Ten Years Gone (3 comments)
My ten-year high school reunion took place this past weekend, and I'm glad I went. It's been a while since I'd considered the reputation I earned for myself in high school. Back then, I was an introvert who maintained the school's web site and got straight A's without studying or doing my homework. At the reunion, one of my classmates introduced me to her husband as "the guy who always broke the curve."
Out of all my scholastic achievements, the one I'm most proud of is my role in changing the rules for homework quizzes in the math department. The idea behind homework quizzes was that at the beginning of class, students would be given a set of problem numbers to copy and review from the homework assignment due that day. The system allowed the teacher to grade only a representative sample of the homework while still requiring students to do it all.
But I didn't like doing math homework. Math made sense to me and I saw it as a waste of time to practice something I knew how to do. So I skipped the homework and did the selected problems in the few minutes we were given to copy and review. The time was tight, but I always finished and usually got a perfect score.
Partway through my senior year, we were told that we would no longer be allowed to refer to our textbooks during homework quizzes. Every night, I copied the homework problems from the book into my notebook and left it at that. I considered it a victory.
Anyway, years after that, Facebook came along and I had friends working as system administrators at other universities. There were some shenanigans, and then my Facebook profile listed alma maters that I didn't attend:
Quite a few people noticed that and asked me about it at the reunion, and some of them remembered me as the kind of guy who just might earn four degrees in ten years. I didn't expect that. I hope they weren't too let down when I admitted my fraud.