"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." ~Aristotle One of my pet peeves when it comes to teaching is the student who claims that this other student is simply "smarter" than they are. Now, I am not going to argue with anybody about people having different levels of intelligence, but I do have some words to say about this. In my experience, I have never had a student who performed well and made good grades on everything that truly didn't work. Some might say that they never worked or never studied, but that wasn't really the case. These "smart" kids were really just reaping the benefits of working hard for years . They had most likely been working hard at school since they entered school. As I observed these " smart " students, each time they would approach a new idea or a new topic, they would make sure that they really understood it completely before moving on, and they had been doing this fo...