Don&#x27;t lose hope, but be realistic. The kid needs to disabused of the notion of innate skill.<p>My brother&#x27;s a smart kid too. He ended up getting the lowest grades in living memory at our school, totally bombed high school.<p>Now he&#x27;s finishing a CS degree at Columbia.<p>Going over it, he told me he never saw me study anything. I went off to Oxford before him, and he figured he&#x27;d do what I did. (What he didn&#x27;t see was my late night homework sessions.) Only after many years did he get his act together.<p>Learning is really only about effort. You get a lot of people pretending it&#x27;s easy so they can get that &quot;smart&quot; label, even through college. Don&#x27;t let them fool you. Remember there&#x27;s nothing at all, all the way through college, that isn&#x27;t public knowledge that you can acquire just by reading and trying for yourself.