I also said once, unsuccessfully, "Would you refuse to let Steven Hawking write a book because he can't type it with his hands?" Evil teacher said "Your child is no Steven Hawking."
I would have said, "Do you know Stephen Hawking?"
--
"Hawking, who went to a public school in St Albans, did not like conventional lessons, his handwriting was terrible and he was not competitive, says his mother. He was often near the bottom of the class.
But by the age of 10, he knew he wanted to be a scientist. He liked designing complicated Meccano models, and at the age of 16 he and his school friends designed and built a working computer out of parts of old machines. He spoke quickly, a characteristic his friends labeled Hawkingese. His final school report said 'He will go far.'"..
and,
"He was a social young man who did little schoolwork because he was able to grasp the essentials of a mathematics or physics problem quickly. At home he reports, "I would take things apart to see how they worked, but they didn't often go back together."And,
"His physics tutor, Robert Berman, later said in The New York Times Magazine:
It was only necessary for him to know that something could be done, and he could do it without looking to see how other people did it. [...] He didn't have very many books, and he didn't take notes. Of course, his mind was completely different from all of his contemporaries.[9]
Hawking was passing, but his unimpressive study habits resulted in a final examination score on the borderline between first and second class honours, making an "oral examination" necessary. Berman said of the oral examination:
And of course the examiners then were intelligent enough to realize they were talking to someone far more clever than most of themselves.[9]"
