I was not bad at school because I was dull. I struggled because I did not understand what I was being taught. Growing up, I had serious difficulty with subjects like Mathematics, Economics, Chemistry, Physics and anything that leaned heavily on numbers, formulas or abstract scientific ideas. Not because I refused to learn, but because no one ever stopped to ask how I learned or why I was struggling. Understanding was never the goal. Passing was. In school, failing to understand was treated as disobedience. I remember being flogged for failing mathematics. I remember being punished for not passing economics and government. Not once did it occur to anyone that a child could be intelligent and still not grasp what was being taught the way it was being taught. Meanwhile, I excelled in subjec...