The move from Lohn to Brady had seemed enormous to me. I had no idea what was coming next. During the summer before my sophomore year of high school, my brother Charles moved my mother, my brother Jim, and me to Lake Jackson, Texas. Once again, I was leaving one world and entering another. At Brady, my class had contained somewhere around forty or fifty students. Suddenly, I was in a class of about one thousand. I was lost. That is the simplest way I know to describe it.
I had come from small schools where teachers knew their students and everybody seemed to know everybody else. Now I was one student among hundreds. Academically, I was not prepared for it. I didn't know how to study. I don't mean that I was incapable of learning. I simply had never developed the study habits necessary to function successfully in a school that large. And it showed. During my sophomore year, I earned only two and a half credits. I had dug myself a pretty deep hole.
If I wanted to graduate with my class, I was going to have to climb out of it.
Making Up the Difference
From that point forward, summer vacation did not mean vacation. I went to summer school every summer to make up the credits I had lost. But I also needed to work. So, summer became a combination of school and jobs. Looking back, there is something almost ironic about it. I had struggled in school partly because I had not learned how to discipline myself academically. Then the consequences of that failure required more discipline from me than I had ever had before. I couldn't simply quit.
I couldn't recover those credits in one afternoon. I had to keep going back. Class by class. Credit by credit. Summer by summer. Eventually, I caught up. And along the way, one of those summer jobs gave me a schedule that still amazes me when I think about it today.