[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).