When have you outsmarted the “smart” kid?

I was very much a fuck up in school and my family background was unstable but I was always in the gifted and talented programs when they were applicable.

The extraordinarily intelligent kid in our class was doing math that was about five or six years ahead of us when we were in 8th grade. I think it was trig or advanced calc. I was joking with people that I was dumb but I could do a tough problem in his math book.

He gave me a hard one, kind of laughing while doing it. I looked at it for like thirty seconds and came up with an answer that I thought made sense, even though I wasn't really familiar with trig but I had an idea of how it worked. His jaw dropped and he was like "you did that in your head?" The pretty girl at the table was like "whoa." I got a little more respect after that. I mean, I still got like C's and D's because I didn't give a fuck.

It was a half-guess, half-understood thing that I ball-parked and ended up getting right. The smart kid and I ended up being friends for a bit.

/r/AskReddit Thread