In elementary school I was a really smart kid.  I made all A’s and with of couple of B’s here and there.  But it was well known that I was one of the smartest kids in class.   In those days they had IQ (Intelligence Quotient Test) and I scored 127 and my friend James scored 135.  These were the highest scores ever posted at my elementary school at the time.   So I thought of my self as the second smartest kid at that school and in reality I thought I was a genius.

So when I reached Junior High I they divided us into homerooms by our GPA in elementary school.  James went to group 7A and I went to group 7B.  There were three other groups 7C, 7D and 7E.  As students we discerned that the groups were ordered by intelligence with the smart kids in A and the dumb kids in D.  So making to 7B was not bad or at least that’s what we thought.  We continued to think that even after we had a 7 grade school meeting in the auditorium and the principle told us not to assume that the smarter kids were in 7A and the less smart kids were in 7E.  He further stated that the classes had been formed from three Elementary schools, thus the important concept was diversity with each class having students from each elementary school.  But you know students it did not matter what was said, 7A thought they were better than 7B, and we thought 7B was better than all the other homerooms.

One of the problems that I suffered from in Junior high was that I would not do homework and as you probably know there was a lot.  Going from one or two teachers you go to six and all six assign homework.  The amount of homework was overwhelming and each year there was more.  All through elementary I would do homework just before class or while the teacher was talking about something else.  So I would not have to take it home.  But in Junior high if you tried to do some other teachers work in another teachers class, you got into big trouble.  Sometimes the teacher would confiscate you homework and you would be not able to get it done.  And they would always say “I hope you learn your lesson just after they took it”.