City Tutoring Discussion Forum

Here's something I've wondered about for a while. Why is the ideal student almost always the same kind of person?

Reads a lot. Quiet. Analytical. Good memory. Thinks everything through. Writes well. Gets interested in fairly abstract things. Probably wants to go to college. Gets good grades. These students have always existed, but maybe Im wrong and some of you older guys can correct me if Im mistaken, my impression is that back in the day, these types of students didnt wield nearly as much power as they do today.

We've all known the guy who isn't particularly impressive academically but is incredibly competent outside school.

Maybe he gets Cs but can fix a car. Maybe he isn't much of a reader but can walk into a room where he knows nobody and have five friends twenty minutes later.

Maybe he's good at football, which is also a skill, and then he's also or can be also funny, brave, physically capable, loyal to his friends.

Meanwhile, you can be extremely academically successful while being indecisive, socially terrified, physically useless, afraid of risk, permanently stressed and completely unable to function without somebody telling you exactly what the rubric requires. I know I can't be the only person thinking this because I spent all my life in school, graduated, and several of my friends were thinking the same type of stuff. Like if you had to choose for your safety and just overall sense of wellbeing, are you seriously going to choose some random straight A kid or the kid who is actually physically capable? In the stuff that truly matters to me, I dont see great academic types.

From what Ive seen, a lot of the guys who get suspended from school or in trouble are not always in the wrong. For example, students have been known to be suspended when schools infiltrate their PRIVATE chats and accuse them of racism or antisemitism. What right does any school have to look at private chats?

But anyway going back to the main thing, the kid who hates writing an essay explaining leadership but captains a football team brilliantly might actually know something about leadership that the person grading his essay doesn't. Just an example but, I think it's fair.

If you've spent years getting Cs while sitting beside somebody who seems to get As without trying, eventually it's very easy to conclude that you're simply a lower-quality version of that person and I don't think that's true.

The ideal student for me is a student that learns a bit "from everyone", then applies what they had learned "from everyone". (Even though they may not have specialized, that does not mean their well-roundedness is useless). Then, well-roundedness accompanied with intentional reflection about different types of reasoning applied across many different topics... and boom the student might become a Polymath. (what does reflecting on different types of reasoning have to do with Polymaths?) we all are kinda searching for truth for ourselves right... so that's what's similar between an academic and a non-academic. And I guess a Polymath's mind is flexible and can easily adapt to different types of reasoning depending on the situation. You can say a Polymath is someone who really applies the wisdom~ "Not everything is a nail. You dont use a hammer for everything" to reasoning.


--Oh, before learning a "bit from everyone", mathematical reasoning serves as an ideal. So a student should have a taste of that, so that the student has some sort of standard as to what counts as rigorous reasoning. This rigorous reasoning serves as a noise canceller. Only then perhaps, engaging in "learning a bit from everyone" is safer?

​Being "smart" is not a single, well-defined characteristic. To claim that someone is simply "smarter" than you is to rely on a weak, incomplete perception of capability. You must realize that most of your world is actively constructed by you—shaped by your intent and the way your being engages with the objects, structures, and phenomena you encounter. You must stop believing that they are people smarter than you and start observing this truth. The smart people is just people with a process shapped by the regularity or irreglarities on the road they choose. When you pick the road and you do the rigth movements you can be sure to call yourself an intelligent person. Stop caring about the proyections of others about their process. And start observing your own process and proyections.

Jose_Reales wrote: Fri Aug 14, 2026 2:20 pm ​Being "smart" is not a single, well-defined characteristic. To claim that someone is simply "smarter" than you is to rely on a weak, incomplete perception of capability. You must realize that most of your world is actively constructed by you—shaped by your intent and the way your being engages with the objects, structures, and phenomena you encounter. You must stop believing that they are people smarter than you and start observing this truth. The smart people is just people with a process shapped by the regularity or irreglarities on the road they choose. When you pick the road and you do the rigth movements you can be sure to call yourself an intelligent person. Stop caring about the proyections of others about their process. And start observing your own process and proyections.

Yeah, I think we're mostly on the same page. My point isn't really that the academically successful person isn't intelligent, or that the C student is secretly smarter. It's that school takes a particular set of abilities and makes them feel like a general hierarchy of human competence. If you're sitting next to someone who consistently gets As while you get Cs, it's very easy to internalize that as "this person is simply more capable than me," when really you might just be comparing yourselves on the road where they've developed the better process, to use your wording. Put the same two people in a completely different environment and the hierarchy could reverse. I think what bothers me is that school doesn't always make that distinction obvious.

​Sometimes, you must discover a reality that is not readily visible on the surface. Certain answers can only be found by walking the path yourself—not provided by external channels like schools, peers, or any medium that lacks the empathy, respect, and genuine depth required to give a valuable response to the position you are establishing. This I say is one of the things that probably could give you a better sense on your life as a being, that is capable of getting what ever he wants (in his own achievable goals) and find the fulfillment to transmmit his knowledge to the people that really want to hear it and be something better every day.

Being "smart" just means having the ability to learn relatively faster than others. So while you have to be a little smart to be successful, there are other traits that lead to success, like persistence. Quite often the academically gifted kids give up prematurely, because they're not used to encountering difficulties.

There are also the non-gifted academic achievers that grind away at school, because that's somehow tied to their feeling of self-worth or their parents are Asian (East Asian or South Asian). They're not particularly smart.

Anyways, you can always choose a scenario where one person has an advantage over another, so being "smart" doesn't make you a better person.

mwtichen wrote: Sat Aug 15, 2026 7:58 pm Being "smart" just means having the ability to learn relatively faster than others. So while you have to be a little smart to be successful, there are other traits that lead to success, like persistence. Quite often the academically gifted kids give up prematurely, because they're not used to encountering difficulties.

There are also the non-gifted academic achievers that grind away at school, because that's somehow tied to their feeling of self-worth or their parents are Asian (East Asian or South Asian). They're not particularly smart.

Anyways, you can always choose a scenario where one person has an advantage over another, so being "smart" doesn't make you a better person.

haha ive had some classmates like that that theyre not that smart but they spend their lives griding away and yeah they are all Asian or thats how it was in my school! I think we're in a worst place today because in the past, you actually didnt really need to grind away at school to become relatively successful or have a middle class existence. Today, if youre not in STEM, and even that is becoming highly questionable unless you really really really enjoy it, youre basically going to be poor.