Honestly, I don't read books, I'm still a student tho and maybe later I'll change, but I really hate reading book. The only moment I read a book is when I enjoy it, and it happened only once in my life. I also was good in maths, before I reached High School 🤣
I completely understand you.
Honestly, I do hate reading books, it just doesn't interest me and I don't have the motivation and patience, but recently, I've been sometimes reading short online stories, comics, or I've even been writing my own, even tho I will never read them XD

TL;DR

:P

Elementary school did their darnedest to make me HATE reading books. They made reading a task, a chore, an obligation. They made me read some boring old Classic Of Great Literature and then write a report about it. (In retrospect, it was the reports I hated more than anything else.)

Yeaaaaah :(
To be fair, I picked the driest example of a classic I knew to make fun of here in the comic, but some of them became classics for a reason and I'm glad I was assigned to read them, or I otherwise wouldn't have bothered with them. It's good to have at least one touchstone to understand how the themes made their way into public consciousness.

Wonderful introspection there! I love learning more than I love doing.

Something I recently realized is I enjoy the mods shift between “doing art” and “reflecting” on what I have done, figuring out what I don’t know and need to improve upon.
I get the sense of completing something, even if it’s not what I know would be better, it’s the best I’ve done to date.

Software development doesn’t have this modality: it feels like a second-by-second flip-flop of questioning the possible choices, it feels like the pressure is always on hard to achieve, so there’s no time to try one and see if it works, you have to just start and go. But not only can I not find and then implement the right solution, I have to build it upon the past code, the decisions of others, sub-par and not ideal, written by others, and worse, written by me. What I have done to date is not good enough. Not only do I have to fight my own self doubt and experience, but I have to fight against my past stuff holding me back.

I think I might change careers.

Coding is something I would love to get into more! The first language I ever learned was C++ and I made little command line thingies.
I'd like to make games and useful apps but there's this dumb little discomfort I have with coding using anything I didn't make myself. I'd rather make my own building blocks because I feel like I would know them much more thoroughly. It might be that I played all the Zachtronics games which made me feel like I could tackle assembly and even make my own OS or something! (I am a loooong way off.)

So I'm a supremely hard-to-please frog on this topic. I want complete control AND perfect intuitive ease. As far as game studios, Godot is closest to what I'm looking for (open source ftw) but even the best-made tools aren't worth much without patience, which I seem to lack!

Aaaaand this, right here, the "smart kid" and "nerd" stigma, fucked me over in school more than anything. I, too, had a lot of easy distractions like the Internet, awesome TV shows and online gaming that I would've much rather gravitated towards than struggling to get through the arrogant writing style in The Scarlet Letter or The Great Gatsby, and relied on SparkNotes™ (which unlike Cliff's Notes, were free online) to get through 11th and 12th grade English literature, with a few exceptions (1984, Animal Farm and Of Mice And Men were gripping reads, whereas Pride and Prejudice just might be among the finest cures for insomnia an author has ever produced). I didn't really have much trouble focusing if something caught my interest, though. My 10th grade English teacher had told us the key to reading for educational purposes is to read every paragraph 3 times. The first time you're not likely to absorb it, the second you'll probably absorb 75% of and by the third it's most likely going to stick. I didn't bother, since I had SparkNotes to back me up if I wasn't absorbing the themes and undertones of a story on my first read.

I had a psychometrist interview and test me in my senior year and she said she could tell my classes were chosen to be as normal as possible probably to avoid being outcast as a nerd, but actually it was because I didn't want the added hassle, pressure to succeed and homework those AP and Honors classes resulted in. I had peers in Honors Geometry say the teacher would turn on the overhead projector which listed the entire week's work, do maybe 2-3 sample problems and expect everyone in class to immediately click and get to the grind, turning in hours and hours of work by the end of the week. As it was, I struggled even in regular Geometry and Algebra 2 and had to ask my teachers to help me out by staying after school or coming in early to work on it. I also had my dad help a lot, and to both their credit, that helped immensely. I barely squeaked by with a C in Algebra 2 and now that the entire job market is dominated by tech, someone without a solid, advanced grasp in mathematics is effecively doomed to work in the service industry. They tried to warn us, in the 21st century, ignorance kills, but I was just fed up with being frustrated and didn't push myself to excel in the areas I was weakest. I kicked ass in English, history, psychology and philosophy, but math was always my weakest subject.

I think socially it was less of a problem that I was a nerd and probably more that I'd already matured intellectually beyond my peers, so I couldn't talk or relate to them on the same level. Here I was at 16 quoting fucking Voltaire, Descartes, Nietzsche and Camus as answers when asked scientific questions in Biology, along with making obscure pop culture references and songs no one else listened to like TMBG and Weird Al Yankovic, which while popular with the other geeks fell on deaf ears or even offended some of the other kids who had extremely different tastes. "That's not real music!" "Al ruined Smells Like Teen Spirit! I refuse to play that with you! Look how he dissed Coolio!"

I think a good teacher that can relate the subject matter to their students is absolutely key, especially with drier topics like World History or Literature because if the students disengage and are falling asleep in class, they're not learning a thing. My world history teacher tried very hard to make history more relatable and sneaked in fun pop culture references and even would smack a ruler down on a student's desk if they nodded off. Fun times.

That's what's so tragic -- every one of these fields is objectively valuable, and the difference between a student seeing it as it is or not depends on having a teacher that is passionate about the topic and the students' engagement. I was ambivalent toward history, but my history teacher was awesome at making the lessons come alive.

I wish teachers like that were more common, and I try to be that teacher. I initially wanted to go into teaching grades 6-12 but the more I learned the more discouraged I got, since there's a lot of obstacles in the system (at least public school, and at least where I live) and a lot of pressure and non-teaching duties placed on teachers to the point that it didn't seem worth the pay. But that's a rant for another time...

Stuff like this (as well as the low pay) is why I decided to not pursue teaching. People can excel in their own ways: math, reading, history, athletics, music, art. However, the system expects their smart kids to be good at everything and it sets them up to be alienated or depreciated when they can't hit those goals. And you pretty much have to work with that system once you're in it. I'm glad you found your stride later in life.

I like these little reflections. I loved math and reading, myself. The problem with books though is finding one you'll resonate with. It is really hard to get the feel of a book without taking that initial jump into reading it. Especially as one who actually has ADHD. So often I just don't read books at all. Discovery is a difficult thing for books. Unlike movies, TV shows, and games, where you can get an impression by looking at trailers or watching someone play.

One thing that's definitely helped me, personally, is getting a Kindle. Now I can have a whole bookshelf at my fingertips and browse and sample. It's still not as easy as glimpsing a TV show or movie, but it reduces the barrier to discovery and is much more convenient than having to store full physical books.

Yesss, Kindle is great. I think that's my preferred way to read.

And I ended up kind of being the opposite, myself. I was terrible with math. I had (and still don't have) a good head for numbers, remembering formulas and any of that. The reason I personally disliked math is because it felt a bit like a foreign language.

And yet, I excelled in Language Arts. I was the kid that got in trouble for reading ahead, because the class was going too slowly. I was often the one called on to read in class because unlike the majority of the other kids in it, I put feeling into the words, rather then flat, mono-tone reciting.

But I also kind of slacked, and coasted. Because I didn't really have much drive. It drove my uncle insane. He knew I could do better (and I could have, if I had gotten myself to care) since I could do things like....5 page reports in like one or two drafts and get a B slapped on it. I just...couldn't really get myself to care, other then actually reading the stories, and my 'creative' electives, like Shop and Art and like earth/biological science. Everything else was just so...boring to me.

And I guess, being told that I was 'lazy' and I should 'know better' and all this other negative reinforcement stuff just made me care...less, not more. Though now I happily ask a billion questions about anything and learn as much as I can about most things. And I still read a LOT, whenever I have some free time. I actually have some stories earmarked for when I'm in the restroom, or brushing my teeth.

But yeah, I can kinda relate, but in like...the other side of things. I was in the slow math classes, and I was recommended for the AP language arts class. I just...didn't take it, because I wanted to read what I wanted and write about what I wanted. The heavily compartmentalized in-the-box teaching was suffocating.

But this was kinda cool to read about, y'know?

I didn't find that I liked reading or a book series I like until after college. I spent my time until then trying to find books with dragons in them that weren't human knight killing dragons. The closest I got was a series that was something like kids are places in the abdomen of a dragon in a ceremony then they can read the dragon's thoughts? I haven't been able to find it again.

Such a cute, young Hexa!

What a coincidence, I was reading a bunch Lewis Carroll recently and was thinking that you might enjoy him. Like yourself, he also enjoyed math and puzzle games. He incorporated both into a collection of stories known as A Tangled Tale, which is essentially a collection of math problems in story form. Have you ever read it? I'd be curious to see what you think of it: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/290.....-h/29042-h.htm

I'll check it out! Lewis Carroll is great with both whimsy and logic.

Fantastic as always, Hex. I love your comics a lot and I relate so much about the issues of being an over thinker myself. Keep up the good work.

Thaaaaaanks friend -u-

Man, I love these comics. I was probably the only kid in my classes whose favorite subject was Math. Couldn’t really comprehend how my other classmates despised math with a vengeance. And especially with the AP classes of high school, even if some of the books were intriguing, it’s as if time to sit down and actually read a book without fear of missing out on important school lessons or due dates is whittled down to nothing these days.

That last line strikes me right in the heart, too. I hope that you accomplish such a desirable feat. Thank you for this. :)

Thanks a bunch for the thoughts and all the favs! :D

TBH school does it's best to make you hate any subject or make it boring. I'm a reader and even I hated when the school made me read something I didn't want to read. It's the difference between doing something of your own volition versus someone forcing you to do it. Also I wasn't the kind to just do the whole read 5 pages a night person and would finish the book when everyone else was still on the first chapter because the teacher wanted to set a 'pace' that was way too slow to keep yourself in the story.
I used to be good at math, able to do it in my head, but the way school works discourages you from being able to do that and thanks to school I just can't do any of that anymore. In essence school is more about dumbing you down.