I wish I wasn’t good at school

I wish I wasn’t good at school.

Growing up, I was always the top student in class. It came quite easily. Valedictorian in primary, secondary, and high school entrance exams, second prize in national chemistry olympiad, IELTS 8.0, SAT 1480/1600, good college acceptance, study abroad. All of them happened on the first try, most through self-studied. I have a long-standing history of academic success to brag about and reassure myself that I’m “smart”.

There’s a way to hack standardized tests. Any test would only have THAT many types of questions. You break that down, see how other people solve it, and duplicate it until the style of question could hint at the answer to you. It’s pure pattern recognition. A game with finite possibilities.

But sometimes I wish I wasn’t good at school.

Being the golden goose laying golden prized eggs for schools, I was spoon-fed validations. Then gradually the next question asked wasn’t what I wanted to do, but what I needed to do to keep the next validation meal ready. It makes playing infinite games extremely scary because it means I will suck at first, and won’t be regarded “smart” right off the bat. Writing is one such game, where there isn’t a solid answer on what being a good writer means, no one to measure and grade that process, no way to break it down, to drill, to succeed linearly.

Another big difference between playing finite versus infinite games is that the former requires replication, while the latter requires more first-principle thinking. This difference showed in how different my friend Leo and I do math. If you give us a math test, I’d probably solve it faster than him. But only a few of that questions would I have actually said I “figured it on my own” because I learned mostly from modeled answers. Leo, with a homeschool background, loves working with proof and coming up with creative solutions without referring to textbooks.

It reflects in his entire education and in other homeschooled friends I saw. Because there was never a structure, they constantly chose what was next to read, and what was next to study. It’s very self-directed and curiosity-driven, which parallels the way some geniuses were taught. I never got to ask that question for the entire 12 years in the public school system. I didn’t know it was possible to study something obscure just for curiosity. It wasn’t until my gap year that those choices presented themselves.

And because of this difference, I often regard my homeschooled friends as having higher agency, ie the ability to define your own game to play it. While I got stuck in the game of next good university, next good job, they seem to “play” with the possibilities of jobs they would be doing, more freely exploring topics that “might not go anywhere”, such as queer tango, or abstract art, or abstract math.

But would I have gone this far had I not been good at school? All the opportunities presented to me were there because I went to a prestigious high school where I needed to take a filter entrance test. The asymmetry in public resources poured into my school versus the rest of the city is jarring - our chemistry lab was approximately $400k, while other schools probably don’t have an intact beaker.

And would some of my friends have felt that free had they not had financially viable parents? A safe cushion to fall back to so that it’s literally safe to explore any other option?

Would I have actually wished to be bad at school?

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This is the second blog in 30-day publishing challenge I’m doing with MỞ - Mơ và Hỏi | Facebook’s course, Writing On The Net 2 (#wotn2). I’ll publish everything on this Notion page and Substack, and send a summary of 7 posts on Sunday.

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