Bubble number 2, I’m impressed. You’re almost as strong willed in your academics as Foucault was.
As mentioned prior, Foucault’s thoughts were very modern and, from what I can gather, pretty down-to-earth. Though he knew that he had to put effort in to be smart, in an interview with American novelist Edmund White he said,
“I wasn’t always smart, I was actually very stupid in school … [T]here was a boy who was very attractive who was even stupider than I was. And in order to ingratiate myself with this boy who was very beautiful, I began to do his homework for him—and that’s how I became smart, I had to do all this work to just keep ahead of him a little bit, in order to help him. In a sense, all the rest of my life I’ve been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys.”
Doing all that extra work definitely paid off. Foucault went on to excel in secondary school which led him to be accepted into École Normale Supérieure (ENS), at the young age of 20, which has produced numerous Nobel Prize recipients – if that indicates how prestigious the institution is. There he studied both philosophy and psychology. After five years at ENS, he traveled abroad and lectured as a cultural diplomat in addition to writing and publishing his first of four books, the last one to be left unfinished and not published. He ultimately returned to Paris and became head of the Philosophy department at Paris VIII.
All About Michel Foucault 