I also have a high variance in my intellectual abilities . I got a perfect score on the math section of the GRE, but received a C+ in my high school geometry class despite putting a massive amount of effort into it. A big challenge I have repeatedly faced is convincing people that my inability to accomplish certain things isn’t due to laziness.
A big challenge I have repeatedly faced is convincing people that my inability to accomplish certain things isn’t due to laziness.
I’ve had the exact same problem, and it’s made life difficult for me in many ways. One point that people miss is that if your abilities are very uneven, your comparative advantage on certain tasks can be so much lower than your comparative advantage on other tasks that it’s actually rational not to do certain things that are “required.” In college I took a music theory course that turned out to be centered around memorizing the different key signatures and the scales and chords in each of them. It makes a lot more sense for someone who can do these things easily to put effort in the class than it does for somebody who finds it a serious struggle while being very good at other things.
For me, conscientiousness is the main problem. The high school I attend places a very high emphasis on doing homework when calculating grades, and the grading system my calculus teacher has in place goes something like this:
He assigns us nightly homework.
The next day, he checks to see if we completed the homework. Just that. There is no weight placed on whether or not you’ve actually done the problems correctly; either you have the homework done, in which case you receive 10⁄10, or else you don’t, in which case you receive 0⁄10. Someone who completed half the problems, then, and did all of them correctly would receive a 5⁄10, whereas someone who complete all of them but got them all wrong would receive a 10⁄10.
This means that I have more or less taken to filling in random answers on the homework problems whenever I don’t feel like doing excess work, which for me (someone who has ADHD and as such is great at procrastination) is pretty much every night. I get ~100% on the tests we take, but the percent grade that homework provides is far greater than that provided by the tests, so what ends up happening is I get a B or so in the class whereas someone who doesn’t really understand the material manages to coast through by simply completing the work and gets an A in the end.
The problem is, I feel, that the way the system is set up now doesn’t really incentivize a true understanding of the material. Rather, it encourages rote memorization and task completion, which is a great way to stifle creativity, which I am given to understand is rather important later on in mathematics. (When I am feeling particularly uncharitable, I am prone to characterizing it as “drone behavior”.) Unfortunately, this means that someone who doesn’t think that way and doesn’t want to think that way is punished by the grading system, and—what’s worse—the teachers think that I’m just being lazy when really many of my classmates are (in my opinion) being a lot more lazy by not actually bothering to learn the material.
If I understand correctly, there are various forms of dyscalculia which can selectively impact performance in arithmetic or geometry, and dyscalculia in general occurs over a wide range of IQ.
This suggests that skills in specific math fields may be related to specific neural circuits in the brain.
I also have a high variance in my intellectual abilities . I got a perfect score on the math section of the GRE, but received a C+ in my high school geometry class despite putting a massive amount of effort into it. A big challenge I have repeatedly faced is convincing people that my inability to accomplish certain things isn’t due to laziness.
I’ve had the exact same problem, and it’s made life difficult for me in many ways. One point that people miss is that if your abilities are very uneven, your comparative advantage on certain tasks can be so much lower than your comparative advantage on other tasks that it’s actually rational not to do certain things that are “required.” In college I took a music theory course that turned out to be centered around memorizing the different key signatures and the scales and chords in each of them. It makes a lot more sense for someone who can do these things easily to put effort in the class than it does for somebody who finds it a serious struggle while being very good at other things.
For me, conscientiousness is the main problem. The high school I attend places a very high emphasis on doing homework when calculating grades, and the grading system my calculus teacher has in place goes something like this:
He assigns us nightly homework.
The next day, he checks to see if we completed the homework. Just that. There is no weight placed on whether or not you’ve actually done the problems correctly; either you have the homework done, in which case you receive 10⁄10, or else you don’t, in which case you receive 0⁄10. Someone who completed half the problems, then, and did all of them correctly would receive a 5⁄10, whereas someone who complete all of them but got them all wrong would receive a 10⁄10.
This means that I have more or less taken to filling in random answers on the homework problems whenever I don’t feel like doing excess work, which for me (someone who has ADHD and as such is great at procrastination) is pretty much every night. I get ~100% on the tests we take, but the percent grade that homework provides is far greater than that provided by the tests, so what ends up happening is I get a B or so in the class whereas someone who doesn’t really understand the material manages to coast through by simply completing the work and gets an A in the end.
The problem is, I feel, that the way the system is set up now doesn’t really incentivize a true understanding of the material. Rather, it encourages rote memorization and task completion, which is a great way to stifle creativity, which I am given to understand is rather important later on in mathematics. (When I am feeling particularly uncharitable, I am prone to characterizing it as “drone behavior”.) Unfortunately, this means that someone who doesn’t think that way and doesn’t want to think that way is punished by the grading system, and—what’s worse—the teachers think that I’m just being lazy when really many of my classmates are (in my opinion) being a lot more lazy by not actually bothering to learn the material.
If I understand correctly, there are various forms of dyscalculia which can selectively impact performance in arithmetic or geometry, and dyscalculia in general occurs over a wide range of IQ.
This suggests that skills in specific math fields may be related to specific neural circuits in the brain.