[lisper]

I think a very important point is in danger of being buried in glibness here:

> Highschool is a mechanism to socialize you and a filter for colleges. Nothing that goes on there is a waste of time.

Being able to effectively interact with other people is an extremely important skill in life, and will become more so in the future as the world gets more crowded and less wealthy. There's an old aphorism: it's not what you know, it's who you know. It took me twenty years to learn the hard way that this aphorism contains more than a grain of truth. It is, in fact, the whole ballgame. If you're smart but no one can stand to work with you, you will lose. Contrariwise, if you're dim but people love you you will do fine.

So if you don't want to waste the next two years, here's a project for you: figure out a way to get 100 of your peers working on something -- anything -- together. It doesn't have to make a profit (though that would be good), it doesn't have to make the world a better place (though that would be good too), but it should not be actively destructive (that makes it too easy) and every one of those 100 people has to be doing it because they want to. They all have to be enthusiastic about it. Note that what I'm suggesting is different from becoming "popular", though becoming popular might be helpful (or it might not). You have to actually organize these people into doing some kind of productive activity. Just inviting 100 people to a beer bash doesn't count.

If you achieve that you will have just had the most useful two years of your life. Good luck.

[billybob]

"Being able to effectively interact with other people is an extremely important skill in life..."

Absolutely. High school is a great time to learn to get along with, and like, all sorts of people. You have your whole life to study and learn. But knowing how to get along with people is more important than any other skill you can learn.

Beware developing an "I'm smarter than everyone around me" attitude like most geeks have. It limits us, both in success and in happiness.

[wallflower]

> Contrariwise, if you're dim but people love you you will do fine.

Well said. I have started to meet many people who aren't super smart but they get things done because they don't paralyze themselves by analyzing why things won't work and just get things started. And by corollary, their confidence makes other people believe they can do it (even if they don't know how they will do it)

Recommended essay to ponder: "I ain't good but I got guts"

http://iggychaos.blogspot.com/2006/02/i-aint-good-but-i-got-...

[tokenadult]

figure out a way to get 100 of your peers working on something -- anything -- together.

This suggestion caught my eye. My oldest son appears to be a bit older than the submitter of this thread, now in eleventh grade. For him, "eleventh grade" has been mostly dual-enrollment studies at our state flagship university, with a seventeen-credit course load there this semester, and an additional distance learning class from the EPGY Online High School at Stanford University.

His peer collaboration project has been a website

http://impishidea.com/

about literary criticism of best-selling fantasy genre novels read by today's young people. He has gradually found a group of local and online friends who are appalled by the literary characteristics of today's best-sellers such as the Inheritance and Twilight series, and runs the website as webmaster and forum moderator, with help from a lot of his friends, to elevate the tastes of readers and to discuss better writing. Computer programming in the service of good literature is how he combines his interests.

I have utterly no idea how my son's activities will look to a college admission committee. (He should have his first admission result in about a half year's time as I type this.) And, no, he doesn't feel all day every day that he is doing just what he would like best. Part of the stress of being an adolescent is moving from dependence on the birth family to being able to independently support a family in the next generation. My son tries to keep his eye on the prize of getting to make more and more of his own decisions as he grows up.