its not that I didn't agree with you, I push my kids to get an education...very much so...it was your presentation that sucked...
I wrote it that way on purpose to get the attention of the OP... The thread was going the way of "hey I had fun being a dumba*^ in school and look how well I turned out". Well, not really. For every one person in these forums who had a good outcome from wasting their free education, there are about 5000 broom pushers who don't really understand what went wrong and who don't really know how to save their kids from the same fate.
I'm really glad you figured it out and saved your kids. Some guys in your situation wouldn't have learned squat from their experiences and kept going downhill without ever thinking about it.
It's easy. Just take the energy used to screw around in school and direct it towards playing the game for just a little while. Pry that information and the grades from the teacher no matter how dumb the teacher is, no matter how disruptive the class gets. Trade 6 years of school lockdown for 70 years of the good life, since those 6 years will be spent in school no matter what the student actually DOES while in there so they might as well get something out of it.
Yea I posted that way on purpose because the topic raised in the OP is kind of serious, and it gets "too late" pretty darn quickly. I came THIS CLOSE to being too late myself... I had zero focus my 10th grade year and got a 1.8 GPA. Oops. I got 3.8 - 4.0 in 11th and 12th grades while taking AP and college level courses, and scored in the top .5% in all the placement exams, lettered in 2 sports, and it was still amost all ruined by my 10th grade year. I had to go to a community college for a full year to prove that I could handle college level courses, and even then it was almost too little too late. I almost threw away every dream I ever had for my whole life, over one bad year in school, and I wasn't even a screwup. It kills me to see people get anywhere close to the consequences I faced, especially if they make them deliberately. I just didn't know how to study and had no motivation, even though I wasn't disruptive or a class clown. I had to relearn and change everything I did in school to turn that around, and I made the decision myself, because nobody told me the truth about school. That it is just a means to an end and an opportunity to ruthlessly exploit, nothing more.
Sorry if I insulted you. The tone of the discussion really got to me because behind all the bravado I saw a lifetime of regret in the first dozen posts.