YA short story, 1970s, boy flunking out of college - SOLVED

[Andrew]

Looking for a short story that would have been taught to a seventh or eighth grader in the late 1970s. Plot involves a boy struggling to make it in college and failing. He is working nights to pay his tuition, I remember a passage about wearing mirrored sunglasses to class because he was so exhausted that he could not stay awake.

SOLVED - This is a short story called "A Student in Economics" by George Milburn, first published in 1933.

[Rainbowheart]

Did you read it in a textbook or a magazine or a collection of other short stories?

[Andrew]

Great question. I definitely read it at school. I started out thinking that the story had been in my seventh or eight grade language arts textbook. But I have been looking for this story for a long time, and I am starting to think that if the story had been in a textbook, I would be more well known and I would have found it by now. Other than Junior Scholastic, I can’t think of what magazines they might have given us at school. I have a few copies of Junior Scholastic from the same time period. They were mostly news and issues oriented- no short stories. Thanks!

[Rainbowheart]

Yeah, I don't remember Junior Scholastic having fictional stories. It was just news articles.

My textbooks had some obscure stories, though. Do you remember the textbooks your school used? We could try searching by the textbook publisher to see what turns up.

[Andrew]

Unfortunately, I don’t remember anything at all about the textbook. I remember reading “So Much Unfairness of Things” by C.D.B. Bryan at about the same time, so it may have been in the same textbook. The school years in question would have been 77-78 or 78-79.

Someone from another site remembered the story also; he couldn’t help with the name or title, but he remembered a few additional details that I had forgotten. The boy is failing all of his classes except Spanish; he is passing Spanish because he knows the language from having worked on a farm with migrant workers. Early in the story, he meets with his academic advisor who tells him that if his Spanish grade goes down, he will be dismissed from school. Meanwhile, he is working full time, and sleeps during his classes by wearing mirrored sunglasses and propping up his head. He works as a waiter in a campus restaurant and there is a scene where some obnoxious fraternity boys come in and leave him a tip in the form of coins stuck in the congealed food on the plates. In the final scene, he is in his Spanish class, taking some kind of live oral final exam. The professor calls on him, but he is unaware because he has fallen asleep. The story ends with everyone else leaving the class, and him still asleep, unaware of what has happened.