Indeed, school is very, very playable. Here's one anecdote from my personal experience: One of high school English teachers was notoriously hard on guys. It wa

Indeed, school is very, very playable. Here's one anecdote from my personal experience: One of high school English teachers was notoriously hard on guys. It was generally understood that she considered them goof-offs and slackers, and didn't give good grades to guys even for really hard work. I was at a disadvantage in that class even before I walked in the door. So rather than fight an uphill battle due to my gender, I spent an extra hour on the first report (a paper on Romeo and Juliet) and carefully drew hearts and a large rose in colored pencil on the cover page. I then proceeded to behave a smidge more effeminately than my natural self whenever speaking to her, and breezed through that year while my male classmates struggled, with my teacher convinced I was a persecuted homosexual. I'm not convinced it was helpful in the long term, because the work I avoided in that class didn't do me any favors. I've never done particularly well in English classes since, despite my love of reading and an over-sized vocabulary. But it certainly did give me an appreciation for the malleability of rules and systems when they are administered by imperfect humans.