That happened to me in high school. I was in "advanced" freshman bio. Teacher gave me a B. When my parents inquired during a parent-teacher conference, she said I looked like I wasn't paying attention.
Fast forward ten years and the therapist I was seeing for seemingly unrelated reasons diagnoses me with ADHD...
There’s certainly fields of math where I’ve seen a twist on the advice. Differential geometry, for example, is a big field with a lot of notation. Different textbooks end up using very different notations and covering non-overlapping sections of the field. Therefore, the advice I got was to not just do the problems, but translate the definitions and theorems into a unified notation that you feel is natural.
Plus, at various times, I’ve had to revisit things I learned years ago and ended up understanding it much better because I could connect it to a swath of things I hadn’t learned the first time I saw the material.
Math and its applications are a contact sport. You don’t truly appreciate it until you try to use it yourself.
I don’t know much about continuum mechanics (unless you count stat mech but I wouldn’t), however Goldstein has a few chapters on the topic that might serve as an introduction
You could say that about a lot of topics. Heck you could say that chemistry is just an emergent phenomenon of physics.
The benefit of taking such a class or reading such a textbook is that these things have been studied extensively, we have good models for them, and it is useful to know because people are still doing fundamental research on it to this day or working on phenomena that are closely related.
This stuff was never written for the public at large. It was written for the (upper-)middle class. Particularly those who already know something about the subject or enough about the academic/cultural sphere that they can wade through it. A ten page article in N+1 about the decline of orchestras is not targeted at people who don't have some exposure to classical music.
Fast forward ten years and the therapist I was seeing for seemingly unrelated reasons diagnoses me with ADHD...