I found this article extremely interesting, as I felt that I found my own personality perfectly mirrored in it. To clarify, I'm currently in my final year of high school (doing the Irish Leaving Certificate) - my entire life I have been "acing most of my assignments", indeed doing things at the last minute and doing extremely well with it.
And yes, I am not taking school seriously at all. My punctuality is terrible, I think I can honestly count on one hand the number of days I haven't been late this year (and I live close to the school). I skip classes in which I feel I am wasting my time (religion, anyone?), and have gotten several detentions, etc. because of it. In many ways, my track record in the school (I got a full scholarship for secondary schooling based on an exam in sixth grade, I was the only person in my year to have received an offer from Cambridge etc.), and resulting from that my relationship with the teachers, is the only thing that has kept me afloat in this school.
I have a huge problem with the Irish Leaving Certificate, an exam which in my opinion teaches you exactly two things: How to learn things off by heart, and how to write fast. It has nothing to do with intelligence or skill, but just the number of hours spent memorising pre-written notes, and being able to spit it out onto the page in two hours during the exam. I am utterly bored by it, and so I spend a lot of time in class on my iPhone, checking the news, reading RSS feeds, Hacker News, etc.
This frenetic burst of activity, followed by a period of "[doing] nothing but [strumming] his guitar and [lying] around in bed for several days" completely describes me, except you'd have to replace strumming the guitar with lurking on Hacker News! ;) I have never found anything wrong with that before, and to be honest, this description of being "bipolar" struck me - is there really anything wrong with this sort of behaviour?
This article certainly paints a fairly grim picture for my future university life, if my personality is truly as reflected in the article as I can see it to be at the moment!
Anyway, it was truly enlightening to have found this now, before I'm even at university - I have only now become aware of my attitude. We'll see how things pan out for me, if I'll be "scraping along the bottom" or end up on top...
(This is my first comment here, even though I have been following along for a fairly long time.)
Memorising things is a pretty important skill for a good hacker. I forget (D'oh!) which famous researcher into comp sci it was, but one of them had done a study on the "uber-programmers" (the guys who out produce normal programmers by a factor of 10 or more) and found that all of them had much better memories than average.
The real danger of being too smart in high-school is that because you can pull the answer out of your arse any time you want, you don't develop a good work ethic. And in University, not having a work ethic is almost certainly going to catch up with you. In high school I was in a streamed class (ie all the bright kids) and almost all of them came off the rails in the first year of uni when they got to the end of the year and discovered that they weren't allowed to sit the final exams because they hadn't done the 'stupid' assignments.
Naturally, being smarter even than the rest of the smart people, I sailed through first year uni. ... only to come unstuck during the second year. :D
A lot of the kids you look at now and despise for their inferior intellects are going to have an easier time of it at university than you, because they've built up a work ethic, and you haven't.
You don't have to be bipolar for most of the symptoms the article talks about, just smart and lazy. You get a great idea and half complete it? Not necessarily a bipolar thing at all.
Problem is, smart and lazy won't cut it working for 'the man'.
So you might think, well, this is HN, I'll just start my own company and 'the man' can go whistle dixie!
Unfortunately, while 'the man' frowns on laziness, the free market absolutely despises it. It will hunt you down. murder you and then do unspeakable things to your corpse.
You sound like me in the final year of 6th form (last year of high school in the UK).
I don't really have time to write a longer answer right now, but I'd say - don't worry, your behavior is pretty much a rational response to your environment. Things do get a bit better at university, so it's worth making the effort to get into one with a program you like. (Caveats: one you like might not be one that's highly prestigious; university is better than high school, but not always that much better).
And yes, I am not taking school seriously at all. My punctuality is terrible, I think I can honestly count on one hand the number of days I haven't been late this year (and I live close to the school). I skip classes in which I feel I am wasting my time (religion, anyone?), and have gotten several detentions, etc. because of it. In many ways, my track record in the school (I got a full scholarship for secondary schooling based on an exam in sixth grade, I was the only person in my year to have received an offer from Cambridge etc.), and resulting from that my relationship with the teachers, is the only thing that has kept me afloat in this school.
I have a huge problem with the Irish Leaving Certificate, an exam which in my opinion teaches you exactly two things: How to learn things off by heart, and how to write fast. It has nothing to do with intelligence or skill, but just the number of hours spent memorising pre-written notes, and being able to spit it out onto the page in two hours during the exam. I am utterly bored by it, and so I spend a lot of time in class on my iPhone, checking the news, reading RSS feeds, Hacker News, etc.
This frenetic burst of activity, followed by a period of "[doing] nothing but [strumming] his guitar and [lying] around in bed for several days" completely describes me, except you'd have to replace strumming the guitar with lurking on Hacker News! ;) I have never found anything wrong with that before, and to be honest, this description of being "bipolar" struck me - is there really anything wrong with this sort of behaviour?
This article certainly paints a fairly grim picture for my future university life, if my personality is truly as reflected in the article as I can see it to be at the moment!
Anyway, it was truly enlightening to have found this now, before I'm even at university - I have only now become aware of my attitude. We'll see how things pan out for me, if I'll be "scraping along the bottom" or end up on top...
(This is my first comment here, even though I have been following along for a fairly long time.)