Academics at Hyde

Proper therapy and medication, not their "seminars," turned my life around.  And I came out of my shell in college, where I realized how crappy Hyde's academics were.  Hyde actually ruined my chances to get into some colleges because of their grading system.  You would get two grades, achievement and effort, and the two were averaged together.  I'd get high achievement grades, but low effort grades because they said I wasn't a "leader" in class.  I think they set the system up this way to help some kids who didn't have the intellect, but it really hurt a student like me who didn't fit their mold.  Fortunately, I obtained a very high score on the SAT (and the dumb schmucks on the Hyde faculty couldn't figure out how).  Even so, my high test score combined with my mediocre grades convinced some colleges that I was an underachiever.

In college, I could learn my own way, just sitting back, enjoying the lectures & getting A after A.  Ironically, after a few years I began to participate quite a bit in classroom discussions.

In the real world, colleges, grad schools & employers don't give a f&^% about your effort unless it leads to high achievement.  I wasn't surprised to see that many of my classmates who played the academic game well at Hyde struggled in college and the alumni class notes section of the Hyde newsletter was filled with entries describing how so and so was trying to find him or herself (and glossing over the fact that they had dropped out of college).

I noticed too, that they tried to steer kids to small liberal arts colleges in the northeast.  Screw that, I went west to a big school (Arizona State) and gave them the proverbial middle finger by partying my ass off AND doing well enough to get into law school.