[legion]

I was one step worse than you in high school. I got A's on tests without studying, but I refused to do homework because it wasn't teaching me anything. I could generally listen to a lesson and ace the test. Unfortunately, many teachers felt that they should grade based on effort and not information retention, so they made homework anywhere from 30% - 70% of your grade. I literally had multiple teachers say that if you turned in every homework assignment, you were guaranteed a C. Anyways, I generally aced every test in every class, but got anywhere from D's to A's depending on what weight was given to homework. (I did do homework for math classes, as it actually helped me learn.)

When I got to college, I found the lessons much more interesting and much faster paced. I was expected to digest in a week what I was given a semester to digest in high school. I actually did homework in every class and kept up with lessons, whether or not I had any assigned. (A lot of professors who actually assigned homework would have you turn it all in at the end of the class--the trick was not falling behind.) I was expected to read whole books and write papers on them between Monday and Wednesday.

I also had some major events take place in my life my freshmen year. Within a one-month period, I broke up with my high school girlfriend, got into a fist fight with my roommate (who was my high school best friend), had my roommate move out, and got into a huge fight with my parents. Suddenly I found myself away at college and alone. The thing I learned from all of this turmoil was that I had nothing to fall back on. If I flunked out of college, I was on my own and without an education. If I wanted to succeed in life, I needed to be successful in college.

Over the course of college, the fights with my parents intensified to the point that I pledged never to live with them again after the explosive summer between my freshmen and sophomore years. I got internships that kept me from home the remaining summers, and the motivation to never go crawling back to my parents sustained me through graduation.