If there’s one thing I learned in college, it’s that I’m not nearly as stupid as I thought I was. Ditzy? Probably. Stupid? Not even close.

Throughout high school, I struggled with math. I’m talking tutoring every day before and after school just to scrape by with an extremely low “B”. I thought that for the rest of my life, I would never be good at math and always hate it with a passion.

Flash forward to today where I have a “97” in math right now and consider it my favorite class. It’s not that my skills have become more refined or even that I’m trying harder. It’s the teacher that changed not me.

Full disclosure, my high school math teachers were awesome. And I’m forever grateful they took time out to help out what I thought was a hopeless case.

But my professor really gets how I learn. He started the first class on a history of counting. Then he started to build up to the math we know today. Before every lesson, he starts with why we need a new theory that we’re learning and how it’s created. He spends time on the lesson and doesn’t move on until everyone gets it.

On the other hand, I have a class that I thought I was going to be good at. I excelled at the class in high school and was looking forward to taking it in college. But the professor is confusing.

They don’t explain lessons and go off on tangents at what seems like random times. I don’t know what tests are about or even what’s testable, and from talking to other students, they don’t, either.

The fact of the matter is that there are so many factors in getting a good grade. I swear, if I had my math professor throughout the duration of my career, I’d swing A's easily. But, if I had the other, I would surely fail.

All those times I thought I was stupid, that I just wasn’t “getting” math, I didn’t realize that there really wasn’t anything to “get”. The way that I was being taught wasn’t clicking, and I wasn’t able to learn effectively because of it.

Sometimes educational failure has nothing to do with intelligence.