I'm similar to the author in that I hated school forever, yada yada, but I feel like there's something between learn and work. I've always been (hubris alert) f

I'm similar to the author in that I hated school forever, yada yada, but I feel like there's something between learn and work. I've always been (hubris alert) far more learned than my peers in nearly every subject, but the things that didn't come easily I was weak on - higher math was really the only thing that didn't. I think the main problem wasn't learning per se - I learned whatever I needed to do my technical personal projects with ease (chemistry, programming, electronics, etc.), but what I lacked was something like "how to work" which was really a kind of short-term dedicated focus that math so requires. Higher math is banging your head against a concept until ::pop:: - that's easy! I never banged my head enough - so whatever that is - it's a major problem that we need to overcome. This all goes back to why so many engineering students, like me, dropout of these programs because we have shortcomings in overcoming these initial problems. Schools need to identify this aggressively and provide some kind of scaffold that will allow these students to learn this focus/work type of skill. Also - the baggage the term "work" in our (US) culture makes it a bad item to focus on when improving a system. "Bad work ethic" is often a symptom of these types of problems.