And Our Favorite Case Study Continues
My first quarter of college, I enrolled in Calculus and was falling on my face. I was rusty and actual college classes move a LOT faster than high school classes.A year of X in high school is typically a single class of college and in college it's taught in four-and-a-half to six months, not nine. Four-and-a-half months for the quarter system and six months for the semester system and I was in a quarter system.My older sister told me it's okay to drop the class, God bless her. And I did.
In that conversation, my sister said something about learning this the hard way or taking too long to get it.
When I was active on The TAG Project, people talked about bright kids who never took homework home and finished it all in class and never learned to study sometimes got to college and flunked classes.
My sister was the first person in the family to attend college. I benefited enormously from her guidance and that guidance came from tough lessons learned the hard way.
Dad was a high school drop out who taught college (ROTC) as part of his military career and corrected the grammar, spelling and punctuation of college educated public school teachers who sent notes home with his children or grandchildren.
Mom was a German immigrant with no firsthand experience with the American education system, not any college in her own name in any system.
So her difficulties in college threatening her scholarship money were likely partly due to being the first in the family to attend college. Unlike me, she had no relatives who could tell her "Just DROP that class. Goodness. It's not the end of the world."
Maybe she only changed one or two grades because of issues like this. Maybe Julius caught her.
In the military, there is some school that officers can repeat as many times as it takes. No big.
Enlisted personnel need to pass the equivalent class the first time through or tank their career. Enlisted personnel do everything they can to help their classmates pass it on paper without cutting their own throats, even if they know they didn't really learn the material.
Upper class kids there on Daddy's dime don't need to worry that the entire thing will come unraveled over one bad grade causing them to lose their scholarship.
It's a scholarship probably acquired fraudulently because she cheated on the SAT, but under circumstances where she might have gotten it on merit if she didn't feel desperate.
It is eventually revealed that Jonathan cheated on the SAT, a college entrance exam. Skip is like "But WHY? You're actually SMART!" and Jonathan says something like because he's from a poor family and he's there at this elite prep school on scholarship, so he HAD to be sure he scored well enough.
I NEVER did stuff like that. I don't really understand why she seems to have done that.
But at age seventeen, I and my future husband were plotting to get his girlfriend an abortion in my name as soon as I turned eighteen using my ID card. That would also be fraud committed as a teenager.
If she cheated on the SAT, she wasn't even a legal adult at the time. But it's a somewhat serious crime if it got her thousands of dollars in scholarship money.
Or maybe not.
Maybe it's thumb sucking self assurance by someone who absolutely could have gotten it on merit.
She and I were BOTH STAR Student of our graduating high school class. That means we had the highest SAT score and we were in the top ten percent GPA.
After I was raped at age twelve, I was suicidal for decades and I began making at least one D or F every year because I had undiagnosed health problems and I was suicidal and I just never got around to doing some assignments.
I was barely in the top ten percent of GPA for my class and surprised I qualified. And my ex absolutely wasn't top 10 percent, the verbal part of his SAT score was higher than my verbal score and he once said something like "I would have tried harder had I known." and indicated it would have been funny to outscore me and the result would be no STAR Student that year.
Being dragged into a life of serious crime by two abusive husbands seems a high price to pay for what may be two relatively minor academic crimes, one committed as a minor.