I was in gifted and talented classes and in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program in school. I always tested extremely well on standardized tests and my parents were asked early and often for me to skip grades or skip up levels in certain subjects. One subject I tested well in and was asked to skip forward was in math. I skipped pre algebra and went into algebra. Tested out of the second half of algebra and then went straight to geometry when I was still in middle school where I was utterly miserable trying to catch up when I didn’t have a foundation. My dad who has a PhD in material science and is quite genius in chemistry often schooled me in math and science. The schooling he gave was not fun. Lol I will say, just because I could rote repeat and plug in formulas when asked, it did not mean I had a true and real grasp of algebra or geometry. I realized around 10th grade after I was already skipped to calculus that I didn’t have good basics and went and took remedial algebra to get them. I passed all the tests with a lot of tough tutoring from my dad before that but I realized later I didn’t really know algebra enough to keep moving in math. Math is a language but it isn’t taught like one often. My algebra teacher when I took remedial algebra was an amazing teacher named Mr. Smith who taught special education and also summer remedial math. He was brilliant in how he taught. I learned a lot from him about how to learn. It wasn’t just math either that I later realized I lacked a true foundation in. I was a very voracious reader and had strong pattern recognition so I was skipped out of a lot of English basics through testing into the gifted and talented program. The gifted and talented program made a lot of assumptions about what students knew and didn’t know based off of tests and evaluations and did not go over basics ever. While other students were learning about nouns and pronouns and adjectives and grammar and increasing vocabulary…we were in a truly innovative humanities class where we were pretending to be lost civilizations and had to decipher a language through a hidden Rosetta’s stone or writing our own newspaper or being knights and ladies and serfs eating off of trenches in medieval times. But I never got my basics. I did ridiculously well on tests. Won writing contests. Was scouted for advanced writing camps in colleges. Was given scholarships for writing. Couldn’t tell you until I went over my Strunk and White in college what were compound-complex structures, or clauses, or what the five basic structures of a sentence were. My parents weren’t negligent about my education. They just really thought doing well on a test or having a good grade was indicative of knowing a subject.