Sorry, Bostonian, I'm with MON on this one. Twenty plus years later, I still recall teachers holding my work up for praise and leading me to be ridiculed in the hallways by my high school peers. The worst event involved my chemistry teacher singling me out as the only person who scored 100% on her exam. I could feel the loathing from my classmates and actually had one of the other students threaten to give me food poisoning before the next test. I don't know anyone who was motivated to do better by my academic success. I didn't learn the same way as most of my peers. They knew that I was different and every time a teacher held up my work, it just reinforced their perception. Sometimes I think that these teachers never went to high school.
Individual results will vary.
I mentioned how I was not motivated at all by the posted Algebra II scores, so I guess I'll go ahead and mention how having my essays read to the class on a regular basis (and the teachers asking for my permission to read them to their others) said there was a lot more to my writing abilities than the letter grade itself could communicate. This motivated me to become a novelist. Life had a way of derailing that plan, but I still have every confidence in my abilities, and there's a project sitting on the shelf for the day when the kid is grown up and I have more time on my hands.
If someone was angry at me for doing better than them, my personality is not one that would ever internalize that. That's their problem, not mine.
