The State’s Smartest C Student

Watching El Camino High’s Academic Decathlon team bask in well-deserved glory this week, I couldn’t help but take heart at senior Robert Magee’s rise from academic mediocrity to the top of the scholastic heap.

When his team swept the statewide competition Sunday, Robert finished with more medals and more points than any of the 400 other contestants in this year’s “battle of the brains” among the brightest high school students from 43 California districts.

That makes him, at least unofficially, the state’s smartest student . . . certainly its smartest C student.

You see, Robert sits on his school’s nine-member decathlon team in one of three spots reserved for C students--kids whose grade-point average falls below 3.0, which is the equivalent of a B.

It is part of the beauty of the decathlon that each team is required to field three squads: an Honors unit for A students, a Scholastic squad for B students and a Varsity team, for those whose grades hover in the “satisfactory” range.

And as the mother of a C student myself, I couldn’t help but applaud the victory of this unsung underachiever and wonder, “Who is this kid? And how does a C student walk off with top honors at a contest among the state’s brainiest kids?”

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To be fair, Robert is no ordinary C student. The 18-year-old was an honor student at Nobel Middle School and entered El Camino Real High in Woodland Hills with good grades. He earned straight A’s in his freshman year, but started to slack off in 10th grade, he says. “And in 11th grade, my grades really went through the floor.”

That was when he “rebelled” against homework--deemed it pointless and mind-numbing--and by the time he began his senior year, that, combined with a tough course load, had him struggling to maintain a 2.9 GPA.

English teacher Sharon Markenson remembers him from her 11th-grade honors class. “He sat in the back of the class. . . . He never spoke, he never took notes. And he set the curve for every test.”

She’s had students like him pass through her classes before; every teacher has.

They’re the ones the system is most likely to fail, she says--gifted but unmotivated youngsters who lose patience and tune out when the teacher hands out the umpteenth worksheet or drones on about every mundane point.

“Our lesson plans are made for the kids who need to review, like most of us do, before they can understand,” Markenson explains. “That’s built into the system--repeating something again and again until you’ve got it. But kids like Bob begin to look at that as busywork, and they tune out.”

“Say I’m talking about the concept expressed in a poem and I go over it in class three or four times. . . . I call that good teaching. He calls it boring.”

It was Markenson, who coaches the decathlon team with history teacher Dave Roberson, who helped persuade Robert to join the squad. He turned them down the first time they asked, in his junior year, then watched their team make it all the way to the national finals and come in second.

Meanwhile, his marks had dipped so low, “it got to the point where I was kind of embarrassed to show anybody my grades,” he recalls.

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The Academic Decathlon competition was created to highlight students’ scholastic achievements in much the same way sports championships spotlight high school athletes.

Over 18 years, it has evolved into a series of county, statewide and national contests in which students can score in 10 categories, from science to fine arts, literature to economics. Gold, silver and bronze medals are given in each, and the team amassing the most total points wins.

Although the training schedule is grueling--six hours of study every night--competition is stiff for spots on the team’s top two tiers; the brainiacs know it may spell the difference between getting into UCLA or winding up at UC Riverside.

But it’s harder to fill those three slots on the Varsity rung. Coaches joke that they’re looking for a rare bird--the student with a C average and a 1,600 (perfect) SAT score.

Yet Markenson said it may be those C students who get the most out of the decathlon experience. “These are the students we are failing,” she said. The decathlon “provides something that the system was not able to provide . . . a challenge that encourages them to reach their potential.”

For Robert, the opportunity resuscitated his flagging academic career and rekindled his fading college aspirations.

“I was beginning to realize that I’d really messed up, but I couldn’t get back on track,” he said. “I’d say, ‘I’ve got to go home and do this homework tonight,’ but when I’d get there and there’d be television and magazines. . . .” His voice trails off and he shakes his head at the memory.

But his enthusiasm for the decathlon cram sessions carried over into his schoolwork. This semester, he’s pulling straight A’s and hoping college admissions officials will overlook those Cs and Ds. He’s applied to several University of California campuses and is making his first college visit with his family this weekend, to UC Berkeley.

The son of a nurse and a rocket scientist (no joke--Dad is an electrical engineer at Rocketdyne), Robert has no ready explanation for what went wrong, how he almost squandered his intellectual promise.

“I knew I could do better. My teachers knew I could better. They tried to talk to me, but I just didn’t see the point.”

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Life as a C student was mostly OK, he says. He played the piano, hung out with his friends, worked weekends at a Ventura Boulevard comic book store. He went hiking, did crossword puzzles, spent time with his girlfriend. “I was kind of in a rut,” he realizes now.

His parents were disappointed, he said, but never rode him about his grades. “Still, I knew I was letting them down. There was nothing really they could say. . . . I had to want to do it for myself.” But Markenson said her years in the classroom have convinced her that parents err when they let up on good students once they reach high school.

“Parents need to push them to study, to organize their lives and structure their time for them,” she said. “Yes, they’re more mature, but they’re also facing a lot more distractions and peer pressure.” Many stumble and never recover.

So I’m wondering now if it’s too early to make decathlon plans for my own underachiever. Those medals would look awfully good hanging on my daughter, who’s also decided homework is a mind-numbing bore. . . . But then, she’s only in second grade.

Columnist Scott Harris is on vacation. Times staff writer Sandy Banks will write occasional columns during his absence.