He has a way of deflating any over-inflation of my ego with one or two pointed questions and/or musing on high level math stuff that's light years beyond me.

That'd certainly deflate me nicely. t Barbie Math is hard! t /Barbie

I did my homework because my mother was a teacher in the school system and the fear that my teachers would snitch on me was enough of a motivation. By the time I got to college and tried to goof-off, I found the guilt to be ingrained.

A friend in law school dubbed me the "hardest working lazy person" he knew.

I learn most things easily, but when I run across something that takes a little effort, I'm nearly offended by it.

This is me, and I think I am just learning how to study now because of it. I never developed study skills in grade school because I never have to. I never read the textbooks because I learned that I was only going to be tested on the lectures. This was not an advantage to me at all when I started college.

I did my homework because my mother was a teacher in the school system and the fear that my teachers would snitch on me was enough of a motivation.

My mother worked in the school system I went to and my teachers snitched on me on a regular basis. It didn't seem to matter to me. I am fearful of the stubborn children I could have one of these days for payback.

I never, ever did my homework. I got suspended from primary school a few times because of it. By secondary school I'd figured out ways to get around doing most of it. I'm just naturally lazy. Plus homework was always just the same thing you'd been doing in school all day, and it was far more interesting to go outside and play with friends, or read a book, or watch tv or... anything that wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing.

Edited to add

This is me, and I think I am just learning how to study now because of it. I never developed study skills in grade school because I never have to. I never read the textbooks because I learned that I was only going to be tested on the lectures. This was not an advantage to me at all when I started college.

Yes, this.

I never learned good study habits. I learned how to learn things quickly; I learned how to write exceptionally well; I learned how to use those two abilities to coast at every opportunity. And it's been a bitch of a thing.

Brenda is me. I was a smart kid who moved to a small South Georgia town, and I never had to put forth the least effort to make A's. College was a terrible shock to me, since I didn't have the foggiest idea how to study. In high school, all I had to do was read the book. I can pretty much remember anything I've read and I read fast. I found these talents of no help at all in organic chemistry.

I have several friends who have had terrible times with their teenage daughters, both bright girls who simply won't do the work, no matter how much they're punished or rewarded. In one case, I think it's because the cool kids don't study. In the other, schoolwork apparently got in the way of her memorizing The Lord of the Rings.

The only way I can learn something now is if I can find a way to hook the information into my existing knowledge matrix in a meaningful way. I've also got to be able to come up with a good reason to keep the information. Knowing the declension of a French verb is all well and good but disappears if I never need that verb. I have a very Trivia Pursuit sort of brain, lots of factoids with interconnected reference tags, but not much for integrating theories or things like that. Hubby's gotten to the point where if he needs some obscure information he'll say "Access" to me, which somehow triggers the reference librarian in my cerebral cortex.

My last year of high school was a wake up year. The whole group of kids who had coasted through math mostly all flunked the first Calculus test (I think the teacher did that on purpose for exactly that reason). Our English class jumped right into James Joyce and had papers that could only be researched at a University library (where I discovered that most of the books on the poet I was doing a paper on were not in English), the Chemistry teacher (who had a PhD) held extra classes at his house becuase there was too much to cover in class, the Biology class required insane amounts of homework, and I was just glad I had a couple of normal classes. Plus I got my ass kicked in academic contests a few times. Then I went to college where almost everybody was top of their class. Any illusions of super-smartness were pretty well squished.

My google homepage word of the day. Ha!

Shiny!