Looking back at High School, I sometimes can’t believe what an underachiever I was. Not a slacker, just someone who did things his way regardless of the consequences. If I had been willing to put in the work, I probably could have gone to almost any college I wanted, maybe even have made it into the Coast Guard Academy as I had hoped. But; instead I did things my way, and occasionally payed the price.
Case in point. My Sophomore year I took AP English where we had a requirement to read either Dante’s Inferno or a William Shakespeare play. I tried, I mean I really tried, for minutes I tried before I gave up and said the heck with it. So I received an incomplete for that assignment. I figured no big deal I was doing pretty good in the class. In high school the quarter grades were handed to the student to take home and share with their families. While when the grades came out for the quarter and I had a “D” for English! Wait, what? I couldn’t let mom or dad see that, they would crucify me! So with a little effort I was able to change the piece of paper and make it look like a C. Problem solved. Unfortunately, the semester grades were mailed home. Mom opened them on arrival and notice the real grade and lets just say that things didn’t go well for me that evening.
Being the responsible young adult that I was I of course blamed the teacher. During my senior year I needed to take an elective class and had no interest in any of the options and then I noticed that the teacher who had given me my only D was offering a class in Mythology. Well during my time with her as a sophomore we had dedicated a whole quarter to this subject. I knew it would be a piece of cake. So I talked my best friend Brian into signing up with me and on the first day of class the teacher looked at the two of us and couldn’t understand what we were doing there as we had already covered the material in her English class. We explained it was the only thing available that particular period that we were interested in. So she shrugged and had us take a seat.
Well….
Brian and I finished the entire semesters work in the first two weeks of class and spent the rest of the semester “studying” in the library, Towards the middle of the semester the teacher felt we should do extra credit and asked us to create a crossword puzzle for the rest of the class. So over the course of the following weeks we did and the teacher seemed pleased. When we turned it in, we forgot to mention one small little detail. The way we built the crossword puzzle was by turning to the index at the back of the book and finding names and terms that neither Brian nor I knew. Figuring if we didn’t know them, our classmates never would. So we would look up the words and them turn to the appropriate page to develop the clue. Well I am reasonable sure that the class had nowhere near as much fun solving the crossword puzzle as we did in creating it. Good news was that I ended up with an A in her class.
Central Coast Senior 