Did you work at school?

i worked in the mailroom at college. it was great i got $30 a week and had free magazine subscriptions (fake names, empty mailboxes) and free columbia house, bmg and sony music club things.

oh as far as the studying thing went, no.

also did you skip days, did you get caught, etc etc etc?

I remember once one of my best friends had skipped school for the day and he forgot his lunch so his mother dropped it in to the school and he wasn't there, haha, so unlucky.

i attended class all the time, i was the "class clown" though so most of the time I spent in the principals office. But senior yr of high school I did a lot of skipping.

Yes in my final year I did it a bit too, I used to write notes for myself when I felt like going home. I was caught once towards the end but nothing happened to me.

Haha. I used to skip school to do GCSE revision (for which read 'to lie in the park with an unopened French book') but I was generally pretty good at doing homework on time etc. It does make life a lot less stressful, I could never see the point of putting it off. (I am very punctual too and get panic attacks when running late).

haha, I was horrible.
and look where it got me. posting my mutterings on a digital bathroom wall.

damn.

I worked my ass off in fourth and fifth grade (I can't remember which American terms make British sense and which don't; ages ten and eleven), which doesn't make any sense, really. But I'd been put in an advanced progam I wasn't really prepared for.

After that, I pretty much said fuck it. I dropped out of the honors courses in high school, except Honors Physics because it was a small school and that was the only science class I could fit into my schedule in order to graduate early. I took the easiest classes I was allowed to take, and in my last two years of high school only showed up sporadically.

As far as skipping -- being sporadic in high school didn't count, cause that was allowed -- a friend and I concocted this big scheme in sixth grade to skip a day. We forged notes from home excusing us, turned them in, walked out, and promptly had no idea what to do except spend tons of money on junk food, including -- I don't know why -- a jar of caramel sundae topping. We wandered around town, and got caught when we headed back in a fit of boredom to get on the bus to go home. (As punishment, we had to make a presentation to our class on Why Skipping School Is Wrong.)

And? Why is it?

something about 'mortgaging your future' i bet

cos the tv is crap

Cause we Lied, and we Betrayed The Trust of Mr Ward (our homeroom teacher) and Miss Zimmerman (the hot receptionist who checked the notes when we turned them in, and didn't see us sneakily sneak off out of the office and into the parking lot, thence away to The Town).

And also cause, c'mon. A jar of caramel sundae topping. It's not like we bought ice cream to go with it.

I don't really remember doing much in the way of homework, even though I had the reputation of being a nerdy swot. I just did the absolute minimum. I spent way more time developing hopeless crushes, playing and watching football and listening to metal.

Worked much much harder on my a-levels, virtually memorised my Economics textbook at one point.

Ditching was hard to pull of at my HS. The trick was to not come in until near the end of the day...then you only get an hour of detention.

I lived in a really really small town in high school, so unless you had some master plan about what to do (nothing.. oh, i know, let's go to the eddy and watch the whirlpool... we'd get stoned if we knew anyone that had any pot, but we live at the end of the fucking earth and no one even grows dirt weed here... but I'm not bitter) and where to go to do it, there was really fuck all reason for skipping

See, we had this whole thing -- this is a state law thing, I think, or at least a policy affected by that law -- in high school where a) if you were 18, you could come and go as you pleased, but more importantly, b) if you were 16, you could come and go as your parents pleased. At 18, you weren't required to be in school, so they decided that if that applied to school as a whole, it also applied to school on any given day; at 16, the same was true if you had parental permission.

I lived next door, so my mother had signed the "let my people go" form so that I could go home during study hall and lunch. Naturally I turned that into "What's today? Tuesday? eh ... I already went to school this week."

I worked 15 hours a week at a gas station for most of high school and added 30 hours of doing pizza delivery while overloading my OACs and working on the big musical that year (Little Shop of Horrors).
I was drinking about 12~15 cups of coffee and a bottle of Jolt at the time and was lucky to get 5 hours of sleep. University lifestyle was a breeze compared to that. Sadly I found nonacedemic ways to fill up my time there too.

I was at a fee-paying boarding school from 14, so couldn't skip. I worked less time than anyone else, to the best of my knowledge, and was a clown/trouble-maker in class and in the school generally. I have still not met anyone faster at getting things done than me, so it was pretty easy for me to do this and still end up top.

Yeah, I still work. I get my homework done about 95% of the time, and about 50% of that time I get it done in the class before the next day. And I've only skipped once without a note from my parents saying "she was sick and tired" or something.

Yes, although the never-doing-homework-and-getting-A's thing does fuck you up eventually. I was good at school with not much effort, hence a need to keep amused by rule-bending and cheeky with adults in a way they liked, so I had scams laid down including:

Skipping early to go downtown and hang out with Zantigo punx.
Getting cinema/lit teacher to write me passes Uptown to get Vietnamese take-away.
Parent who went to my school as a teenager and had lingering hatreds for certain staff, most especially the Ass Principal who was moonlighting as the town's mayor. My mum would write me excuses just to hack him off.
Gifted counsellor who was good for writing me passes out of really boring classes so I could go to the library and look up back issues of Rolling Stone and '60s LIFE magazines with good Peter O'Toole pix for HOURS.
Caning the open phone in the newspaper office (mostly sitting on hold for Cure tickets etc.)
Commandeering English teacher's office in order to RULE his stereo with Frankie Goes To Hollywood tape (eg. seeing who notices Scouser going "COME!!!!" at top volume and shrieks in horror first).
Telling the journalism teacher that we really needed subscriptions to NME, MM, i-D, Blitz and The Face (obviously) for the newspaper.

I worked, never skipped, never got in trouble. I was out of class often for things like out of town academic competitions and I was drum major, honor society president etc. (Yes I was a nerd.) I also worked part time after school at a grocery store often not getting to my homework till after I got off at midnight.

This did pay off though as I graduated 2nd in my class and received more than one full scholarship offer. Urgent and key since my family was food-stamps-dirt-poor.

I try to stress to my kiddos that they do have to start thinking about these things now if they want to map a way to college for themselves. Except for a couple they don't have much drive or focus yet.

Not at all. I still don't, really. Any class where the professor lowers your grade for absences (or has a daily quiz), I'm out. If I can do well and learn on my own, just showing up to turn in projects or take tests, I should be allowed to.

My senior year in high school was a waste. All my requirements were done, so I had a few college-credit classes (English, Euro history, gummint), the newspaper, creative writing and the literary magazine. Had I been smart, I would have just gotten my Good Enough Degree.

Probably b/c I teach primary grades, not college, I do not award grades on ability but on effort.

I don't care if you're the smartest whip since Albert Einstein, if you don't come to class and you don't do the work I'll flunk your ass. It's all about the effort.

I see it this way b/c I don't want to punish students who are truly trying and having a hard time with it. I'd rather find a way to help those students get it and punish those who can't be bothered to work up an effort to meet minimum requirements.