By high school, I had developed a well-organized and efficient method of studying and learning which lead to excellent grades. Though I felt it was important to maintain my standards, I was much more interested in my artistic, sports, and other youth activities, which took place after school and on weekends and left little time for homework. Nonetheless, I was able to do enough on the bus, in class, and at lunchtime to score 90% or higher in every class.
This changed in higher level math courses. As the complexity of the material increased and their application to problems required new cognitive skills, I was no longer able to rely on understanding concepts well in class and my ability to quickly figure things out in exams. One day in an exam I realized I did not know how to do a problem and I did not have time to figure it out. I panicked and froze, and could not even start to reason my way through it. For the first time ever did not complete an exam in the allotted time and got a score well below my expectations. The next semesters were marked by very erratic grades. I remember one course in which I got 100%, and the second 50%, though the second included material covered on the first. The difference was whether or not I encountered a problem I could not immediately see how to solve and lost confidence.
None of my teachers noticed or commented, but I judged myself harshly. I saw students who I beat in every other subject getting 95% consistently in Calculus and seeming to enjoy it, whereas for me it was a source of stress and self-doubt. I thought that I lacked some mathematical talent, and decided to rule out engineering, astrophysics, and any other fields that involved a lot of math.
What I did not figure out on my own until much later is that math (and programming) skills require a different preparation than that which I had learned in other subjects and was trying to use. To develop the ability to rapidly apply math skills to problems, particularly on exams, you actually have to do the practice problems. It sounds obvious, but in every other subject I had gotten by just listening in class and then looking over the example problems and solutions. I had been praised so many times for being clever and talented that it seemed to me that the fact I was not succeeding with minimal effort was evidence that I was unfit and stupid. It would have been helpful to know that the uncomfortable feeling of struggling with a problem happens even to very successful experts.
What I try to take from this experience to my own teaching is:
1.) try to praise/reward effort and progress, not effortless success
2.) some types of skills require a lot of practice (there are no shortcuts)
3.) struggle is not failure, but is what happens immediately before your skill level increases