Actually, Carmack DID slack off in school, and he dropped out of college almost emediatly after he got there!
Schools are not a good example of work ethic. First of all, schools actually are harder than most work is (key word: "most"), because youyou must memorize countless terms, sit in class listening to lectures and attempting to figure out what the hell the teacher is talking about, you must get up a 5:45 in the morning to catch your bus, you get hours and hours of homework every night, deal with five completely unrelated subjects simultanieously, and hundreds of other things that I''m not even going to take the time to list.
Obviously, there is some work that is more difficult then this, however, all of the work that is more difficult then this requires one to work hard to get there in the first place, which means that they WANT to be there.
Also, because of how many classes a typical student has, and how quickly the classes go through stuff, and because of the method of teach almost every teacher in america uses (compulsory education), it is nearly impossible to understand all of the stuff that is tought to you and pass all of your classes at the same time.
I have a philosophy: learning comes first, education comes second. In other words, actually learn something in school, and do what ever it takes to do so. If that means failing all but one of your classes so that you can take the time to actually learn and understand the stuff in that one class, then do so!

When I was in school, geometry during sophomore year in high school was average. Maybe the standard a few years later is already higher. There are many successful programmers that weren''t on the "fast track" in school.

I took a Pascal course in high school and I wasn''t that good at it. I didn''t even go into college anticipating to pursue computer science; I just sort of fell into it a year later. So I really didn''t start learning to program until my sophomore year in college. Furthermore, there are many 13 year olds that visit this site that already know more than me at the ripe age of 24. If I got started that early, who knows... The fact that you are here already leads me to predict that you will be more advanced than most of your peers.

2nd prediction: you will not become a "rich azz" programmer. Barely anyone who has ever visited this site will. You may likely become a very rich DBA or Java programmer though and you can find fun non-game development jobs out there. I make heaps of money for a 24 year old. Good luck.

I''m with Nomad, I''m in grade 10, and I''d consider getting eighties in school a givein. I haven''t studied more than 20 minutes for any tests(except I studied for like 2 hours for one of my exams). Most classes are completely useless for you''re future. All the old guys out there will agree with me that it doesn''t matter what you got in grade 10 geography. Actually I have a story about my geography class, my mark was 90 in the first half of the year and 64 in the second, and the teacher called me an ass-h0le in front of the whole class, but then I got the highest mark in the school for this Nation wide geography quiz. To the point of this message: the best memories get the best marks and just say no to drugs!