We grow up within an educational Skinner box where our behaviors throughout childhood and into adulthood produce the educational system’s responses that reward or punish us with tokens. We are constantly observed and graded from the pre-operational stage of development until adulthood. For some people, one in a thousand or ten thousand, the educational system only responds with positive feedback. For extremely high achievers, a childhood of only positive feedback produces a delusional referential state, not only about how behaviors and rewards work in the world, but also about the real world capacities of other people in real world problem solving, which are not like educational simulacra. Extrinsic rewards that come in a variable interval are more powerful than rewards a person may get without trying, so education functions better on people who have to work to learn. I don’t know if this is relevant. I’m just saying that whatever is the formula for happiness doesn’t have much to do with ‘brilliance’. I’m sorry your brother had such a hard time. Being very smart is supposed to make things easier for a person.

Sounds like my public high school’s computer science class, a class at the dawn of the PC age…

Was ‘that guy’ in that my class? Hmm… I was the official student assistant to the teacher of the class…and I was like maybe the fifth or sixth best programmer in the class. Some were brilliant programmers. As an example, two of the students had already designed and sold a debugger command-o rom to a large company, and then self-published a book on how to use it (where the real money on the deal was it turned out!), etc. Needless to say, our teacher was pretty much out classed by at least a handful of the students when it came to programming and modern CS tech.

“Mr. L” seemed uncomfortable with using the two crt pdp timeshare terminals and basically only knew much about punchcards and paper tapes and other things that most of the rest of us thought of as passé. If one didn’t get access to a crt terminal, one had to use the much slooower, long-in-the-tooth ttys for timeshare access to a remote site many miles away. We always had to use a tty to save our programs to punchtape so we could feed them back in later as there wasn’t magnetic tape facilities at our site. “Mark my word, boys, you’ll regret not having learned how to use punchcards!” the teacher would remark as we fought over who would get to use a CRT terminal.

We all nodded our heads in class…mostly because we were falling asleep… but, still, it turned out that he was right about the bloody punch-cards…if only because many universities and technical colleges, businesses, were still using punchcards well into the late-80s to mid-90s as they “maximized return on infrastructure investment” (past the point of it making much educational sense…I leave it to others to imagine the business sense of it).

Yeah, there was very likely a ‘handful’ of budding “that guys” in Mr. L’s classes…a fact that he appeared to be resigned to year in and year out.