This American Life - 271: Best Interests

Broadcast on: 20 Aug 2004

Collin was 14, a straight A student and a program for gifted kids, but he hated school. And this spring, a few weeks before the end of 8th grade, before he would leave middle school forever, he looked at his grade point average, did a little calculation, and realized something kind of amazing. I had a high enough GPA that I could flunk every class in 8th grade all the way through and I would still graduate. Even if I had turned in nothing, I would have had a D average for that semester, and the D average would turn into an overall B average, overall. And so I had no reason to go. So I didn't go. He didn't just quit school all at once though. For a while he went to class, but quietly and deliberately stopped doing his work, on principle. There was lots of days when I just didn't do any work at all, and I would just sit through class and wait for the builder ring, and give the appearance that I was working, or copy off people, or things like that. Wasn't it more boring doing nothing? No. Did you have a book you were reading where you could just kind of accept the book? I don't know. I don't really read. Yeah. Or magazine or something. Go get something. That's something that they could point at though. I mean, I wasn't giving him anything they could point at. So if I did something like that, then they could say, well he was reading while we were supposed to be working. Right. That would be deliberately defying their instructions. Well, it's just sitting there and not working. Right. There's nothing more they can do. And when it comes to high school, will you work in high school? Of course. Because high school, you're working towards the rest of your life. You're working towards what college you'll go to, and what college you go to decides what career you choose from a career. In middle school, my counselor reassured me that it doesn't account for anything, that this will be all disregarded after this year's over. He cut school completely one time, and then the second time. And both times, the school tried to call his parents, but Colin naturally intercepted those messages and erased them from the family answering machine. And the third day that Colin cut school, it led to a kind of uncomfortable moment for his dad. His dad, you see, is a behavior specialist for the public schools. In charge of training administrators, how to keep kids doing what they're supposed to be doing. At 100 schools, in three counties in Oregon, including the school, the Colin attends. In your job, do you deal with kids who don't shop at school?

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