[scrollaway]

I'm not the person you responded to, but when I was in school, if a class didn't captivate me, it wasn't going to be any better if I "paid more attention". It was either I'm listening and actively learning, or I'm bored.

We didn't have laptops back then. Now when I do learn, with the benefit of experience and technology, it's a mix of videos + active research / googling. And I often enough just leave educational videos running in the background while doing something a little more mindless if I'm not in the mood to fully pay attention.

People learn differently. I want to stress this: There really are different types of learners, and applying one method to everybody means some people lose out. That said (and this is completely anecdotal), the smartest hands-on "easily distracted" learners I know run massive circles all the meticulous book learners I know.

[icepat]

> There really are different types of learners, and applying one method to everybody means some people lose out.

You get it -- this is exactly what I'm getting at. The second issue here is that many people grow up thinking they're bad at a lot of things, when in reality they just were bad at learning it in the prescribed way.

My favorite example is the one computer science course I took, I failed. And I failed it hard. This was a course in a programming language I'd been actively using for a year, as a contractor, working in data engineering. Needless to say, I was baffled.

[folkrav]

> many people grow up thinking they're bad at a lot of things, when in reality they just were bad at learning it in the prescribed way.

I spent half my life convinced that I was bad at mathematics. My math grades in high school dropped sharply the second we hit algebra, and they never really recovered. When I decided to reorient my studies towards programming approaching my mid 20s, this led to me missing some HS prerequisites. Long story short, we have 3 levels of math classes in the last two grades of high school here, I passed the mid-level of 4th grade, needed mid-level of 5th grade at least. So I enrolled in remote HS for this one class.

All it took was me sitting down with the teacher once and grilling him with all my questions for everything I misunderstood as a teen to finally click. Working on exercises on my own terms, and actually having the opportunity to understand _why_ things work the way they do rather than just learning obscure formulas and applying them, let me realize "well shit, this stuff's actually easy". I aced the class, got my prerequisite, and got in my CS program. The rest is history, I've now been working for almost 7 years, stepped up from junior to leading my own team.

I'd wager I'm far from alone in this situation. The one-size-fits-all approach to education is IMHO doing more harm than good.