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Sometime when I was maybe in my early 20's, I went through my baby book and saw some of my gradeschool report cards. If you looked at them like an "adult", they made no sense. My grades wildly fluctuated between A's and F's (even for a single subject, like math). I think the answer, though, is that I am curious and enjoy learning things, so if I have fun, I'm motivated and perform well, and if I don't have fun, I don't.

I think that really showed up in highschool. Freshman year, I had an old-school teacher who made us write "five paragraph essays" with no accepted variance in or critique of the style, he'd assign topics I had nothing to say about, he tested reading knowledge by making us quote-mine to answer very specific questions that only a single sentence in an entire book would answer, and the essays were often things that we discussed to death in class (ie., the theme of Shane is, "You can't escape your past".) I think from his perspective, that was supposed to make the class easier. We supposedly knew what he wanted us to say, we just had to say it. And that class might have been beneficial to people who had trouble reading literature and finding something to say about it afterwards. I found it stifling. I also got a C.

In senior year, we covered literature that I really enjoyed (like 1984). We had a lot of work to do: we had to write a long "senior paper". But we were able to pick our own topics, so I was able to pick something that interested me. And I got an A. (Actually, I got a 4.0 senior year)



So, anyway, I just don't trust that grades correlate to intelligence.