This resonated with me. Growing up I always felt like an alien around other kids, my mindset was just so different. I put a lot of effort into fitting in though

This resonated with me. Growing up I always felt like an alien around other kids, my mindset was just so different. I put a lot of effort into fitting in though, which I think helped somewhat. Even so, I very nearly dropped out of school and could quite easily have gone down a dark path (likely ending up homeless or in prison or worse). Luckily I went to one of the best public schools in the country and ended up with some pretty good teachers, but I learned as much on my own as I did from school, and had things been different I might have lost patience. As it was I nearly ended up stuck on a remedial track for most subjects on entering High School (due partly to the fact that I just didn't do homework, 20-some years later after discovering that I have ADHD a lot more things make sense). Somehow at 13 I had the maturity to realize I needed to fix that and luckily the school system rewarded my efforts (ultimately I graduated with special honors among a handful of top students in my class, and entered college as a sophomore). I imagine a lot of other folks who are just as smart as I was but didn't luck out with the same circumstances have been severely let down by the system over the years. Things just aren't setup for people who learn differently, or at a different pace, or have a different form of cognition than the archetypal student that everything is built around. Which ends up ill serving a lot of students across all intelligence levels.