Intelligence and LO LO9777

Benjamin Compton (bcompton@geocities.com)
Thu, 05 Sep 1996 21:35:45 -0700

Replying to LO9757 --

Valdis says,

> Yes! How many of us have been back to a high school reunion and been
> totally amazed at who is successful? Yes, the Valedictorian and his/her
> court all probably have 'better than average' jobs/careers. But who is
> running their own mult-million dollar firm? Who is a world-famous
> researcher, doctor, musician, journalist, consultant, humanitarian? It's
> usually those people who were not particularly 'noticeable' in high school
> [they were neither cute, athletic, or very brainy].

When I was a senior in high school I was elected by many of my
classmates as the most likely to fail in life! They had a point. From
the 9th grade to the 12th grade I received 19 failing grades. The only
way I could graduate from high school was to run 5 miles after school
with PE teacher, as I had failed his class two years consecutively, and
it was a required credit.

My academic career in high school certainly was not indicative of the
life I would live. Recently I saw a guy I graduated with (I think I
graduated with the lowest GPA of anyone who had attended that high
school) who went to MIT and earned his bachelors and then went to
another school back east for his masters. We had lunch together, and,
frankly, I found the conversation to be very boring and unstimulating.

Perhaps it is my poor academic record in high school, as well as the way
I was socially treated because of that record, that I have such strong
feelings about education reform. I think I was 12 or 13 when I decided
that the public education system was a joke, as it focused more on
memorization than it did on rewarding students for their thinking and
their imagination.

Ben
bcompton@geocities.com

-- 

Benjamin Compton <bcompton@geocities.com>

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>