"Highschool felt at best a dungeon, and at worst a torture chamber." I had a largely similar experience, though my method of coping was a bit different. Simply

"Highschool felt at best a dungeon, and at worst a torture chamber." I had a largely similar experience, though my method of coping was a bit different. Simply put, day in and day out, I would try to manipulate systems as best as I could and raise hell. Every teacher had figured out a system that they wouldn't deviate from. Spend the first two weeks of each class studying how the teacher behaves and befriending the students, and you're set for the rest of the year. From staging an "essayist uprising" in AP Literature complete with founding documents that closely mirrored the Communist Manifesto, to forcing use of sexual innuendo in every sentence in a class with a particularly senile teacher, to starting a "barefoot" trend (which was strictly against the rules but I hate shoes) high school was a huge game and a joke. I feel I learned a lot from it, but almost never from the actual material. The pace was so mind-numbingly slow that I could spend my days plotting and sneaking out windows, while learning what really worked to influence people. Come test-time I could read the book for 15 minutes the day before class and do fine, or even just notice the patterns in the teachers' awful test writing and follow it throughout. High School, at least academically, was a complete joke.