I went through a few different phases in my education: First, in my home country, were 6-day school weeks and hours of evening study. I remember a very specifi

I went through a few different phases in my education: First, in my home country, were 6-day school weeks and hours of evening study. I remember a very specific instance of sitting at my desk at home with a light on when I was 8 or 9 years old, racking my brain over a math problem I just could NOT figure out. My grandmother, a retired math teacher, would come in once in a while to see how I was doing: no progress. I'd write out so many attempts at solutions and all of them were wrong. She grew increasingly frustrated with each visit to my room, and would then leave me to keep sitting, trying to figure it out. At some point what felt like hours later I just broke: I sat there crying onto my notebook after she yelled at me again during her last check-in. No matter how much I tried, I just could NOT figure out this problem. It felt like hitting my head against the wall and like I'd be sitting there for an eternity. I knew she wouldn't let me stop until I got the right answer. Eventually my mom came in to check on me and saw that I was basically sobbing trying to scribble something - anything - that made sense. She didn't realize how upset I was. She comforted me and we stopped the homework session for the night. When we moved to the US, my parents were more hands-off than my grandmother. I think they grew very relaxed when it became obvious that the math curriculum seemed to cover all the things I already learned in my home country. For several years I didn't need to put any effort in at all, since I already knew all the material. Sure, my classmates thought my way of writing out long division was "weird", but I was the one getting straight As. It was a breeze, and I got complacent. A few years in, I suddenly had to learn new stuff in Math and my discipline for having to actually learn new math concepts again just was not there anymore. My grades slipped really quickly after that and I became an average math student. In some ways, I wished the situation was somewhere between the strictness of my grandmother and the leniency of my parents. It's not that my parents didn't care or anything, it's just that I felt like I got into the habit of producing mediocre work with mediocre habits. I did love learning, just not learning at school. My mom would take me to the library and I'd check out a bunch of programming textbooks to tinker with my own websites and projects at home. I wish I'd put more effort into math at school, though. It was my own fault of course, but I could've used an adult to push me to put more effort in after moving to the US. Luckily, I ended up doing what I love via the self-taught route despite not ending up going to university. Looking back on it, I really lucked out with having a relatively supportive mother and a computer at home. My parents thought my computer time was a problem, but they let me pursue my interests in spending hours learning how to code websites, writing stories, and playing video games nonetheless. I think that early and ongoing practice in self-learning via hobby projects is the main reason I ended up OK despite a not-ideal formal education progression. Also luckily (for my specific case), no medication was prescribed.