I don’t know quite why people persist in claiming that Einstein failed high school math. Perhaps it’s to put down teachers –who clearly can’t teach or recognize genius — or perhaps to stake a claim to a higher understanding that’s masked by ADHD — a disease Einstein is supposed to have had. But, sorry to say, it ain’t true. Here’s Einstein’s diploma, 1896. His math and physics scores are perfect. Only his English seems to have been lacking. He would have been 17 at the time.
Albert Einstein’s high school diploma, 1896.
Robert Buxbaum, December 16, 2014. Here’s Einstein relaxing in Princeton. Here’s something on black holes, and on High School calculus for non-continuous functions.
I remembered it as being that he failed in grade school, not high school, though now that I think about it, I’ve heard the rumor both ways. In any case, my interpretation of the myth-rumor-whatever-it-is is that it reinforces the idea that not being a good student isn’t the same thing as being stupid or incapable of success – even in the academic world. It also means to say that being far ahead of everyone else often looks the same as being far behind. My main criticism of these messages is that while they are true, and may be inspiring, they don’t really do much for us. If someone is failing, the important thing is to determine why, whether it should be addressed at the moment, and if so, how? These are much more relevant issues that the simplistic reassurance that someone else who was highly successful once endured a topically similar situation to one that we are struggling with at the moment…
As an ex-professor, there were only two reasons, as best I could tell, that we gave grades. One of them was to provide feedback to help the student see what he or she was good at. If a student consistently got A’s in one subject and C’s in another, that should be a clue that the student might pursue the one subject over the other. It’s OK for a student to fail math; for all I know Beethoven would have failed math. It’s not so OK when a student ignores real talent and goes off after a chimera.