Have you ever failed a class in highschool?

I never failed a class, but I came close in government/economica my senior high school year. I hated high school and literally just did enough to get by. I went on to graduate college with a 4.0 gpa.

Yes. Band class.
...I have no excuse.

Yep. And it had no effect on me in the long run either.

Oh, hell yeah. Math, English, hell, all of them. The band teacher failed me, saying I know nothing about music and got no talent. I later played semi-pro in a working band for like 10 years. I wonder of he ever caught a show. What contributed was I didn’t give a damn about nothing that they were teaching. the mental and physical abuse that they supplied won’t be spoken about here and now…. ssssshhhhhhhh I dropped out at 16, got a job that same day, am looking on retiring soon here.

Yup. Spanish, Chemistry, and Algebra II. Between my not giving a shit about the subjects, being throughly confused by the material, all of them being first thing in the morning, and my being suicidally depressed (so my mental capacities were pretty low), there was just no freaking way I was going to do well.

IB Calc. OMGDEATH. Didn’t help it was 7 in the morning.

I’ve never failed a class, but I did get close to failing Algebra II w/ Trig. my Junior year in high school. That teacher got fired a year later for being an asshat. He threw a pen at me once, the bastard.

I flunked Chemistry my last semester. I had been accepted at a college already, and only needed a C in one class to get my diploma. Chemistry was right before lunch, I had a friend who brought me hall passes three days a week, and we’d leave campus and drink beer, then get back for the end of the lunch hour.

I failed Algebra in High school.. Twice! only to find my answers were almost always correct but I didn’t use the proscribed method the teacher wanted. But that was 40 years ago. I would probably pass wickedly now. In those days they didn’t know how do deal with people who think outside their narrow focus.

Yep, jazz band.

Ironically, I took the class so I could easily skip out every day and go to the “band house” some friends and I had rented about a block away so we could rehearse for our (presumed) ascension as gods of rock and roll.

(Hey, I wanted to be a rock star, not a high school band director. In the infamous words of Maxwell Smart, “Missed it by that much…”)

Junior year I almost failed probability and statistics AP. I hated that class so much.

At college, we had a pass/no entry choice, so a failing grade wouldn’t appear on your transcript. One class first semester sophomore year proved tough enough to psych me out. I got a B+ on the first paper, I think, but I never could get it together to write the final paper.

That caused a scramble to transfer some college credits I had gotten while in college, which enabled me to graduate on time. That was probably a big mistake, but that’s the past.

In grad school there was a course I really wanted to audit, but not take. The teacher wouldn’t let me audit it, so I enrolled. Fortunately I didn’t need it to graduate, so I didn’t study for the test, and I didn’t hand in the last paper. I took an incomplete. It’s probably still incomplete to this day.

Nope I skated though even graduated a semester early. High School was a joke.

Nope. Lowest grade I got was an A- in physics, junior year first semester. Not even kidding. I almost Asian failed it.

My boyfriend failed a couple classes though, and he’s doing well at Cal Poly, so… :\

no, not yet. But I have a feeling I’m going to pretty soon, exams are in may.
I guess I’m going to find out pretty soon . . .

Funny that this came up a moment ago in the Never Ending TJBM thread. I failed Italian, then Spanish in High School. A year of a language was required to graduate however, so I had to go to community college in my senior year to learn sign language. It was much easier to wrap my head around, so I passed it with flying colors and such.

I failed French, because I am and always have been totally hopeless at trying to learn any foreign language and the only reason I did one at all was because it was compulsory. I just can’t hold enough vocabulary in my memory.

I only ever failed one class….Grade 10 French, The teacher had a unhealthy…...crush on me, when I turned HIM down I ended up with a 23% grade…... every other class I had 96+ Went to summer school for this credit took the final and scored 98%...... !&#*%

The closest I came to failing a course was the D+ I earned in Honors Chemistry. (How I passed the second semester with a solid C is beyond me.) I retook the course in summer school prior to my senior year. It was a horrible experience and I am not fond of the subject as a result.

Latin! Technically, I didn’t fail. I (upon a kind request of the teacher) changed classes to Humanities. I think she decided I was the only person on the planet that she could not teach Latin. It’s ok. My life has been full without it, so far.

I almost failed Algebra 2. Several years ago I took a course in Algebra in our junior college to see if I’d gotten over my lack of talent dealing with number concepts. I did 4 times the amount of homework to be sure I had it down. I went into the final with an A, but I must have done poorly in the the exam because I go a B in the course. Conclusion: I wasn’t any more proficient in Algebra than I’d been in high school. In the interim, I just learned to work harder.

No. The lowest grade I ever got was a C in pre-calc.

@aprilsimnel Calc. That’s calculus, right? Kind of like fancy math or something. Never got pi, or the fascination that goes with it. Amyway, that calc is like one step above regular math, right?

@12Oaks – Yup. My high school had advanced trig/pre-calc, differential calculus and integral calculus. All those slopes and curves and velocity and all that; meh. I wasn’t going to go on to physics at uni, and I wasn’t interested enough to do actual calculus of any kind. I didn’t feel like working very hard during senior year.

@aprilsimnel Oh, so calculus is that math where you figure out the area or the shape with some straight lines and regular angles but will have a curvy side. Need a compass to do that sort of fancy math. Trig is that weird things where some guys get so obsessed with triangles that their whole career is measuring triangle angles and lengths of the lines and that stuff. I always wondered how someone could get so fascinated with something like that that it becomes their whole life. Not cracking it or anything. If you like traingles that much, may as well make a living doing that. I do find a humor in that, though…. the good kind.

All great answers! I myself am failing in my Introduction to Engineering Design class, but I’m hoping to bring it up! I think the closest I came to actually failing was in 7th grade. I lost a 50 point study guide for her class when my binder got stolen and she wouldn’t give me another. It took a lot of begging, but she gave me another worth half credit. All warm feelings towards math died with those other 25 points..

Yes, many. But that was in the distant long ago when it was a great deal easier than it is today.

@12Oaks: the Pythagorean Theorem has been the guiding principle of my life, and it has never failed me.

One phys ed class. It was gymnastics and I wiped out badly on the uneven’s, thought I almost killed myself so I said fuck this and showed up and just loitered in class until the next period every time till it ended. That class was a dumb idea, pffft.

I didn’t fail but my dad had to pay for me to do English Language and English Literature final exams. They were the only GCEs I passed. I just wasn’t into school. I wasn’t engaged. If you knew what I do now, I am the perfect example of why we can’t judge a person’s potential based on how they did at school. I was a school dud.

@ratboy That is some wild stuff. Glad somebody gets it. Not too sure how it would function in real life as applied to real life living, but looks like it could be fun if you like that sort of fancy math.

My guiding principal is Occam’s Razor. So simple, so true.

@12Oaks: take care; Occam’s Razor is a double-edged blade.

I have failed several classes in High School, which I am not proud of.

What contributed to my failure? Procrastination. Not doing enough work. Laziness. Not asking for help when I should have. Wanting my work to be perfect before I handed it in. Giving up too easily. Feeling like I couldn’t do the work because I felt like I wasn’t good enough. Feeling too hurt by criticism of my work when it happened. Fear of being judged by my work. Wanting my work to stand out and being disappointed in myself when it didn’t measure up to the unrealistically high standards I set up for myself. Feeling like it was too late for me to finish my work. Taking teacher’s words too seriously. Not wanting to bother people by asking for help. Wanting to prove I could do my work without help. At times, not wanting to do the work in the first place because I found it hard to relate to it and didn’t find it the least bit interesting. Doing other things I wanted to do instead of doing homework. Avoiding homework by giving my attention to something else because I didn’t want to think about it. Guilt. Not being happy enough with the work I did do to hand it in to be marked. Having a self-defeatist mentality. Punishing myself too much. There may be other reasons, but I’m sure I don’t need to go into more.

I would rather not go into which classes I failed. When I look back, I understand why I failed and I feel that I should use my failures as motivation to know what to do right in the future.