It's tough to pin it down to just one grade. "Impact" kinda has a lot of ends to it. I guess if I were to pin it down to like...the grade I kinda figured out the way of the world, it would be 9th/freshman year. My city was kinda weird at the time...elementary school was K-6, middle school was 7-9, but once you were in 9th grade, you were earning high school credit and receiving report cards from the high school - you just hadn't switched buildings yet.
In the middle of 4th grade, I moved close to 2,000 miles from where I'd started school, and it kinda tanked everything for me. Down south I had established friendships and pretty good grades, but that's kinda hard to recapture when you move to a completely different part of the country. Everything is different, right down to what kids are into, and it's a bitch to try and adjust to. I basically spent the latter half of 4th grade through 9th grade floundering in all aspects of life, when the schools finally landed on a learning disability, and agreed to craft an IEP for me.
The plan was simple enough - my mother, my guidance counselor, and each of my core subject teachers would meet after school to establish a regimen and schedule that would distribute a shared accountability for my academics across the lot of us (the bulk of it still resting on my shoulders, which is fair).
The day we'd scheduled the meeting came - I stayed after school, mom showed up, we met in the guidance counselor's office...and only one of my teachers showed up. The plan doesn't really work without the input of all the teachers, and so we set a new date, and the same thing happened - I stay back, mom drops in, sit down in the counselor's office....and the same teacher shows up. Well, hey - third time's the charm, right?
I'd like to say so, but at 14, I kinda took it to assume that I'd just watched all but one of my teachers say, without a word, that they didn't really give a flip about my academics at that point, and so mom dropped in, headed to guidance, and sat down with my counselor and that same, solitary teacher, along with one other this time who, dead ass, was only there because he was a long term sub for my original teacher who'd wound up having a heart attack in the interim, and my ass was already halfway home on foot.
I guess, in spite of all my lack of effort up to that point, I kinda gave up that day. I basically spent the rest of high school scraping by...I fell into a good group of friends and wound up dating a pretty sweet girl, all of whom kinda helped keep me
along the track, if not necessarily
on it. I graduated on time (barely), pretty close to the bottom of my class (of 800+), with a next-to-nothing GPA to show for it.
I spent the next ten years kinda bouncing between different collegiate endeavors and employment pursuits before finally settling on a career I felt like I could do. I think people look at that ten year expanse between graduating high school and getting a degree and kind of assume the worst, but I still chalk it up to time well spent. I met a girl, got married, bought a house, and learned a wealth of skills on the job along the way. Honestly, that ten years probably has more value in my life than the 13 I spent in mandated public school.
TL;DR - school is important, but it's not the be all, end all.
Good thread, Barnxbee, whichever name you're lurking under now.