'Underachievement' in school

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My marks were always lopsided, the only kid to not be consistent. 50-65 math, reading, writeing, PE (all achidemics) 80-95 history, shop, civics, some science, art etc.

Was told I did not apply myself, did not care or try, I was lazy, etc. Told they knew I could do better. Fact was I tryed twice as hard as anyone else at the subjects I was bad at and slid through the ones I did good at. Studying did not help with the test scores much, I got it or I didn't.

Was even threatened with after school teaching, not something I wanted to do. Did not help that I hated school with a passion.

I did make my grade 11 honor roll though, thanks extra shop class!

Yes. Frequently. It happened so often I didn't know what people expected of me. All teachers I interacted with inevitably came to the conclusion that I was smart but was not paying close enough attention or not trying hard enough to apply my knowledge. It really hurt. I was doing my best. In subjects that I was weak in, I was trying but found it near impossible to process the information. Especially in mathematics when abstraction started to come into play, with geometry and algebra. A second problem to this was the slow pace and excessive repetition in school. If I could understand the material, I would have it committed to memory after the first pass of the lesson. But then the teacher would repeat over and over and over. Homework that asked me to do the same things again and again. With that stuff I just stopped paying attention entirely. To everything. Which put my grades into a nosedive.

The same from my parents as well. Bring home report card, the inevitable frown and sigh and "you can do better." God damnit I was doing my best. Ack!

I was able to get into university and did well there, mostly due to more focused study of subject matter and faster pace. Certain subjects I never had issues with, I majored in those, and of course did well.

I'm pretty sure i could have done well in school, if it had been me and the teacher.

Being stuck in a class with 1 or 2 teachers and 25-30 other kids, is not fun, when you have problems with being around others, and get mentally stressed and tired.

To be honest im amazed that people even get anything out of school, when its done under such poor circumstances.

I went out of school in 9th class or maybe it was 8th, best decision ever. If i wasnt messed up, being stuck in that hell for so many years certainly made sure of that.

I am proud to be an underachiever. I wish I had gotten strait Fs and flunked every class. At lease it could justify all the pain I had gone through. With the internet and google today. Who need schools. shut them down.

So much on this thread sounds familiar. I was always being told that I didn't work hard enough, that I didn't apply myself, that I was lazy or unmotivated or didn't work hard enough.
I didn't do homework, I was disorganized, I forgot assignments. I never studied for exams - in fact, I considered it to be pointless and possibly cheating. I relied on my ability to remember facts and conversations verbatim, as well as my ability to reason things out, to do well on exams. I had no problem speaking out in class - in fact, I was the annoying kid who corrected the teachers and had to comment on everything. (That did wonders for my popularity, I'm sure.)
I especially hated math, and did especially poorly in it. (Probably a combination of some NLD thing and poor teaching.)
In classes I cared about, I often did well. Sometimes I bombed them anyway, because I didn't turn in the homework. I remember placing as one of the top 25 students in my state in the national French competition, and getting a C in the class anyway.
Somehow, I made into a selective liberal arts college, and did very well (although I still struggled with daily assignments in classes I didn't care about.)
I probably could have done much better in college and grad school, but I did well enough to get a PhD.

When it came to math and science. I excelled grades ahead of all the other students. I was already doing 12th grade math when I was in 6th grade and I won every science fair they had at school. The biggest thing that hurt for me was during the award ceremony. When all the other students came up to get their awards, the audience would applause. When it came time for me to come up, There was nothing but silence. And you wonder why I hate school. Sometimes I think it's better to fail then to succeed in vain.

It's kind of ironic when people come up to me and say "I wish I was as smart as you" or " you're a genius" when they have no clue how much of a price you pay for it and I envy them for their friends and social life. You have no idea at times I would give up my 150 IQ of a good social life, but then again, There's the old saying "Be careful what you wish for".

So there were some subjects i really loved, and in this I did pretty well. But in all other subjects it would have been better, if I had learned them at university by learning at home and only coming for tests. Sitting in class was overwhelming for me and after 2 hours I normally was completely down without energy and just wanted to leave. Following the lessons was torture, I often had no homework because I needed the time in the evening to learn afterwards, what I had missed during day in school, because I couldnt really follow the lessons after 2 hours. I still visited a good school, so when there was a test and I had to learn for it, I often left the for me anyway useless lessons, found me a silent place and learned on my own. The teacher responsible for my class, was a really great guy, because for him it was ok (inofficial ^^), as long as I did not leave the school area (Which is huge, so we even had an own forest for the Wooden-Engineering departement.) and did well in tests. Still my score was pretty bad, because the teachers had to give you the average score from: Tests (Excellent), Homework (Bad), Attention and cooperation during lessons (Terrible)... so excellent test results with lousy homework and zero attention and cooperation (or presence XD )during lessons is a 3-4 in our school system. (With 1 as best score possible and 5 as worst.) If I had been diagnosed earlier, there could have been special treatment, so as example I could have insisted that "Attention and cooperation during lessons" would not be scored for me, but I dont really mind. I had the chance to visit a really good school, I was interested in, my teacher was great, most of my classmates were really nice according to the bullying horror stories of others, and my life now is ok. I dont need more.

Me all over. I was notorious for never doing my homework and skimping on assignments. Everything just seemed pointless to me; I was educating myself in the areas I was interested in, and school just struck me as ridiculous and arbitrary. I just didn't *care*. My grade, as a result, were absolute garbage.

mfw perfect scores on Reading and Writing HSPEs, but failing every class. orz

I'm going to an alternative school, currently, and the way it's broken down is pretty awesome, but I just... can't find the motivation. :/

I might end up homeschooling, just because it'd be easier to do the stuff I'm supposed to within the frame of my interests. My dad's been talking about making me do research for writing a novel, for instance.

When I got my IQ test results back recently, I learned, to my horror, that I have actually been overachieving my whole life. My barely average IQ and subtest weaknesses would predict someone who might not even finish high school, and I've obviously gone way further than that.

You might not have actually gotten an accurate IQ test. The last time I got one, I was told that the usual procedure for determining a person's IQ, which involves averaging their verbal and non-verbal scores, simply wasn't relevant in my case. My scores were very high in the verbal area, but only average in non-verbal. However, the testers said that in daily life and academic work, I probably was able to use the verbal-centered part of my brain to do things that most people do with the non-verbal centers, and therefore the measurement wasn't really accurate. The rather large discrepancies between my verbal and non-verbal scores was basically tantamount to a diagnosis of NLD, which is frequently, but not exclusively, associated with ASD.
The point of all this is that IQ tests may or may not be an accurate predictor of achievement, especially for us non-NT types. In my case, my (meaningless) tested IQ is already rather high, but your real IQ may be higher than the tests would indicate, and you may have some other undiagnosed learning disability for which you've learned to compensate in most things, but which gets exposed on IQ tests.

By Asian standards, I didn't meet the requirement that my parents set for me (i.e. A to A+ only) I got things ranging from Cs to Bs and some subjects shifted back and forth.

When I was 9, they were so disappointed, they got me a tutor. I hated her and insulted her and refused to listen to her on a daily basis. When I was 13, shortly after I was diagnosed, they asked, "What's it take for you to do better in school, I told them "Stop sending me to tutors and academics and let me control my GPA."

My grades got better and a few times I even earned the achievement of getting straight As.

The story gets even more outrageous; I didn't take any notes