I’m another one who, according to the grade/SAT record, excelled in HS, but by then had discovered that I could get near-perfect grades well short of maximum effort, due to a capacity for learning on my own. Since I, too, had been early on cast by the Grups in the role of having those perfect report cards be the meaning of my life, the adolescent JRD thought he would “show them” by not setting a good example to others, and maintaining near-perfect grades while metaphorically standing on one foot with a hand behind my back, and being generally antisocial and misanthropic.
This DID bite me due to my initial college/program choice turning out to be a zero-handholding environment of often cut-throat academic competitiveness. I found out I had never learned what my true limits really were, nor how to honorably call for help when in over my head. While there I spent multiple semesters each both in the Dean’s List AND in Academic Probation.
I had a lot of potential I think. I didn’t pay attention much and never ever did homework but still graduated in the top 5% with honors.
In math and science classes, it was usually the case where I was bored. I would get the material the first time, but then we’d spend a week practicing it in class and for homework. I already knew it, so didn’t bother with the homework. This ended up where I got 100 or high 90s on all tests, but got an 80 in the class because of homework grades. This was all boredom.
In English and Social Studies, I just wasn’t interested. This was all laziness. I wouldn’t read novels or write papers at home, I did that during the math and science classes where I was bored.
In my computer programming classes, I used to get in trouble for hacking (before they started coming down hard on hackers). Hello world quickly got boring so I ended up messing around mostly. Nowadays I would have been expelled for some of the things I did. We wrote a fake login screen and ended up getting the admin password, then deleted an entire class, which ended up in people in that class not being able to access the system. All boredom leading to mischief.
Gym just sucked. But nobody got less than an A anyway. All you had to do was show up.
None of the other students really knew how I did gradewise, as I never talked about my grades. So maybe I also just came off as not caring.
I ended up graduating around the top 5% with honors anyway (rank 34 out of 670). I even got a full scholarship thanks to my 800 on the Math SAT (1370 total). I didn’t even bother studying for that.
I don’t think of myself as “brilliant”, I’m just a quick learner who’s good at memorizing facts and procedures.
When I got to college things got a bit hard, and I had a rude awakening in that the work was actually challenging and I needed to pay attention and do the homework for practice. I failed two classes, but took them over and got an A. I almost lost the scholarship twice, but managed to keep the bare minimum GPA. Just barely too, which fits with the whole lazy motif.
So yes, I think it’s true that a lot of students are bored, but there’s just as many if not more who really just don’t care. How can you tell the difference? Beats me…
Yeah, up to a point. I never actually failed a course, and made only a few D’s, but I did assignments when I felt like it and seldom studied at all. Most of the time I got away with it because I’ve been blessed with a retentive memory, at least when I’m marginally interested in the subject (and I was interested in most things, my other saving grace). Math, however, was another matter – I came very close to failing geometry on several occasions.
I also remember doing a lot of “joke” assignments like the one evensven describes, just for the heck of it. (In my chemistry class, we were supposed to write a report about an alloy; I chose Ink, which is, as everybody knows, an alloy of Indium and Zinc. The teacher didn’t buy it, but she was sufficiently amused that she gave me extra time to redo the essay. Kids who write well get away with a lot.)
All this ended in eleventh grade, when I was lucky enough to draw a schedule of classes that were actually engaging. (Well, except Physics, but everybody did OK in Physics because the teacher didn’t want anyone to expose the fact that he couldn’t speak English.) Besides, I discovered Quiz Bowl and Boys, more or less simultaneously, and began to have other interests than being a pissed-off rebellious kid. I suppose slacking off is one of those things you grow out of, but I don’t think it’s at all unusual; bright kids are, almost by definition, the ones who want to question and challenge stuff, and there is plenty to challenge in the average public high school.
Gee, a thread with my name in it.
Do smart students sometimes slack off? Of course.
Have some writers made superheroes out of characters who are so smart that they can intuit theoretical physics and do calculus in 2nd grade? Yes. Invariably included in the plot devices are depictions of how these brilliant students sigh at the stupidities of school and their teachers and how they are resented by their dumber classmates who torment them when possible.
I think that this is not a good mythos to unquestioningly buy into. We buy into things we can relate to. Perhaps all of the smart people in this thread (including me) buy into this because it is a bit like reality–we may be a little bit smarter than our classmates and our teachers may not be the best.
BUT, this myth deserves to be questioned because there aren’t kids who do theoretical physics and calculus in 2nd grade. (I’m not gonna caveat that sentence by saying that there’s only a couple of students who have done those things–show me cites, not anecdotes, and I’ll grant exceptions.) 99.9 percentile kids don’t do those things. It’s not true.
These type of books glorify impossible smarts and, I think, encourage the smart kids who read them to show similar disdain for school learning and to feel sorry for themselves because the dumber kids must be jealous. It also discourages self-honesty–even smart kids have limits, but the kids in the books don’t, so the real kids don’t see the hero as anything less than perfect–just like them. This is a bad attitude to buy into.
I would prefer to see protagonists who are realistically (or even a little beyond) smart, who work hard, experience failure and pick themselves up and work hard some more. I think that kind of character is more admirable and more interesting.
None of this is a defense of bad schools or bad teaching, nor is it in support of always keeping gifted kids in regular schools.
It is a questioning of what our ideals in this area should be.
Count me in.
I did well in elementary & middle school, but by the time I got to secondary, I started going downhill. I skipped class half of grade 11 and most of grade 12. I did well my first couple years of university, then I turned into the most abominable student (except for my Italian classes, where I always got As).
Then again, I had personal problems, and I also got sick and had to take two semesters off.
I think I’d do much better were I to go back to school now. Who knows…
definitely a slacker, here.
In grade school, I had a teacher who would publicly humiliate me (brilliant teacher… :rolleyes:) for not doing my homework. I didn’t understand WHY I should do any homework if I understood the content when she taught it in class, and I tested on it near perfect when we were tested, and I fell above that top dotted line in the standardized tests every time. She didn’t explain it to me in a way that made sense (all her arguments were ‘do it so you learn how to do it’ and I’d reply ‘but I KNOW how to do it, didn’t you see my test score?’) And I was (am) dyslexic, to boot.
My teachers pretty much did not know what to do with me, from about 2nd grade on. Don’t even get me started on stupid stuff like ‘science fairs’ - where we were expected to reproduce research that had already been done by someone else. I thought that was a huge waste of time - if you want to know how a volcano works, LOOK IT UP. How stupid did they think I was? They were the ones who talked about using your reference materials effectively, right? I wanted to do new research, explore topics that nobody had ever examined (that I knew of) … in second grade. I got a lot of ‘interesting idea, poor execution - C’ grades for my science fair projects because none of the teachers could tell me how to do statistical analysis on the results of the behavioral experiments I did on my peers.
Also got a lot of ‘doesn’t work up to potential’ comments on my report cards - especially when we were graded on homework along with tests.
I wasn’t bored, exactly, but I didn’t do the work. Doing the work was clearly pointless. Fortunately, we had an open classroom system in my gradeschool, so if I could demonstrate that I understood the topic of the day, I could go to the library. I spent a lot of time in the library. The librarian started ordering books just because she thought I’d like them.
High school, the same, but with more boredom and slightly less success. Got decent grades, but didn’t learn how to learn. Just sucked up content from class time. Had some really miserably bad teachers, and a few absolutely brilliant ones. Still spent most of my time on the honor roll, but with slightly less reliability. Got the best grades in classes with good lectures.
The major point that affected my grades? I have always tested well. Especially essays. In highschool, I passed the margin between the gift and the skill, and started to do poorly on exams. Then I had a class where the teacher explained (in lecture) how to write better essays. Boom, right back up went my grades.
First semester of college was a shock. I had a class that you actually did need to do (some) of the homework to get a decent grade. WHOA. Started doing some of the reading. Discovered that I could get good grades by doing about 1/4 of the homework/reading required (much to the annoyance of my peers), but more work than NONE of the work required. I did figure out which classes tested and graded based on the reading (separate from what was covered in class), though, and pushed the reading in those classes to maybe 2/3 of the required amount. And I did the projects and papers that counted as part of the grade, period. Graduated with honors.
Grad school was where I finally discovered the value of doing all the reading, and finally learned how to learn, in the ‘effort’ sense. I discovered that there were things that I needed to practice to understand fully (instead of ‘getting’ them from the lecture), but I also discovered that there were professors who didn’t ‘get’ things that seemed entirely obvious to me… I had to patiently explain some of my thoughts to them, and usually (but not always) they’d have the lightbulb go off eventually. I discovered that I made huge leaps that seemed obvious to me, but which included steps that had to be explained to other people. :shrug:
It wasn’t until we started looking at schools for my older son that I realized that I was actually smarter than the average bear. Suddenly, all that confusion about why anyone ever does homework made sense. Count me smart, but still clueless sometimes. :rolleyes:
I had one friend who was brilliant at every academic subject at school, and had a stable home life (as far as I know) who just dropped out completely. He just lost interest; worked in charity shops, roleplayed, and we lost touch completely.
To a lesser extent at college and university I would slack off once I worked out what the lecturers ‘wanted’. Obviously some work and some original though was required but generally they each had an angle or preferred approach; just rearrange quotes from original sources, question some of the big name sources (that was the bit requiring a little thought), come up with a compromise. A favourite tactic for me was rejecting the question as a false dilemma.
I’m not proud of it but a lot of the time it made essay-writing pretty formulaic and a lot more straightforward than other people seemed to find them. Instead of trying to be particularly creative or original I just plodded along happy to minimise my hours in the library or slaving over notes.
I can’t tell if I slacked off.
I got myself through HS with very little work, but ended up as the valedictorian anyway.
I got myself through a most competitive college with a degree that takes 160 credit hours to complete. I spent most of my time hacking (the good sense) and playing games.
I got myself through post-graduate studies hiding in the labs 
I definitely feel that I could work harder, but there was no need for it.
** Pepper ** you and me both girl…
In HS, I slacked and skipped and had a 3.9 w/ AP/Honors Courses, National Merit Semifinlist but I never went to class and NEVER did homework.
Surely, I thought, surely this would bite me in the ass in college. Nope. Graduated w/ Honors. I would often go to a class on the first day, pick up the syllabus, and then show up only to take tests or to turn in assignments.
Law school. OK, now I’m screwed and I gotta buckle down… Nope. Graduated with honors, was assistant editor of the law journal…all that crap. Again, I’d show up pick up my syllabus and show up for the final.
I, too wondered what the heck I could have done had I actually applied myself. I’ve finally come to grips with the fact that I’d be right about in the same position. I never learned from teachers (most teachers) I taught myself…that’s how I learned. It could be a fear of failure thing–imagine what would happen if you totally applied yourself and you did no better than if you’d slacked off. I just think that my particular style of learning would not have benefited from reading and going to class. I’m just lucky.
But FWIW, if I had more challenging curriculum, I don’t think I would have applied myself any harder. It’s really a matter of more interesting curriculum and a great teacher!
Depends. I paid attention and worked hard in my history, English, and German classes because I was truly interested in the material. My science and math classes, I just showed up to. I already knew that I was not going to be a scientist or a mathematician, so why bust my butt? It hasn’t come back to haunt me. I can do basic math and have developed a bit of an interest in natural history. I got a full scholarship to college and then a full ride plus stipend for grad school.
I think high schools encourage slacking, frankly. I went to an inner city public high school. At my school, the administration and many teachers–with a few shining exceptions–basically treated students like potential criminals who might blow at any moment. There’s just something demeaning about being 18, a legal adult, doing college level work, and having to riase your hand to go to the bathroom. It wasn’t the kind of atmosphere that encouraged initiative.
I didn’t need to work hard in high school (except in math) or college (again, except in math) to get good grades, either, so I usually didn’t put any more effort into things than I needed to. I suppose with a little more work in high school I could have had 100 averages in my history classes instead of 98’s and 99’s, but I didn’t see the point. I saved my effort for Math- the class I had to work my butt off in to get C’s and D’s- which was damaging my GPA enough as it was: I only got 3.19 in high school overall and 3.2 in college overall <cries>
I still find it sort of funny that so many of my high school teachers took it upon themselves to warn the bright kids that it was going to be nearly as easy for them once they got to college, so study hard. After sixteen years of schooling I still don’t understand how people are supposed to do that: reading it twice was usually all it took for me to memorize anything, and it didn’t take much more effort in college to expand upon concepts while writing papers.
American public schools are a joke to smart kids. I was bored and then some. If I hated an uninteresting class it showed. E.g., 5 A’s and a C (or D). It wasn’t until college that I was able to find interesting stuff.
My oldest son was in a gifted kids program and dropped it in middle school when it turned into boring busy work. It wasn’t the least bit challenging or interesting. And this is supposedly one of the best districts in the state.
Very important The students considered “smart” by most teachers are not considered at all smart by the other kids. They’re just good apple polishers, etc. I’ve never met a valedictorian that was anywhere close to genius level. The American school system is anti-genius. Truly smart kids do poorly and are strongly discouraged.
I excelled early on in school, getting pretty much straight A’s from first grade through junior high.
I went to a Catholic high school that deemed itself college preparatory. Apparently, college preparatory means a lot of homework.
I too was among those frustrated by a lot of busy work. My grades slipped a bit, in part due to my lack of effort with homework, in part due to being part of a more competitive student body. I was a B+ student in high school, but did well on the SAT.
One interesting thing is that my interests changed a bit in high school. In my early years I had been good in all subjects, but especially excelled in math, and was most interested in science. Sure, I read a lot as a child, but english and grammar hadn’t interested me much in school. As high school progressed, I became less interested in science, and detested my math teachers. At the same time, I found myself reading and writing more, and my english teachers were my favorites.
Still, I went to college without a direction, and by default chose chemistry :smack:
Why chemistry? My family seemed to expect me to pursue a career in science due to my youthful interest in it, and the fact that the other men in my family got BS’s. Having no alternate more favorable in sight, I went along with the plan. I should note that the women in the family got BA’s. Of course, no one pointed that out to me.
After 3 semesters I was sporting a hefty 2.40 GPA. I had switched from chemistry to computer science, and promptly failed the course:p
I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, so I made the only logical choice: major in philosophy:)
I enjoyed reading philosophy, writing papers, thinking of arguments made and the inevitable responses and responses to responses, but I especially enjoyed logic. Set forth the premises, and the conclusion becomes evident. QED.
I cruised the rest of the way through college, and scoring well on the LSAT, got a scholarship to law school. Instead of being Socrates, I chose to be Protagoras:D
I did well in my first year of law school, but my grades dropped a bit in the last two years, in part due to personal issues, in part due to an overly intense dedication to scholastic journal editorial responsibilities and internship, and in part due to slowly but surely becoming tired of school, especially the law school format. Law school doesn’t teach you much other than how to think like a lawyer, as many of the classes are interesting and useful for the state bar exam, but much of the substantive law learned won’t be used because it just doesn’t fit into the subject matter of one’s career. Of course, I had already been well on my way to thinking like a lawyer with my philosophy background. Instead, my focuses were on the journal, which I felt helped me hone my writing skills, and internships, which helped me learn about how the law actually works in the real world, something I’m still learning even after graduation:)
Should I have worked harder at times? Of course. Was I lazy? At times, but not especially. I think that lack of a goal was my undoing in high school and college. In law school, getting top grades ceased to be my top priority. I developed my own course of learning.
And thanks to all that hard work and learning, I now have my very own newspaper route and 5-speed Schwinn bicycle.
Next year I will be a high school Senior. I am a slacker. I go to a dumbass private school. Anyway, it all started in fifth grade. We did this visual math, it was retarted! Each worksheet had a puzzle or riddle or something to be solved, for each correct answer you were give a letter and you could unscramble the answer. Well, I decided to just do the homework backwards in class while other students blurted out the answer they worked so hard to get. After that year, I haven’t done homework regularly at all. It’s not a good way to go.
Everybody around me thinks I am a freaking genius. Everybody, parents, teachers, and my peers. Every year I’ve been pulled aside and asked why I don’t do my work, if I just hate that subject, or if this is just who I am.
Junior year we read or were supposed to read “The Catcher in the Rye.” My English teacher (one of the few teachers of whom I am fond) all year had been making remarks about me being afraid of myself and afraid of what I could be and my fear of work ethic. I didn’t know what he meant back then, and I am still not quite sure. Well, I read some of that book and discussed the rest in class. And it’s true, caulfield and I do have a lot of similarities, although we do have differences.
(I am sorry, this is poorly structured…)
My favorite quote from that book, is when Holden is asked by Stradlater to do his homework, Holden tells him that he will do it if he gets around to it, he won’t if he doesn’t. I can totally relate, that’s how I feel about everything.
My teacher kept bugging me, he would ask if I was going to do my homework in college. I told him I didn’t know. He wanted to know why I didn’t work hard. I told him I just didn’t. We kept talking and I finally told him. I am just really really distractable. I mean, when it comes down to it, homework is boring, and doing other more interesting stuff is not. I told him that I know that is very juvenile, but that is just the way I operate a lot of the time.
I did some homework. I remember in 7th grade social studies, we were supposed to write about the men of the scientific revolution, just a couple sentences on each. Well I got home and I got out the world book and I wrote 7 pages total. I was really interested in astronomy at the time. The stuff fascinated me. It was exciting, I didn’t do any other homework, just that. In 8th grade, we were supposed to answer some questions on the periodic table of elements, I ended up writing 12 pages. It was just interesting, I loved it, completely loved it.
I just do what I want to do at the time. I love watching the History channel, PBS, A&E, and the Discovery Channel. It just fascinates me.
Sorry about that huge chunk of info, back to my point.
Somebody mentioned that students feel they will fail and not meet their reputation as genius and I can admit this is true. When we do math competitions and stuff, I don’t even try because I am afraid that I won’t do well and people will judge me. Shit, I gotta go, I have more to say… I will get back to ya on this…!
Matt
you guys showed up for the tests? hell, i had 'em mailed to my house, where I’d do 'em in two minutes, with a typewriter. school always bored me so . . . 
I did and still do slack off regularly. My mom said it would make me go blind, but I say it’s worth it because it feels so good.
I had horrible grades all the way to high school. I did so poorly that I was often at risk for not advancing to the next grade level. It finally ended when I dropped out my freshman year in high school.
Nowadays, I work 20-25 hours a week as a computer geek, and 20 hours a weekend at an auto parts store. I routinely take 18 credit hours a semester, I am halfway through my Aerospace degree, and I have a 4.0 GPA.
All it took to turn me around was an airplane ride.
I actually worked in HS, mostly because I enjoyed it for the most part. (The exception: trigonometry, which was taught by a complete moron. Once I was hiding a sci-fi book with “Flowers for Algernon” in it behind my trig book, reading in class, and started bawling at the end. The teacher thought I was depairing at trig identities.) I ended up with almost a 4.3 GPA due to weighted averages for honors and AP classes, which still put me 28th in our class of almost 800. (We had some smart and motivated kids, it being a university town and all.)
Many of my friends were both brilliant human beings and major slackers, especially in the math arena. One used to flunk AP Calculus exams for not showing his work on the test paper, even if the answers were right (he did the problems in his head, but the teacher couldn’t have cared less and flunked him anyway). He never did homework, but later placed out of 2 semesters of calculus at U. of Illinois, which he had never taken in school. He had a perfect 800 math SAT score (no slouch on the verbal, either), which was actually the case with seevral of my friends.
Another friend did reasonably well in most HS classes, but dropped out of college after his freshman year and went to study with some mathematician guy in Humgary. He never finished college, but is now in the math Ph.D. program at Cal Tech.
In the case of my friends, I think they were mostly bored and unchallenged by schoolwork, even in AP classes at one of the better public high schools in the country. Some dealt with it by just doing the work, either because they enjoyed it or figured that the results of blowing it off weren’t worth the hassle. Some found greater challenge in other things, like the math team or chess teams, which gave them enough motivation to deal with the rest of the BS. They’ve all turned out more or less OK, and are productive members of society even if not all have graduated college.
I slacked, to a certain extent. That is, I got by on native intelligence. Most of the time, I wound up with anywhere from an ‘A’ to a ‘B-’, but sometimes I wound up with lower grades. Why didn’t I work to improve these lower grades?
I didn’t like work & could skate by without doing it, ergo, I didn’t do it. Also, because of my physical condition, it was unlikely that I’d attend college anyplace out of driving distance. Hence, I didn’t need to worry about being Harvard- or Brown-worthy. I knew what grades I needed to get into any colleges I might apply to. I got those grades by doing the minimum in my advanced/AP (i.e. weighted) classes, & that was that.
I got through school with a ‘B’ or ‘B-’ average & did reasonably well on my SAT’s.
Postscript: This method did not work in college. I currently work on my studies. (Not too much, but more than I used to. I care about my grades, basically)