Can I make you smarter?

I've had people say to me things like, "I wish I was as smart as you" or "Can you just give me some of your smarts?" (No! Never! I want it all for myself! Oh wait, that's not even possible...)  Well I don't know of a way to transfer smartness, but, if you're willing to work with me, maybe I could find a way to make you "smarter".  Is what I sometimes wanted to say (although I never actually did).


For one, I believe it helps to have the right attitude.  People say things like, "Oh, I'm bad at math," like it's a set fact that will never change.  I don't believe that has to be true.  With practice, you can improve your skills in almost anything, and I see no reason why something like math would be an exception.  What?  You've tried but it doesn't work?  I have one answer which I can always turn to: "Well, maybe you didn't try hard enough."

Everything else relies on questions which I have never had answered.  What is it that I understand better than other people?  What is it that I get faster?  That I recognize more easily?  What is it that I remember?

The problem was that in general I did everything by myself, so I had no way to find those answers.  Homework, other school stuff, even most video games.  But sometimes I'd overhear people quoting off theorems or discussing how to apply Fourier sequences and I'd always think, "Wow, they seem to understand that stuff pretty well.  Better than me, at least."  And then I'd get a higher score on the test and I'd have to wonder how such a thing could happen.

If I had to take a wild guess, I'd say that I could often do better by remembering processes rather than facts.  But I'm not sure about that.  Maybe it's that I have a fairly complete understanding of the particular topic of study as a whole, and the smaller details become pretty intuitive statements that I could prove or back up myself.  I'm pretty sure that's when I am truly at my best.  That was one thing I liked about math.  It was possible to understand everything from the absolute basics, like the definition of addition, multiplication, functions, limits, integrals...  But even then, I seemed to be good at memorizing plain information.  Which things was I significantly better at than most people?  None of them?  All of them?  Without really spending time learning how other people learned, I'd most likely never find those answers.  And it didn't seem like that was going to happen.

I still believe that other people could improve their learning abilities by looking at things in different ways or focusing on different aspects of problems.  But, as always, I have to counter myself.  Different ways of learning might be beneficial in other areas or in other ways, despite not working as well in the areas I was good at.  Or, maybe people just learn differently and different strategies won't work better for them at all.  Or, maybe it's that memory is a key point, and to really learn better, you'd have to improve your memory, and maybe that's hard to do.  Or, maybe...  Ahh... I don't know.  Who knows?