That's what you get.

One of the best pieces of advice my father has given me is: If you want to be a top student, always sit in the front row. Of course, I was a teenager when he said that to me, and too young/ignorant/bull-headed/self-conscious (take your pick) to pay attention to him. I'm much smarter now, so when Mike started school in January, I passed my father's advice on to him. And seeing as how Mike is much older/wiser/more confident/cooler than I was at 13, he actually took it.

On Tuesday he called me from school to tell me that several of his classmates had come up to him while he was studying in the library to ask for help with their homework. And they had said things like, "You're so on top of it, man. How do you do it? I want to be the kind of student you are." I could hear him beaming through the phone.

Wednesday he came home with an A on his health quiz and an extra hop in his step.

Thursday he came home with an A on his English paper and a story about the girl who sits behind him who asked if she could read his paper so she could "see what a good example of an A paper looks like."

Today he came home from school with an enormous, shit-eating grin on his face.
"How was school?" I asked.
"I sit in the front row in all my classes, right?" he begins. He looks so giddy I think his head might explode.
"Right. Because you're smart."
"Right. So, usually I'm the only person in the front row. But today, all of a sudden, there was a kid on either side of me."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. And they were both LOOKING AT MY WORK."
"Like, copying off you? Are you sure?"
"YES."
"Oh no! You're gonna end up being that dorky kid with the glasses who hovers over his work and hides it under his arms so no one can copy! I hated that kid!"
"Well, actually, I just wrote in all the wrong answers."
"What?"
"Yeah. We were doing this kind of quiz where the teacher writes all these equations on the board and we're supposed to work them out on our paper and then he calls on us randomly to go up and put our work on the board. So I just wrote down a bunch of random numbers that didn't make any sense because I knew I could wing it if I got called to the board. But the guys on either side of me copied exactly what I'd written and then, they both got called up to the board where, of course, they just wrote what they'd copied from me."

"Oh my gosh." 

"So of course the teacher nails them because not only do they both get the wrong answers, but their work doesn't make any sense. And I just start laughing. One of the guys looks at me and says, 'Dude! What happened?' and I said, 'That's why I'm not the teacher' and my teacher starts laughing too."

"But why would you do that?"
"Because I'm pretty sure no one will want to copy off me again."