[lordnacho]

Don't lose hope, but be realistic. The kid needs to disabused of the notion of innate skill.

My brother's a smart kid too. He ended up getting the lowest grades in living memory at our school, totally bombed high school.

Now he's finishing a CS degree at Columbia.

Going over it, he told me he never saw me study anything. I went off to Oxford before him, and he figured he'd do what I did. (What he didn't see was my late night homework sessions.) Only after many years did he get his act together.

Learning is really only about effort. You get a lot of people pretending it's easy so they can get that "smart" label, even through college. Don't let them fool you. Remember there's nothing at all, all the way through college, that isn't public knowledge that you can acquire just by reading and trying for yourself.