Leaving "school" out of high school: the winding road to academic excellence.

Our training shoes quietly slapped the rubbery surface of the track as we barreled down the final stretch. One by one we crossed the line and doubled over, desperate to catch our breath. Despite the burning in my lungs from the cold autumn air, I felt great. I had been in college for only a few weeks and was keeping pace with some of the older, veteran runners. Unfortunately, off the track, in the classroom, I wasn't even keeping up with the other freshmen. After practice that night, despite the chill in the air, I took the longest possible route back to my dorm, dreading the research paper and the mountain of books and journal articles and notes and outlines that had littered my desk for weeks. I was just beginning my first semester of college and already knew I was unprepared.

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"How did you do it in high school?" asked my roommate, a graduate of a New Mexico prep school. How did I do it in high school? I didn't. In my public high school, a small school in rural Massachusetts, I was a conscientious student with a straight-A average. But I never had to write a 12-page research paper. In fact, in high school I spent a lot more time on the track and engaged in other pursuits than I did studying. I was captain of the varsity crosscountry and track teams, a class officer, president of the National Honor Society. I volunteered at a local women's shelter, represented the student body on the town school committee, worked at a craft store. I was a Girl Scout.

School was something else. Even in my Advanced Placement courses I did not have to write research papers. My classes rarely required me to fit even an hour of homework into my afternoon schedule, and doing homework on the weekends was an anomaly at best. As I tried to settle in at college, I began to realize that high school had involved very little school. None of my assignments ever required much time or effort, nor did "big" ...