I coasted. My parents were working class, we lived in rural Appalachia, and I went to public school.
I remember refusing to do chalkboards full of arithmetic problems in first grade because I already knew how to do them. Over the next several years, I learned to keep my head down, hide my book under the desk, retain the last sentence spoken by the teacher in short-term memory without actually listening, stare at the teacher while daydreaming, do my homework during the roll call, and count to three before asking a question to give everyone else a chance to answer.
I never made the honor roll in high school. The closest I came was in sophomore year, when I made 5 As and a D in PE. My parents never hassled me about my grades. My dad would look at my report card and sign it without comment, whether my grades were good or bad.
I was the one who wanted to attend a selective college, 150 miles from home geographically, but light years away socially and philosophically. I remember coming home to an empty house from a field trip the day after I received my financial aid offer. I wondered briefly, as you always do if you're growing up in fundamental Christianity, if everybody else had been swept up in the Rapture.
But soon my mother came home and told me that I was going to that college I wanted, that a friend of the family had given us the security deposit instead of giving her tithe to the church that month. I didn't know about the friend, but I'd already decided I was going to find a way, somehow. I patted my mom on the arm and said, "I know."
Fast forward five years, and I'm sitting in the chapel, about to graduate. The choir is chanting a psalm, and I'm looking up into the chancel, where the faculty are sitting in pews that face each other. Some of the professors are craning their necks to look at...us! For the first time, it occurs to me that they are actually proud of us. I remember all the sloppy papers-- essentially first drafts--that I slid under their doors at midnight. And I start to cry for all the missed opportunities to do really good work.
Honestly, I've never been motivated by things like money and grades. When I did well in graduate school, it was because I enjoyed the subject. When I did poorly in graduate school, it's because I was also teaching children at the time, and I tended to prioritize their lessons over mine. And I have often chosen jobs that were interesting to me over jobs that pay well or offer steady employment.
The same 6th grade teacher who told my mother I was "sharp as a whip and lazy as a dog" recently told me to quit working so hard on the furlough days. My state decided they didn't have enough money to pay teachers for some of the days we prepare classrooms, lessons, and report card grades.
My adviser in graduate school said I didn't want to bother with things I didn't think were important, and he was right about that, too. When I got my MA just in time for the tech bubble to burst and the job market to tank in the last recession before this, my host wanted me to wear pantyhose to interviews. I remember thinking that any boss who cared whether I wore pantyhose wasn't a boss I wanted to work for. And that distaste for jumping through hoops, I developed while coasting in school.
When we talk about underachievement, we never seem to say that gifted kids often do not get good grades or good jobs because they do not recognize report card grades, GPA, or a high salary as a valid measure of achievement. And that's part of what coasting does to you, too.
