For me it depended on the subject. Subjects like Maths and ICT were largely logical, I could work out most things without needing to learn them. For maths I wo

For me it depended on the subject. Subjects like Maths and ICT were largely logical, I could work out most things without needing to learn them. For maths I would just read ahead in the textbook, anything I couldn't already have guessed I'd understand straight away, while classmates would need the teacher to explain the various concepts. Languages (for me French and Latin) came easily - French was helped by the fact that I've been to france 30+ times in my life, but Latin was just as easy. Just remembered everything I learned (most forgotten now, Subjects like English and History, I was a very fast reader, so instead of reading along with the class I'd just read to the end of the textbook/novel/whatever, and I found it all pretty easy. I never produced amazing insight into anything, but I could analyse anything to an ok standard without any effort. The three science subjects, I found that doing really well on basic logic/maths/etc. and pretty badly on anything that needed learning averaged out - less so in Biology, though. But I have a pretty good memory when I try and apply it, so again I pretty much didn't forget anything that I'd read once. As a broad non-subject based answer: I never bothered to read over notes just before an exam. Much of what we covered I understood before we got to it in class, and 99% of the time I understood it in class before the teacher got to explaining it. Homework was for me a "do as little as you can" thing, I'd generally either not bother handing it in or I'd do it during registration in my classroom at the start of the day I had to give it in. I guess the biggest thing school actually taught me was how to push the limits and know just exactly how much I could get away with. I managed to break more rules than any of my classmates (both in terms of work done, and other school rules) and yet never found myself in detention. That kind of stuff was actually what kept me slightly interested, for example working out the best ways to really annoy teachers without giving them justification to punish me. The real TLDR answer is: Different children have different skills and different levels of knowledge. Education is designed not to leave anyone behind, so it aims at the lowest common denominator. Hence there are those who would be suited to higher levels of education than people of the same age, but the school doesn't cater for them.