[factorymoo]

I went to the most prestigious high school in France. The top 2 students in my maths class shared one thing in common: they would study the curriculum the summer before.

I did it one summer, and while I was nowhere near as good as them - something magical happened: even though I hadn't understood all the concepts, my ability to understand the concepts during the class went way up. It was easier to follow what the teacher was saying since no concept was totally new to my mind.

[EasyMark]

This is why teachers told us to read the material the night before, because then you have a skeleton to work with and it’s not completely new to you. It did help, but I didn’t always do it :)

[golergka]

I went to math high school which was the most prestigious one in Russia at the time. Most of math class graduates would go to study math at the uni, and for the first year would be far ahead of their coursemates — but then would be hit by the sudden need to actually study the material and prepare for the exams like a wall of bricks.

[gowld]

In other words, the university was terrible at pacing the material, and the high school could only salvage the first year. Very common at university.

[petesergeant]

I did a Software Engineering Maths module at Oxford, having barely touched maths in several years. Working through the curriculum first was incredibly useful, because in the lectures everything just melded together, and my brain was already primed

[raybb]

Did that make it feel more or less boring?

[factorymoo]

To me less boring. I used to struggle to understand new concepts as they were presented. That year though, I was able to follow what the teacher was saying "live", ask interesting questions to deepen my knowledge.

[djeastm]

It'd be what you made it. I went back for a CS degree long after having coded for years and there were certainly things I would have had to sit around and wait for others to catch up on if I let it. But instead I always pushed myself to build much more sophisticated versions of the basic things we were learning and I also tutored, which is where it really becomes not boring, because you get to see how other people learn things in different ways, which broadens your own perspective, as well.

So basically I'm just trying to say it's up to you to make things not boring

[exe34]

It was like that with physics for me in high school. At ages 11-13 we learnt a bunch of stuff, which nobody except I paid any attention to, and then we had to do it all again, exactly the same stuff, for ages 14-15 to prepare for GCSEs. I was horribly bored, but at one point I was lucky enough that the teacher just gave me A-level and then early uni stuff to figure out, so that kept me busy. then first year of uni was horribly boring again, which led me to be over-confident, and didn't do much work in second year, but thankfully I managed to pick up the slack in 3rd and 4th year of uni.