Getting books from the big library requires parental cooperation, which is some degree of effort to obtain. Effort I had no reason to go through, for books that I did not know existed: I thought university books could only be found at university libraries.

I'm glad your teacher supported you towards actual learning. My teachers supported me, too, as well as they knew how: I got to work from a Year 7 textbook for a few weeks in Year 5, and I got handed a curriculum-restricted calculus textbook when I kept asking why we had to memorise the constant-acceleration equations of motion. Whenever I asked for more, I consistently got told to wait until the next stage of education.

We had one lesson where we were given an open-ended problem from outside the curriculum – about balls bouncing around snooker tables – and asked to solve it. This was something I'd worked on before, and while I didn't quite have enough time to write down everything I could, I did get far enough that I got in trouble for being incomprehensible. (They could follow the beginning bit, but then the reading order instructions got too hard to parse. Don't know why: I made sure none of the arrow-lines were parallel for more than half the page, so you could follow them fairly easily with your eyes.)

Now let's make our anecdotes fight to the death.