Good grades were extremely important to me as a child. Indeed, I viewed them as a moral imperative. I was the "good" child of the family as well as the "smart" child. My brother, on the other hand, was the black sheep. He was constantly misbehaving, and his grades were just good enough to get by. Early on I internalized the notion that good little boys get good grades, and bad little boys get bad grades. Of course it helped that I was the smartest kid in the class, and I could get A's and B's with no effort whatsoever.
Still, I was frightened of the dreaded C. C's were what my no-good brother got, and I saw how much grief my parents gave him over that. Therefore, I got to the point where I treated a C as a failing grade. Imagine my displeasure, then, at getting a C in third-grade English. This disturbed both my teacher and my parents to the point where they had a parent-teacher conference... to which I wasn't invited, naturally, and therefore I couldn't give my side of the story. I didn't feel completely devastated about my C because I knew it wasn't my fault, and now I'm going to tell you why it wasn't my fault.
My pencil got dull.
I know, I know, that ranks right up there with "my dog ate my homework", but it's the truth. Of course, there's a little more to it than that.
As I said earlier, I was not only a good student, I was a Good Little Boy[tm]. Part of being a Good Little Boy involves staying out of trouble and not getting the teacher mad at you. In third grade I had a rather temperamental teacher, who was very strict and methodical. She'd say things like "Take your arithmetic books out" (pause, rustle, rustle) "I didn't say to open them yet!!". You did things her way or not at all. If one had an extraordinary request, such as to use the restroom or get up to sharpen one's pencil, one had to raise one's hand, wait to be recognized, and then make the request. Just getting up and doing it was such an abomination as to be unthinkable in her classroom.
The daily English lesson came in the afternoon. Typically the teacher would assign us some work out of the book, which we were to do quietly while she got some paperwork of her own done. Along about this time of the day, my pencil would get dull. Dull enough that it was quite unpleasant to work with. So I would raise my hand to ask to sharpen it. And I'd wait for her to get her head out of her paperwork and recognize me. And I'd wait. And wait. And wait. I don't know what was so fascinating about what was on her desk, but it must have been completely engrossing. Either that, or she was taking any excuse she could not to have to look at her thirty monsters for a few minutes. In any case, I was in a bit of a bind; if I just got up and sharpened my pencil, she'd yell at me. If I called out her name to get attention, she'd yell at me for talking out in class. Meanwhile, as I was waiting, my work wasn't getting done. Eventually I'd go back to work, either peeling back my pencil with my fingernails or writing out my work in messy letters with quarter-inch lines. In any case, I'd turn in an incomplete paper because of the time I wasted waiting for her to acknowledge me.
So that's why I got my C in English that term.
I know, I know, I could have handled this in any number of creative ways. The trouble was, this teacher's lockstep iron-fist approach actively discouraged me from any kind of creative thinking. Doing things differently generally irritated her. If I irritated her I might find myself suddenly reclassified as a (gasp!) Bad Boy. She yelled at kids for using pens ("Third-graders should not write in ink!"). She might yell just as much if I used a mechanical pencil. Or if I deployed a pencil-box sharpener (she didn't tell me I could take that out of my desk). Finally I figured that a couple of extra pencils, as long as they looked enough like the standard-issue model, might pass by unnoticed, and the problem was alleviated.
It was still highly annoying, though.
I never did tell anyone this story until adulthood, because on the one hand "my pencil got dull" sounded like a pretty lame excuse, even if it was the absolute truth.
I suppose the lesson to be learned from this incident is that kids often have their own reasons for doing things the way they do. These reasons make perfect sense to them, even if they might sound bizarre to an adult observer. Children are not adults, and they do not have an adult's sense of perspective or risk-assessment or proritization. What seems trivial to an adult may seem deadly serious to a child, and vice versa.
On the other hand, children often will have a vague sense of what is important in the adult world. When an adult starts grilling a child about something the child did, the child knows that any explanation had better make sense to the adult mind, otherwise it will be dismissed as merely an "excuse".
The problem is that children do not have the necessary tools or vocabulary to build the bridge from their understanding of the world to the adults'. It is up to the adult in this interaction to build this bridge, and to carefully explain to the child: "Yes, I know that's scary for you, but it's not that scary for me, and here's why...".
Maybe if I weren't so scared of a hair-trigger teacher, I wouldn't have had the problems with authority figures that plagued me well into adulthood.