Social Studies was a waste of time. Who cares about lindsey-woolsey dresses when the Monroe Doctrine was far more important? Civics as presented was a waste of time, but it led me to read the Federalist Papers on my own.
It also gave me the chance to make some money. One of our assignments was to cut out political cartoons from the newspapers and write an interpretation. Most of my classmates were lost and didn't know their political Left from their political Right. On the other hand, I had just finished a leafletting effort for the Goldwater campaign. I was approached by classmates to write interpretations of the cartoons and hand them over to them so they could pass the homework off as their own. I charged a pretty penny and made a handsome profit on the deal. The teacher never got wise to the high quality of his students' prose.
It was my first dollar earned. A lot of them.
Publius, that's so funny! My sophomore year in high school I had a nice little cottage industry for a while selling Shakespearean sonnets! I did one free for a girl, word got around, I started charging, and made nice money off the Honors English students. I wrote them in study hall. Teachers were too stupid and lazy to recognize that those bland morons couldn't have written what I submitted.