Pro Tip On Getting Educated In Pretty Much Anything You Have Even Minimal Aptitude For

This is the kind of thing I guess credentials need to be put forth for:

I had an "OK" high school career. Not the highest GPA, but a 30 ACT, 1310 (IIRC) SAT, and 99th percentile nationwide on the PSAT.

I had a terrible university career -- dropped out at midterm of the first semester with a practically non-existent GPA because really I was far more about drinking, fucking, etc. than I was about school.

Since then, however, I've taken a few college credit courses with a perfect GPA. I also successfully graduated Marine Corps boot camp, Infantry Training School (with perfect exam scores on both 81mm and 60mm mortar), Nuclear/Biological/Chemical Survey Monitor school, and shooting coach/marksmanship instructor school (honor graduate in the "teaching" category). And various work-related courses at different jobs. And yesterday, of course, a motorcycle basic rider course.

A crap ton of online courses, too, in everything from HTML (back in the early 1990s) to COVID-19 contact tracing (2020), but that's not really applicable here, because I'm talking about meatspace classroom/field stuff.

At no point since 1985 have I failed a meatspace course of instruction.

The pro tip:

Listen to your instructors.

Yes, it is really that simple.

If you have zero aptitude for math or science, you are not going to get your PhD in physics just by listening to your instructors.

And yes, occasionally you'll have an instructor who can't, for whatever reason, teach well (for example, in that terribly failed university career, I had an algebra teacher for whom English was at best a second language, whose accent was so thick, and who spoke so fast, that nobody in the class could understand more than one out of five words he said -- he clearly knew what he was talking about, but his students had to try to figure it all out from the textbook because they weren't getting anything from him).

But if it's anything you have even a smidgen of aptitude for, and if the instructors are even baseline competent/understandable, listening to the instructors will almost always get you 95% or more of the way to passing (and actually absorbing/retaining the material).

The other 5% is reviewing what you've been taught before testing to make damn sure you've retained it ... and asking the instructor questions as needed, either during class or between class and test.

The Marine Corps uses (or at least did when I was in) took a "mastery learning" approach. If at least 80% of the students didn't establish through testing that they'd retained 80% of the material, the problem was with the instructor, not with the students. Course design emphasized step-by-step progression with frequent review, and circling back if the students didn't seem to be getting Step C and how/why it was anchored in Steps A and B. It worked.