Geeks by Jon Katz Page A

them learn and grow, build new lives, find new friends (maybe even women).
    My first day in Idaho, it struck me how strangely traditional and American their story was, and how simultaneously unprecedented: two unattached, semidestitute kids were planning to head cross-country, to leave their dreary lives behind and make their fortunes in a strange, huge, vastly more complex place than either had ever seen.
    But instead of hopping a freight, it was the Internet they’d ride out of town to Chicago, and it was the Middleton High Geek Club that started the trip. Jesse and Eric were exactly 50 percent of its membership, along with Sam Hunter, just starting his first year at Albertson College of Idaho, down the road in Caldwell, and Joe Angell, a freshman at the University of Colorado. The only place in Idaho Jesse was insistent on showing me was their clubhouse—Mike Brown’s classroom.
    Middleton actually made Caldwell look urban; it was barely a town at all. We drove past farms, fading old houses, gas stations, a couple of sandwich shops. Middleton High seemed frozen somewhere in the fifties, a sprawling, one-story tile, glass, and brick complex, many of whose students were headed inexorably toward lifetimes of low-paying jobs in small, conservative Idaho towns.
    “The best you can do around here is to get to Boise State,” said Eric, who had attempted that very thing, “then maybe get a computer job there. That’s what getting out of Middleton usually means.” Not that anybody here had ever pushed them to get out, told them they were smart enough to, or offered much help. There was only Mr. Brown, the genial, stocky, sandy-haired English teacher from New York—official school liberal, magnet for and friend of outcasts.
    From the moment Jesse and Eric approached the school, and even more so as they crossed the parking lot, walked through the door and down the hallways, they turned wary and alert. They glowered at the LDS Church that sits right next to Middleton High. Non-Mormon as well as Mormon kids are given time in their school schedules—the kids call it going to “seminary”—to visit nearby Mormon churches daily.
    A handful of kids said hello in the halls; Jesse and Eric nodded, but didn’t stop for conversation. It wasn’t exactly a joyous homecoming.
    The three of us showed up in Mr. Brown’s room at about noon, just when the Geek Club used to convene, Jesse and Eric drifting to their usual seats in the far corner of the classroom.
    “We’re getting out of Idaho,” Jesse told him, after they’d introduced me. “We’re going to Chicago.”
    “Wow,” said Brown, a bit surprised. “Great news.”
    Mike Brown was a warm, easygoing guy, not only the founder of the Geek Club, but one of the school’s football coaches. He was also, it was clear, one of those teachers who genuinely enjoys kids. He had the gift of tapping into the rebellious streak of a kid like Jesse while simultaneously curbing and channeling it.
    Everyone in the Geek Club used the same phrases—“a truly great teacher,” Sam Hunter said—to describe Mr. Brown. He was the person-sometimes the only person—who made them think and listened to their ideas. He was funny, accessible, self-deprecating, and informal—unusual qualities at Middleton High, where geeks were not beloved, and where Jesse still bitterly recalls a teacher who punished students for goofing off by making them compose papers on a classroom typewriter—a typewriter!—instead of a computer.
    Most teachers avoided controversial subjects, but Mr. Brown’s classroom reverberated with them. “Horrendous debates over everything from evolution to abortion,” Joe Angell said. “Sometimes it split along Mormon and non-Mormon lines. We talked about politics. He encouraged me to read
Catch-22,
and it’s my favorite single book.”
    Among his students, Jesse and Eric and Sam and Joe stood out; they were all idea-starved. “I could see they needed a place to talk, a