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The Great Losers: 5 Geniuses Who Did Not Do Well in School

We send our children to school with the admonition to study well and get upset if they do the opposite. But the history of mankind has proven: bad grades and https://argoprep.com/store/product/8th-grade-common-core-math-workbook-daily-practice/ do not prevent the achievement of unprecedented heights. Indeed, even some outstanding people, the pride of mankind, had learning difficulties when they were children. And this in no way prevented them from becoming truly great and writing their names in the history of science forever. Let’s look back at these geniuses of the underachievers.

Albert Einstein.
Teachers in Munich high school, who taught another future genius, were not crazy about him. Einstein showed success in mathematics and Latin, but in other subjects was among the laggards, not worried about this. As he recalled the Nobel laureate in this school, the material is not studied, and rote, which hurt the very spirit of learning and creative thinking. Einstein not only received low grades, but also argued with the teachers. He did not even get a high school diploma and failed the exams at the Technical High School in Zurich: Einstein passed the math exams brilliantly, but botany and French failed him. He had to spend another year in school to get his diploma, after which he tried again to enter a technical school and was finally accepted. After that came the theory of relativity, the Nobel Prize in physics, world fame, and immortality in science.

Isaac Newton
One of the “fathers” of classical physics, the mathematician and astronomer Isaac Newton had a hard time and 7th grade science during his school years. The poor boy at first did not please his teachers and studied very mediocrely, though he was gifted. That all changed after a conflict with a classmate, when little Isaac was badly beaten. Newton did not want to put up with such humiliation and decided to prove that he too is strong – not physically, but intellectually. He began to seriously push his studies, studied hard at math and engineering, and quickly became one of the best students in his class and, a few years later, a brilliant scientist, without whom it is impossible to imagine physics as a holistic science.

Carl Linnaeus
The famous Swedish naturalist was fascinated by botany from childhood. When he was still a baby, his father, a great lover of flowers and gardening, gave the boy his own bed in his own grounds. Little Carl was so fascinated by the plants he grew that he neglected his homework and did not strive to master the school curriculum. Teachers noted that the boy was certainly capable, but he did not want to learn and would not, and therefore his future was sad. Linnaeus was lucky: he met a man who began to teach him independently, which allowed Karl to go to university. The talented scientist became famous not only as the creator of a unified system of classification of flora and fauna. Linnaeus had transformed the Celsius scale, the scale of his teacher: 100 degrees was the freezing point and 0 was the boiling point. Now it’s the other way around, and we owe that to the brilliant Swede.

Thomas Alva Edison.
“Brainless dumbass” – such an emotional characteristic from his teachers was repeatedly dignified by the future inventor. Teachers considered Edison so incapable of learning that they even asked his mother to take the boy out of school. And it even did him good: little Thomas spent a lot of time in the library, and the first scientific book he read at age 9. Already at that age he became interested in chemistry and other natural sciences. Edison went to work early in order to have money to conduct the scientific experiments he was so interested in. Without graduating from any educational institution, Edison managed to go down in history as an outstanding inventor with more than 1,000 patents in optics, electric lighting, telephony and other fields.

Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky
The future self-taught scientist, the founder of theoretical cosmonautics, studied very poorly in school. And this was his tragedy, not his fault: little Kostya Tsiolkovsky had serious hearing problems. The teachers, whom the boy simply could not hear properly, did not indulge him and were excessively strict with him. In the second grade Tsiolkovsky was left for a second year, and after the third year he was expelled. After that he studied only independently: books, unlike his teachers, did not pick on him and generously shared their knowledge. The future scientist’s successes were impressive: he independently made an astrolabe, a home-made lathe, conducted experiments with balloons. Tsiolkovsky spent days and nights in the library, independently mastered both school and university curriculum and even began to give private lessons in physics and mathematics, simultaneously doing science. His contribution to astronautics cannot be overestimated: Yuri Gagarin’s flight is unthinkable without Tsiolkovsky’s developments.