ACADEMICS
Usually, they will gush and rave about how amazing you are. That’s been the experience of many of my students. Their schools consider them genetic geniuses, chosen by god to be the leaders of their generation. It obviously isn’t true, by the way. My students succeed for the same reason anyone succeeds: hard work, perseverance, and intelligent techniques. Genetic ability has exactly zero to do with it. But it’s fine to let others think something that helps you. Here’s what we do: in the summer before the school year starts, we have our students cover all the material for their conceptually hardest classes (math, science, philosophy, economics). For example, if they plan to take calculus in 11th grade, then we cover all of calculus in the summer after 10th grade! By September of 11th grade, they know calculus. When their calculus teacher presents a new concept, they appear to understand it instantly, while everyone else struggles for 40 minutes. Obviously, they just struggled for 40 minutes during the summer. But the teacher doesn’t see that struggle. The key is that our students don’t tell their teacher that they already did the work over the summer. They don’t take a class for credit, or in their school’s summer program, or any place that keeps official
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