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No matter how hard I tried, between grades 6 and 11 I could never convince anyone that I was not supposed to be in advanced math, that I was miserable and that I didn’t understand anything. The thought process must have been, “Oh, he’s smart – let’s put him in the smart class for everything!” and the subsequent melange of 60s, 70s, and low 80s were attributed to some sort of deliberate sabotage on my part rather than NOT FRICKING UNDERSTANDING ANYTHING.
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On two separate occasions during my BA, the following scenario occurred. “Tum te too, another wonderful day in linguistics. I wonder what we’re doing today? Hmm, nobody’s getting out their noteboo – midterm?” Each time I got, like, 40% and had to work like the devil the rest of the semester to get top marks on all the rest of my assignments and the final.
I skipped out of so many PE classes in Grade 10 that I failed the semester. Mom kept asking me how someone could possibly fail gym, ferchrissakes. I kept telling her YOU JUST DON’T GO!
I mean, seriously. Square dancing for PE? See you in the back parking lot.
I have a first grade story too.
I was really into school as a young child. I was nerdy even in first grade - I read all the books in our classroom library in the first two months, always got the highest marks on the spelling tests, etc. My best friend in first grade was named Ned.* While I was better at reading, writing, and spelling, Ned was really good at math. By the time we were in third grade, he was “the human calculator” and I was “the human dictionary.” Yes I know that is lame. We both ended up in gifted school in 3rd grade too so we had our nerd outlet once a week. He’s in pharmacy school or something else totally hard nowadays.
But anyway. First grade. We had math books that we wrote in. One day we had to do all the math problems on one page and tear the page out and line up for the teacher to check them when we were done. Ned and I decided to race to see who could get done first (yeah we were also the kids who always finished assignments first…even now I’m pretty much the same).
So Ned and I raced to finish our problems and he beat me to the teacher, barely. She got her red pen out to mark his paper. Maybe one wrong? Then I gave her mine…
Yeah I totally fucked up the assignment. Red pen everywhere. And since I was six years old, I started crying. And then my nose started bleeding. A LOT.
I ended up in the nurses office with a bloody nose that would not quit. Like seriously. As a kid I got them a lot, getting hit in the nose, overheating, etc but this one was bad. The nurse was talking about taking me to the hospital but finally it quit. I remember freaking out a bit but trying to be “cool” because an older (6th grade) girl was in there too, and I had a brother her age and I always wanted to look cool to the older kids. She was really nice and talked to me to help me keep calm. I still remember her name even. But yeah this was notorious nosebleed. A Barbie whack to the nose wasn’t as bad, getting punched in the face wasn’t as bad, accidentally snorting face lotion wasn’t as bad…this was like over an hour of bleeding.
Other than that, I didn’t fail anything else for a long time except one bullshit quiz in 4th grade. Our teacher was an old hag that broke her hip a few months into the school year and we got a way nicer permanent sub instead. I almost failed one quarter of Algebra II in 10th grade and I got D’s in Latin, Microecon, and some journalism course in college. But Latin was ridiculous, Microecon was taught by a notorious bad prof (and I retook it with a different prof and got an A), and I had given up on wanting to study journalism by the time I got into that class and skipped class most of the time.
*not his real name
In Utah, high school students are allowed to leave the high school campus for an hour a day (a free period) to go over to the seminary building, usually across the street or something. Seminary, as the name implies, is LDS Church religious instruction. I don’t know if it’s structured the same everywhere, but at my school, we would spend an entire year one collection of scriptures. For example, my freshman year we studied The Book of Mormon exclusively. My Sophomore year we studied the Doctrine and Covenants–or so I was told. The first semester, my seminary class was held right before lunch, so I took off for an early lunch and, well, fooled around with my boyfriend. The second semester, I had seminary right after lunch, so I took a long lunch and fooled around with my boyfriend. The third semester, I had seminary first thing in the morning. So I stayed home and fooled around with my boyfriend.
I “failed” seminary that year. It was worth it.
Strangely enough, I managed to keep all my other grades up that year, even though I was hugely distracted (I miss being 16!).
For my final US history paper in HS we had to propose a topic and research it. I hadn’t exactly done research papers before, so I was fairly unaware that in doing my prelim research, I didn’t have enough sources to get at a good conclusion. The page of comments I got back from the teacher who retired the year after that (or maybe before, and they pulled him out of retirement to teach our class) after teaching for 25 years started off with “This remains one of the weakest papers I have read.”
Freshman year in college, I took a class called “Astronomy for Non-Science Majors” to fulfill a general education requirement.
My particular section was taught by a very prestigious faculty member, some fancy-pants astrophysicist. This was a big deal. He was about 80 years old, very highly regarded in his field, the most senior person in the department, and he had this thing about how he liked to teach one class of freshmen non-science majors because it was so inspiring to help young people develop a love and appreciation of science.
And he was such a cute, sweet professor, like a grandpa. He would tell us jolly stories about astronomy, really basic stuff like the story of Galileo, and that other guy with the fake nose. For real, a bright third grader would have been able to follow all the lectures with no problem. My friends and I loved going to this class and we adored our sweet grandpa-like professor!
Then the final exam. When I looked at it, I thought the prof had accidentally given us the exam for a senior level science class. This bad boy was full of ACTUAL MATH AND PHYSICS. It didn’t even have English words, it was all those math and science symbols, and not the ones on a normal keyboard, either! I’m not proud of being ignorant of astrophysics, but at the same time, neither did I sign up for a class on astrophysics. I could not answer one question. I literally handed in a blank exam book.
Failed that exam … I think I barely passed the course with a C- or something based on my high grades on the homework assignments, which included things like identifying the literary sources of the names of Uranus’s moons, and coloring in maps of the solar system.
I was demoted from grade 1 back to kindergarten because my teacher refused to believe that I was spelling my name correctly.
I took a class in statistics my first semester in college. I’m not real good at math to begin with, so I was really struggling with the coursework, but I was keeping my head above water. The end of the semester was approaching, and I was focused on getting at least a C on the final. A C on the final would get me a passing grade, and I’d never have to take another statistics class again. The tests were open notes, thank God, because there’s no way I could have memorized all those formulas. Problem was, this teacher had a weird idea about midterms. We had one midterm halfway through the semester, covering everything up to that point. Then we had *another *“midterm” on the last regular day of class, covering everything since the first midterm. Then we had the final, covering the whole class.
Guess who forgot about the second midterm? I didn’t have my notes with me - we were supposed to bring a single page of pre-prepared notes. I signed my name on the top of the test, and turned it in without writing anything else on it. Didn’t even bother to show for the final. Didn’t take statistics again until my last semester at college.
I also forgot about a midterm a year or two later, in some bullshit mass media course I was taking with a real blowhard professor. I overslept, and decided on the spur of the moment that I’d just show up for the last 15 minutes, in case there was a homework assignment. That one was just dumb on my part, because it was the last day of class before spring break. Every other class I had that week had a midterm. I don’t know why I was shocked to walk into class and see that it was 2/3rds empty, with everyone bent over Scantron sheets with their #2 pencils. The prof gave me the major stink eye when he gave me my test. I finished it in 10 minutes. There were still students working on it when I left.
Came back after break, and the classroom is maybe a 10th full. This was one of those auditorium-style classrooms, with about a hundred students, so the lack of attendance really stood out. The teacher gives back our tests, then goes into a twenty minute rant about how 90% of the class failed, and what idiots we all were, then dismisses class early. I’m sitting there thinking, “90% of the class failed. 90% of the class didn’t show up. Hey, genius: which 10% of your students do you think showed up for your rant?” But I didn’t have the guts to say it out loud.
Oh, and I got a C on his fucking midterm.
Your parents couldn’t have verified the name and spelling?
They had the teacher fired.
In pre-school a teacher or teacher’s aide pulled my parents in for a conference because (from my perspective) I wouldn’t follow instructions and just wanted to paint windmills, no matter what we were supposed to be painting.
From the teacher’s perspective, I needed physical therapy for poor fine motor skills. I was so mad at her for being narrow-minded about my paintings, but if she hadn’t intervened, it’s possible I would have been extremely delayed in acquiring writing skills - in fact, the physical therapist I worked with apparently told my parents that I would simply never be able to hold a pen or pencil well enough to write.
So, thanks, teacher I was mad at.
The first paper I wrote in college came back with the comment at the top “This is not a discussion over coffee with your friends.” Ouch. I tightened up my research and writing handily after that. Sources for every damn thing.
I don’t think I’ve ever failed anything, but I’ve gotten damn close 3 times.
Once was Trig, I passed by one point. Don’t get me wrong, I did reasonably well on the tests (B-A) but I turned in maybe 3 homework assignments. For reference we had one 5 point assignment almost every day. Ouch. My reasoning had two sides:
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The natural teenage “I’m doing good and I obviously understand the material, why the fuck do I need to do the homework?”
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My Anxiety supported OCD side: “It’s not peeeeeeerfect enooooough!” I beat issue 1 most of the time, I did DO most of the homework, I just didn’t turn it in even though it was just practice homework the only things graded on actual correctness were tests. I would have probably done fine had the Vice Principal actually FILED MY SPECIAL NEEDS FORM THAT THEY NEGOTIATED FOR MY DISORDER. Yes my parents and all my teachers had conferences and came up some ways to allow me stuff, a few teachers just let me do it, but a few would only do it after the papers were filed with the district which the Vice Principal never did because… uh… because? It may have been a good thing though, so far in college I’m doing extremely well and have gotten past pretty much all the issues so maybe that was a good thing.
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I almost failed Handwriting in 5th grade. It was stupid anyway, everyone could read my handwriting but he got all nitpicky about “form.” I “practiced” and turned in enough extra credit to get a D and never looked at it again.
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I almost failed two computer courses. I almost failed these for two different reasons:
Comp Sci - To be fair the teacher, while awesome, spread himself way too thin he was the only tech teacher and was relegated to teaching six courses at once. As such the “natural” and “good” students were basically the teachers. Now, the one thing I’m proud of is I’m a great teacher… I CANNOT teach in the same class I’m taking. I knew the material practically but it was hard to do the computer graded tests when I don’t know the exact definition the (digitally stored in the lab) book gives and couldn’t do the labs because I was busy teaching everyone else the material. Gee guess who actually understood it? Guess who dropped the class? Guess whose grades dropped after he left?
CCNA - The lab routers didn’t work, they worked on a very basic internal level but wouldn’t ping any other router (for instance). Everyone else just made shit up that was a plausible answer… I did not, it was some mix of honor of not making stuff up, really wanting to know what was wrong, and sheer obsessiveness over what the actual answer would come down to (to the millisecond of the ping time) that I spent three quarters of the semester fixing the routers. I got up to Unit 8 material doing router resets and flushes and whatnot, I did some of these with the teacher (same as above) helping me on occasion. Of course I had about 5 months of work to make up with less than a month left once I got everything working so I turned in enough to squeak by and took some elective or other after dropping the course because there was no point in continuing after all that.
I was one of the smart kids in school…never had any problem with any classes, always aced my spelling tests, understood math, was actually tutoring other students. Then I had my tonsils out, and missed a week of school…just as they were starting negative numbers. I did the homework assignments the teacher sent home, but for some reason, since it was a new unit, he didn’t send home math, because he knew I could catch up faster once I was back. I came back to school, and everyone was very proficient at negative numbers…and I couldn’t wrap my head around it! I watched the other kids go up to the chalkboard to do their work, and remember thinking, “Even Harry Farrell understands this, and I have no clue!” (Harry being one of the pretty, but dumb, jocks in the class). I know I did horrible on the first quiz, and i was totally humiliated. I realized then what the more average and below-average kids went through on a daily basis, struggling to learn a new concept, but I’d never been at the back of the group like that before! I eventually mastered the concept…but I still have some problems with it…it doesn’t come as easily as I’d like. Just like the 7-times-table that I missed in third grade when I had the stomach flu for three days…I know it, I’ve learned it…but I still have to think a bit harder about it than anything else…
This was the 70’s for you kids staying up late.
Flunked an IQ test.
I was tagged as gifted early on and had a number of IQ tests to use as baselines. Fortunately or unfortunately.
Much of my time in High School was spent as high as I could get. Often I would drink, smoke and take whatever I could to just zone out the day. Placidyls were a favorite. Many times I would make it to homeroom for roll call and some one would wake me at 2:30 so I could go to work. I worked 50 or 60 hours a week then. And ran wild all night.
I think this particular test was called for because of potential head trauma from a car accident or something like that. When they called I was so high I could barely walk and I know I reaked. The lady started the test and everything was in slow motion.
One of the tests were some tiles with pictures that told a story and you had to put them in order to tell the story. While she rambled about how to do it and whatever else she rambled about I figured out what order they needed to go in. So I did it in 4 or 5 seconds. But I’m not sure the story was the one it should have been. Another section was short term memory. She would say a string of numbers and I was to repeat them in reverse order. With the slow motion going on I was golden. She started with 6 numbers or something and added a number each time. We got to a string of 22 numbers before she gave up.
She wanted to chat about whatever they chat about to see your responses but I just had the worst kind of cottonmouth and things were fading in and out. I was probably foaming at the mouth like some rabid animal and no doubt my nose was running. I’m surprised she didn’t run screaming from the room.
Apparently the rest of the test didn’t go so well. My parents were notified that my IQ had dropped 40 some points. No one questioned what was going on in my life that might have caused some of this.
I was put into a school for developmentally disabled kids where one could work at their own pace. I and a couple of my friends spent two weeks doing a years worth of work and I went back to getting high and sleeping all day. When confronted I would hand them another stack of work and go back to sleep. Somehow this was okay with everyone.
At some point in a random conversation a friend said “Man, you’re in the tard school.” and I woke up somewhat to the fact that something was going horribly wrong. I forced the issue of retesting and made sure I had my act together that day. Back to regular school and AP this that and the other, and back to sleeping all day.
What a waste.
SAT test I was so out of it I had to be helped to a desk and got sick halfway through. My Dad was the Proctor. Hello!
Worst passed test… I got A’s and B’s in AP Calculus in High School. No problem, it was a piece of cake. When I went to College I had absolutely not the faintest remotest idea of what the hell they were talking about. They were speaking a language I had never heard before. I had never seen a function in my life and couldn’t begin to grasp it.
Oh, there’s nothing embarrassing about having to think a bit harder about the 7s times table. Everyone has to think a bit harder about the 7s times table. Multiplication by 7 just doesn’t play well with base 10.
All these hard luck stories. Let me share my failure.
I failed 8th grade algebra. Because I wanted to.
I spent my whole life being an academic success, and was suddenly seized by the question: what happens if I fail? I’d also recently discovered that I was an independent being outside of other’s expectation of me. In other worlds, that I could just say “no” and not do stuff. And I really didn’t like math.
So I tried it. I slept through class. I didn’t even pretend to do my homework. I just scribbled random numbers on the tests. And not surprisingly I came home with an “F.”
Well, I got in some trouble, but the world didn’t come crashing down. I learned what I needed to learn and had a much better attitude towards school after that.
I failed the entire first grade, held back as they used to say, also my first driving test (stupid cone) when I was 17.
I like your story and respect the moral, even sven.
I failed my driver’s test when I turned 16. I was not a reckless driver, I was a nervous, defensive driver. As soon as the dude climbed in the car with me, I was a wreck. I was told to turn left at the upcoming stoplight, and did… from the straight lane. Automatic fail. I was pretty devastated, especially because everyone leading up to that had said, ‘‘You’ll do fine. After all, you’re so smart.’’ Guess what, jackasses? There’s more than one kind of intelligence.
Tycho Brahe. 
I failed wood shop in 9th grade. Yep, wood shop. Just after the start of the school year, my mother lost her job and my father was avoiding working and paying child support. A major part of the final grade was a project we had to design and build but we had to buy our own materials, it was not supplied by the school district. I made a small wood box from scraps but it did not meet the requirements that were in place. I was actually given a grade of incomplete, this meant I did not fail the class but I got no credit either.