<p>School is artificially difficult because you’re not allowed to learn at your own pace. Academic competitions are likewise.</p>
<p>Here’s an exercise: play [QWOP[/url</a>]. When (not if, but when) you fail spectacularly, ask yourself “Would it help me to have a better understanding of the mechanics of human gait?” Which is an obvious “no” because you could easily produce a successful running pattern by looking at a timeline, placing key-ups and key-downs at certain points on it, and playing a simulation to see where you need to make minute timing changes by moving the key-ups and key-downs a few notches in the right direction.</p>
<p>QWOP is (intentionally) designed poorly because [url=<a href=“http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty]its”>http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty]its</a> difficulty is fake](<a href=“http://www.foddy.net/Athletics.html]QWOP[/url”>QWOP). It doesn’t require creative puzzle-solving, strategy, or even mastery of a rich time-sensitive system that requires you to exploit many aspects (like combat in games). It just requires an obscure muscle coordination that has nothing to do with anything outside the game’s bizarre design.</p>
<p>Now imagine that you have the opportunity to take a class arbitrarily many times, each time spending exactly as many weeks on it as you need (meaning less and less each time), until you get an A. Even if the tests, paper topics, etc. are different each time (still covering the same range of material), they’re easier each time because, without even realizing it, you’ve had more time to digest everything mentally and absorb it more thoroughly.</p>
<p>School is designed poorly because its difficulty is also fake. Consider the most obvious example: midterms. If a class has one midterm worth 30% of the grade and you score 50% on it, it doesn’t matter if you study enough between then and the final to get 100% on a similar midterm; you’ll still be fighting for a B in the class.</p>
<p>Another obvious example is the transcript. If you have a bad Algebra I teacher resulting in a D in the class due to poor comprehension (not due to very difficult exams), the D will haunt you for the rest of high school. It doesn’t matter if everything eventually clicks when you’re in Algebra II and you could go back and ace all the Algebra I assignments and tests with ease; your transcript still says bad things about you by virtue of saying bad things about your past self. There are ways of patching over that problem like holistic college admissions or GPAs that omit freshman grades, but those just count as people doing their best to work within a flawed system rather than actual solutions, and you’ll just go through the same thing again with grades in college classes.</p>
<p>This principle is so damn universal it even applies to the things we do for fun. I used to compete in speech and debate and, every single time I walked out of a room after round that didn’t go so well, my mind was immediately flooded with ways I could have improved. It wasn’t my argumentation skill, research, or intelligence. It was that the brain literally decreases bloodflow to areas responsible for those skills when someone gets up in front of a crowd and automatically goes into defense mode. That’s why the number one fear is of public speaking, ahead of death, claustrophobia, arachnophobia, and even the more general fear of failure.</p>
<p>And is there really so much difference between altering the cerebral bloodflow when performance is demanded, and forcing the brain to learn x, y, and z in that order even though it would be easier to learn y, z, then x?</p>
<p>So the question is really 10% “How can I become smarter?” and 90% “How can I apply my smartness more effectively?” The answer is to take more time to refine yourself. Turn mistakes into lessons instead of bad grades. It’s a great reason to homeschool. I actually took two “sophomore years” and graduated high school a year later than planned, but we handled it by writing the original 10th grade as 9th grade, the original 9th as 8th, etc. It’s a wonderful feeling to play the game by your own rules.</p>
<p>For the other 10%, sometimes you really are learning something at the right pace, purely because you enjoy learning it, and it just feels beyond you. I’m going through that misery, as it’s been a year since I last took a math class but I’m still studying mathematics at my own interest, so I have nothing external to blame for the times when I read something, don’t get it, come back to it a week later, and still don’t get it. I go through overwhelming self-doubt and self-worth crisis every day in a self-destructive cycle because of it, so I recognize that “How can I become smarter?” has no easy answer. The question is the gateway into the vast realm of educational psychology and there are many ways to help yourself think more clearly, like eating healthy, exercising, trying different times of the day, etc. It takes enormous discipline in order to find out what works for you and adopt it into your lifestyle.</p>