11th grade

The difference amounts to how much time they have to waste. I didn't care about grades 'till grade 12. From 9 to 11 my grades hovered around 65% to 75%. I didn't do any homework, besides the obviously mandatory huge projects/group work. As soon as Grade 12 hit and the universities were watching I studied every night and got mid 90s. Best decision I ever made. I learned VB & SQL during that time, some electronics, so mechanics, worked as a programmer found out I hated it. All vastly more useful than a 92% in grade 9 drama or art.

I skipped maths class to attend rehearsals for the lead role in the school play, and learnt trig from trying to understand how Doom BSP worked.

I also got more from trying to automate Linux than I ever did in those non-practical Logo and Pascal exercises. My school had no concept of task-based learning.

I don't see how being opposed to doing busy work in high school (and consequently day dreaming through less interesting classes and coding until 4 in the morning in place of doing homework) makes one anti-intellectual.

I was the stereotype for this comic: in 11th grade I got cold-called by a recruiter who didn't know my age, but saw my resume after seeing my post on a LUG mailing list. I took the job (a jr. sys admin position) essentially drove the grades for most of my classes (except two, where I got A's -- that I'll mention later) down to D or C level.

Sounds like a typical anti-intellectual nerd: barely passing classes just to skip out after lunch to go work a sys-admin job and code Perl, right? Well, out of the two A's the first A was fairly easy to guess: AP Computer Science. The second A was AP US History (complete with a 5 on the exam, highest grade in the class, excellently written essays).

Senior year wasn't much different (except s/Computer Science/Calculus/ and s/US History/Biology/). In the end my GPA wasn't good enough to compete in freshman admissions so I ended up enrolling in a community college. I ended up getting a near 4.0 gpa there and transfering to a to a private university after just a year.

To transfer I needed to write a personal statement. I wrote it on my whole experience: of getting poor grades in most courses, but enjoying the AP program and taking on "adult" work while still a school student.

In community college and university I took courses in philosophy, history, political science and literature all in addition to my major courses.

After college I only interviewed at two search engines and only for mid to senior level positions. I'd think most of my class mates who worried about having a 4.5 (yes, that's possible with AP courses) GPA in high school, Key Clubs and sports teams weren't nearly that lucky (the CS majors amongst them are likely still stuck trying to make their way out of doing QA/support or writing business logic in Java), nor did they end up developing as broadly interested in the intellectual sphere (choosing to concentrate on making their transcripts look good vs. on learning).

That's my story but it's not the only one like this. There are plenty of nerds who may be poor performers in high school but who are very well rounded intellectually and who ultimately end up shining in college (they get in by hacking" their way in: either through extra-curricular like robotics teams [only extra-curricular that I really regret not joining in high school; one member of that team ended up at a UC school with a 1.7 gpa] or by transferring from a community college, or through a alumni recommendation from a boss/coworker).

Problem is: high school instruction generally is poor, teachers coming from bottom of the college class or as a "last resort" option for not getting into med-school/grad-school (while there are many great exceptions, e.g. my calculus and AP US history teachers being the ones who influenced my the most); it's easy to cram one's way into college (and high schools are pressured to become cram schools) and there's too much emphasis on mentally dull labour (physical education classes, sports, busy work) in school.

I agree with one thing: don't drop out of HS to work (I didn't) -- either for yourself or for someone else. Also, don't drop out of college to work for someone else. Do, however, consider doing your senior and junior years of high school at a community college (another regret I have: not taking advantage of such a program offered by our HS/CC district).

I said nothing about not appreciating or recognizing the symbolism in the book. I just didn't see any point in writing an essay on it when it would in fact be the same essay that everyone who'd ever been assigned the task had written. Lest you dispute that, remember that the grading of such essays puts less weight on unique insight or original thinking or even writing skill than it does on inclusion of the bleedingly obvious.

And so it seems to me that anyone capable of completing the assignment will have succeeded in little other than demonstrating how unnecessary it was for them to do it, and those that can't produce passing results will have gained no better understanding in the process of their failure.

The weight is in fact so biased to the side of redundancy that students routinely compose satisfactory essays without having read the book or understood it's symbolism or learned any skill but deception. And what does that say about the value of the assignment?

As a writing exercise the typical English essay may have marginal value, but significantly less than it would were the style subject matter not always so constrained to literary criticism, a genre which does not carry over well into others. The end product itself is practically worthless--the symbolism is as you said eternal and available to all at any time by reading the book. The only demand for English essays comes from people attempting to shirk creating their own.

I really don't think it's crazy for someone confident in their ability to succeed at such a task to regard it as less important than the challenge of developing a new skill and a tangible end product that is new to the world. I mightn't have have had the words to justify it at the time, but I certainly did feel that I was doing the right thing.

Perl not lasting is irrelevant. Perl was just the medium. Programming was the task, the art, that I got my practice in by wrangling that contraption. And it was practice I would not have gotten if I had relied on external rewards as motivation.