[coryl]

That isn't what natural talent is supposed to be though. You're good at programming Perl probably because you've practiced more, or you care more and thus have thought about it more. Software writing is a skill which you have honed by practice, not naturality.

I don't know why you can't score A's at math though. It makes no sense to me as to why you can help others get good grades but can't get good grades yourself. It probably means you lack the hours applying through repetitive practice.

[einhverfr]

One thing is I have ADD. I run into mental blocks sometimes and can't get started on some things. Or I make transposition errors. These occur in times and places that make no logical sense. Analytical geometry, but only to a lesser extent in trig, and not so much in calculus. Similarly in chemistry, subatomic orbitals are fine but molecular orbitals, which are conceptually simpler, are not.

Similarly in chemistry lab, I could help anyone else but I would invariably run all the right tests on all the wrong samples. This made me a great lab partner but a disaster on my own.

As I have gotten older I have learned coping mechanisms but some things I can't do and I pass those onto others.

At the same time I have always been top of my class in many things, while putting in quite a bit less effort than average. These ranged from history to some of the sciences, to some cases of math (calculus, some algebra).