Final Draft

In middle school I didn't care very much, and as a result I didn't didn't do very well. It's hard enough to try to get yourself motivated to participate in a busywork contest orchestrated by a staff stripped of personality and effort, but it's worse when compounded with a massive disconnect between the cause and effect of success and failure. At that level of education the entrants to higher level classes are picked almost arbitrarily, and the school is more concerned about moving students along regardless if they fail. Before it starts to sound like I'm trying to justify my own failure I should clarify that these observations are retrospective, and that at the time I figured I was just lazy, but the issue affected almost everyone. My own and others' occasional doubts were lost to the staff actually telling us "middle school doesn't really matter", and we were consoled by the thought that one day we could flip a switch and succeed once it matters. This, of course, is much easier said than done.

At the time I had a fair number of friends, and we'd always sit at the same place during lunch and all that. They were the sort of people who were brilliant at one or two things and were known for it. They weren't idiot savants, though, because they were also just generally smart. A couple almost perfectly fit the nerd stereotype, and almost off of them were of the opinion that focusing on whatever their hobby was would be more beneficial in the long run than doing schoolwork. This actually proved true for one friend who focused on programming and ended up completing almost a dozen playable games and several calculator applications by the end of high school. He didn't have great grades, but he still went somewhere with a hefty scholarship. From what I've since heard a lot of those people ended up benefiting from their hobby to some degree. The important distinction is that I wasn't particularly good at anything, and I didn't have many hobbies. Unlike them there wasn't at least one class that could benefit from my own enjoyment of the subject, and unlike everyone else I hadn't managed to have enough sense to actually do any of the work despite how dull and repetitive it was. Even people who hated the work more than I did at least got some of it done. So at the end of eighth grade I was told I was going to summer school.

I hadn't thought about summer school since I was quite young, and the last I thought of it was similar to that of a daycare type service, but I knew that anyone going to summer school at my age has seriously messed up. I can't remember being surprised based on my grades, though. The first day was strange, to say the least.  The room was full of kids who seemed uncontrollable or willfully ignorant. While writing this I spent a while trying to think of the best way to put it, but's essentially how it was. The willfully ignorant simply refused to do work, and the uncontrollable either seemed to care less than I did, stacked with extroversion, or just had short attention spans and were loud. A group of young adults sat in the back watching us all day every day, and according to our teacher it was for their own instructional purposes as they were going to be teachers themselves. Worksheets is what we worked on mostly, and I remember thinking it was a joke at first, simply doing one worksheet after another on various subjects. Algebra, reading comprehension, brief random history texts. Sitting in a classroom with a mound of work you can't take home and being watched by almost 20 soon-to-be teachers is very unnerving, and a great incentive to try to work on some of it. Having at least attended constantly for the last couple years I knew the content, so the work itself wasn't hard. I remembered my math teacher telling me I was smart but lazy while I plowed through the pages and pages of work, thinking "Not so lazy now".

I think the most important single moment was looking up from the efficiency spree expecting to grab another few pages of something to work on and not seeing anything. Paging through everything I had already done and looking around to see if other people were working on something I hadn't received, and realizing that I finished more work in one sitting than as long as I could remember, and it wasn't even that difficult. The sense of accomplishment was great, and I almost wanted more work. I know if I had the option to do all the work at once for the whole class instead of finishing 2 hours early every day I would have, but instead each day I'd either revise my work until perfection or mess around on the only computer in the room.

This went on for several weeks. Every day I'd fly through the work, connect the dots in our reading, state definitions like a dictionary, understand the math and have an answer without writing anything down, and it all felt good. Not everything lasts forever, though, and eventually my position as star pupil came to an end. The work was never too hard in the first place, so overcoming difficulty wasn't the major accomplishment, but the fact that I had started and finished. Having experienced this was instrumental in overcoming my next major challenge, going to West Sound Academy. The school was an arts school converted to college preparation, and considering the work was already a grade ahead of public school level it was going to be very difficult. Once it started I was determined to maintain the feeling of success and accomplishment of completing work, but the workload and difficulty was so great and foreign it was quite a struggle. By the time I managed to catch up and succeed I had already left a trail of barely adequate grades, deeming me unacceptable for most colleges, but having experienced and desired success to the point of recovering a years worth of material in a stressful environment I knew I was ready for whatever was next. It's funny how something designed to catch up the uninterested students to keep them progressing in grade levels taught me work ethic.