Yeah, personality goes a long way toward how they react to you. I was the sort who cried at the drop of the hat when the pressure got to be too much, then I started shouting an angry speech about why the school system was so messed up. Then I'd cry for hours when I got home and get aggressive with people who tried to touch me. That was in first grade, though, I calmed down a lot after that. I was still dysthymic to depressed for years, though.
A lot of it was because I thought they were purposefully lowering the bar for everyone (and while that's true for some components of education, it isn't the case for all). I thought most students who struggled were just not paying attention or didn't care (prevalent attitudes, but hardly the source of all academic difficulty, and a rather egocentric perspective for me to adopt), until in the first grade a substitute accidentally administered a seocnd grade spelling test to the class, reading words we'd never seen on a list, and I just wrote them down (I'd probably read them in short books before, but looking back, some people probably hadn't had exposure to at least some of those words in written format, a thought that just occurred to me). It didn't faze me at all that we'd never "heard" the words before, whereas the rest of the class was in uproar over the unfamiliar list.
I said, "So what if we haven't seen the word list; they're simple words!" I knew it was a rude thing to say, but just wanted them to stop complaining and get the darn thing over with so I could get back to watching the squirrels outside the window. The only thing I ever missed about first grade was that it was easy to look outside the windows all the time, and perhaps a little easier to get away with not doing any cut and paste projects. I hated having so many incomplete projects, but I really wanted to think about other, more important issues, namely the way the school system is run.
