I hated it when they did that. Why couldn't they leave you alone when you were a well-behaved student with good grades. Pick on the bad kids and those that need extra help.

I be in my corner, doing my work, taking notes and then the teacher would suddenly call on me!! I hated that as I know they didn't think I was paying attention. -_-;

Same here. I also seem to have very different interests to everyone else, too. You know, like reading instead of partying. I hate inane small talk. Basically I agree with everything Susan Cain talked about in her excellent book Quiet, which is about introverts.

My mother, who's an extrovert, tried to tell me the other day that you can 'force' yourself into being outgoing. Like, what would she know? She loves people. I hate people. I'm going to look this book up, thanks for the rec!

I preferred groups to buddy-up/partners though. Could let others in group talk more if you didn't want to contribute and had backup for when someone became a jerk or didn't do their share. Get a bad partner and the project was hosed, deadline missed, ...

So of course I've had jobs where you were exhorted to be a team (translation: if it works and there's any acclaim or promotions to be had the guy higher-up on the organization chart takes full credit and benefits but if it fails it's your fault and the team must have deviated from what the higher up wanted...). Just like school, get right work ethics and reasonably un-jerky personalities on the team and you are fine; if not, either miss deadlines and lose clients or team has to cover for the slacker ...

I hated groups because everyone always seemed to look to me to do all the work and then stand up and present it to the class. Buddy-ups were much easier. I could do my share and not get blamed if my partner hadn't done theirs.

I had that done to me more than once, and one time I convinced the teacher to give me an A and everyone else in the group a C.

I was sometimes pretty nasty -- with groups or buddy I'd take a bad grade rather than do someone else's share. Literally stand up in front of class and shrug shoulders silently not even presenting my half/share.

But only after calculating the impact on my GPA. Boy oh boy was there ever a time I was obsessed with things like permanent records and GPAs. I was pretty sure (correctly) that college admissions and many scholarship programs cared about -- and my parents sure we're not going to pay for a girl to go to college. I wound up National Merit scholarship from SAT scores but I could very easily have been dependent on GPA.

Screwed over one of the teacher's kids who got by with murder all through school once even though it dud risk my GPA. They tried to cheat off my final exam so I deliberately went one off on multiple choices and sat there until they turned in their test, then added a note at top of my test that I had went one off because accidentally read my scratch sheet wrong. She got an incomplete for class but no disciplinary measures taken, never sat next to me again in any classes, I got an A and over the summer the teacher asked me about it and I spoke up.