To answer your question: Doesn't really matter for 8th grade, but failing any class no matter how stupid it might be is a bad idea.
How 2 School: Rykuta's tips to telling the system to eat a corn dog.
1) Ignore everything until HS, just get through it, your record starts clean when you start HS.
2) Ignore what people tell you about taking history. The requirements are for SOCIAL STUDIES credits, usually this also includes helpful and interesting subjects such as psychology.
3) Look for EASY classes to stack your grades, the single most important factor to most colleges is your GPA, everything else is just cherries on the cake. (Especially since a lot of schools are removing things like class rank).
4) DO NOT worry about having AP classes, they are usually more work then their college equivalents, and they have a large chance of not transferring to the college you're looking at anyways (Math and Science classes are excluded from this).
5) Challenging yourself is NOT important, your ass just needs to survive until you can actually take subjects you're interested in.
6) Counselors are there for counseling, they do not know everything, they are simply mediums between teacher and student, make sure you look things up yourself, and if you're the first person to ask them a question, make sure they get you a straight well thought out answer (Because sometimes they just wave their hands and say "I see ur thinking about doing something special here but, just do what everyone else does")
7) SAT is worthless, focus your fancy test taking on the ACT and save yourself the trouble. Also keep in mind that the company that makes the ACT and SAT make money by telling students they aren't prepared for college, their tests are not knowledge based, they're test taking based.
8) Master the art of bullstuffting interviews, and by that, I mean pretending you're the best student in the universe. (Work hard, have lots of study strategies, etc)
