Some of my classes in high school were pretty interesting and I benefited from having several very intelligent and inspiring teachers.
Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic.
My freshman year of high school I joined the chess and math clubs.
My head was always bubbling over with facts and it seems to me this had little to do with my paying close attention in school and more to do with my voracious and omnivorous reading habits.
My fellow students there were very smart, but the really novel thing was that they actually seemed to put a lot of effort into their school work. By the end of my first semester there, I began to get into that habit as well.
My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English.