Figuring things out on your own takes longer than having someone simply tell you what they already know. Learning alone is often reinventing the wheel. Sometimes that is good for you, sometimes it isn't.
I think the issue here is that average teachers aren't good at teaching above-average students. What you need is an above-average teacher. Someone on your level, but older and wiser.
Also, you can find teachers outside of schools. I consider a few of my friends to be mentors. Older, wiser people are very much worth paying a great deal of attention to.
Also, you can find teachers outside of schools. I consider a few of my friends to be mentors. Older, wiser people are very much worth paying a great deal of attention to.
This is very true. The trick is to find mentors who will have oomph in the college admission process, if a student doesn't have a high school good at communicating with colleges.
A quotation I saw in a tagline on the Art of Problem Solving website, which I'm having trouble tracing to a source: "Why do we need to reinvent the wheel? Not because we need more wheels, but because we need more inventors."
Learning on your own is not necessarily significantly different than studying, especially in the modern day of omni-available media (e.g. wikipedia).
Many years ago when I was in high school (before the web) I discovered that reading things like national geographic and scientific american on my own time was a perfectly adequate and often superior replacement to a full year long course in biology (which I didn't take and yet still managed to be at the very top of my class in AP biology). And I didn't start to outstrip my home grown knowledge of particle physics until I started taking 400 level Chemistry courses in college.
No. Asking someone a question is a lot less time consuming than reading an entire book to get one paragraph worth of summarized, distilled knowledge. Reading a book counts as "figuring it out yourself".
Actually, asking a question has much higher average latency. Reading a book has much higher total throughput and much better average latency, because it allows you to "ask" questions (look at the index for the appropriate section, for example) from within the correct context, which is key to understanding.
If you ask someone knowledgeable a specific question, they can frame the answer (and question) in the right context, customized for you and your question, and make you see the big picture. Also, you can follow up with more questions until you understand. It's easy to read something and completely miss the point (unless it is very well presented) because there is no interaction.
It is certainly valid to claim that one can learn things this way, but it hardly seems to be the purpose of schooling. If I could read a 45 minute lecture in 7 minutes, I would then have an additional 38 minutes of question time. It's even more inefficient to sit in a classroom full of people, listening to "customized" questions asked on subjects that you fully understand. The scenario that bugs me the most is when a fellow student asks a confused question that indicates to me he has understood very little of the lecture, the instructor then proceeds to answer it poorly, which then confuses other students.
