To be honest, I'm not all that smart and have to go over text and pick out the important stuff. Basic ideas stick better than specific facts and when I took welding, it was like electricity and all the new words concerning welding were to me very different and new so I had to pay attention and I did want to ace every quiz and test. Then, the shop work, to me was very difficult to get perfect weld beads. It's all hand eye coordination, setting the voltage on the machines and adjusting the size of the beads to make sure they came out just right when filling in a bevel. It was very important to make sure your weld passes were uniform and you left just enough under flush on the edges so when you put your cover passes on you had a nice uniform weld all across the seam. Learning to brace my body and feed the welding rod in at a steady rate and follow the previous bead just right, it was all about teaching my fine motor skills to work with my body. What really pissed me off is that at the Los Angeles testing facility the test seemed very easy, I finished before everyone else but the three questions I failed were trick questions designed so that if you over thought them and weren't paying attention to the wording you would get it wrong. The poor kid I had tutored must have got them right because he was a slow methodical reader and didn't overthink it or get tripped up by the wording. Sneaky people writing tests... grrr! One thing I did find out during the course is that I'm very good at paying attention to verbal instructions as long as they are clear and concise. We had one instructor who had us do a combined practical test on following instructions and taking notes that we were to use to make a steel tool box in the shop. I took notes, paying close attention to sizes, angles and welding instructions such as sequence. One instruction I didn't take seriously was we were instructed to place a bit of .032 wire between the lid and the body when welding the hinges. I got so excited I totally skipped the part about the gap and my lid fit too tight so it didn't smoothly close. I spent the next hour with a file carefully filing down the edges until the lid dropped perfectly in place with no gaps. I figured since I was way ahead of everyone else with no other issues I could spare the time it took to make my toolbox perfect. Haha. I got top score as it was the only one with no defect at all. Welds were perfect, tray fit perfectly, no warping, lid closed smoothly with no gap at all, handle perfectly placed and all from verbal instructions. I had that toolbox for years until while moving I left it in my grandpa's garage for a time and someone in our family decided it was too nice to just leave in Grandpa's garage. Which ever one of my relatives snagged it, I wish them well. Haha. Another interesting thing that happened in that course was during one month we had an instructor from Guyana and a student also from Guyana. They were chummy and the instructor was always giving him top scores on his weld plates. So, I went over to see how his welds looked and discovered mine were much better and the instructor had been picking mine apart on every little ripple to mark me down. Then on the class tests I noticed he had scored some of my answers wrong, I'd check in the book to be sure and realized he was scoring correct answers wrong for me. Obviously he wanted HIS student from his country to get the top grade and I was pissed off so I reported him to the director of the school. The next day we had a new instructor so I walked around in the staff hallway and found the school guidance counselor was now the instructor from Guyana. I walked by, saw his name on the door and poked my head in to find the Guyana instructor sitting alone at his new desk with a name placard and not a bit of paperwork on the desk. Just sitting there waiting for some poor soul to come in for guidance. I smiled real big and said, "Hi, Mr. ______, How's it going?" It took him a second to recover and say, "Oh, it's going good!". and I ducked back out with a huge smirk on my face. I was super cheerful the rest of that week and had a private laugh to myself.