This has a few roots:

* It's said he didn't speak till he was (I forget) ~8. I'd believe it - speech develops at different times, and I doubt it has any reflection on adult intelligence.

* He joked that his math wasn't very good. That makes him modest, not a bad student.

* He didn't know how to do the math for non-Euclidian, to develop general relativity (though he did have a vague idea that he needed a curved space, and what it meant, and he vaguely remembered doing it at uni - which shows he wasn't too ignorant), and had a friend help him get up to speed.

* He was probably not the sharpest mathematician in the room, once he was famous enough that every room he walked into would quickly become crowded with the sharpest mathematicians in the world.

* He may not have really liked school, but he obviously liked learning.

Most importantly, everyone likes to think that you can succeed without trying.

Here is Einstein's certificate for the year 1879 (he was 10):

http://www.scienceblogs.de/frischer-wind/einsteins-zeugnis.j...

Long story short, he obtained the best score (6) in the three mathematical topics (algebra, geometry and descriptive geometry) and in physics.

I guess one of the reasons the myth has endured so long may be that it makes for such a great story. A sort of intellectual rags-to-riches, so to speak.

Edit: corrected the physics score.

I don't know whether he was a "good" or "bad" student. He was certainly a disinterested one, as there wasn't great overlap between what he thought about and what they were trying to teach. He must have been an effective one, however, as he picked up the information needed to solve problems in many fields, expand physics, and have a "typically European scientist" level of culture.

For those in science, most dream of having a career that can compare to his 1905.

The story that I have always heard is not that he got bad grades, but that he was a "poor student" in a more general sense, that he was extremely disinterested. I remember hearing claims that his teachers complained to his parents: "he just sits at the back and smiles."

I'm reminded of what was probably my favorite single Calvin and Hobbes strip: "You know how Einstein got bad grades as a kid? Well, mine are even worse!"

Albert Einstein (1879-1955), co-winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics, wrote this statement about his own schooling, in an autobiographical essay he wrote for the introductory material of a book about his role as a philosopher of science:

". . . I worked most of the time in the physical laboratory [at the Polytechnic Institute of Zürich], fascinated by the direct contact with experience. The balance of the time I used in the main in order to study at home the works of Kirchoff, Helmholtz, Hertz, etc. . . . In [physics], however, I soon learned to scent out that which was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things which clutter up the mind and divert it from the essential. The hitch in this was, of course, the fact that one had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect [upon me] that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year. In justice I must add, moreover, that in Switzerland we had to suffer far less under such coercion, which smothers every truly scientific impulse, than is the case in many another locality. There were altogether only two examinations; aside from these, one could just about do as one pleased. This was especially the case if one had a friend, as did I, who attended the lectures regularly and who worked over their content conscientiously. This gave one freedom in the choice of pursuits until a few months before the examination, a freedom which I enjoyed to a great extent and have gladly taken into the bargain the bad conscience connected with it as by far the lesser evil. It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly."

"Autobiographical Notes," in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, Paul Schilpp, ed. (1951), pp. 17-19 © 1951 by the Library of Living Philosophers, Inc.

http://learninfreedom.org/Nobel_hates_school.html

John Kemeny, who was Einstein's assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study, commented on Einstein's pattern of developed abilities that "Einstein did not need help in physics. But contrary to popular belief, Einstein did need help in mathematics. By which I do not mean that he wasn't good at mathematics. He was very good at it, but he was not an up-to-date research level mathematician. His assistants were mathematicians for two reasons. First of all, in just ordinary calculations, anybody makes mistakes. There were many long calculations, deriving one formula from another to solve a differential equation. They go on forever. Any number of times we got the wrong answer. Sometimes one of us got the wrong answer, sometimes the other. The calculations were long enough that if you got the same answer at the end, you were confident. So he needed an assistant for that, and, frankly, I was more up-to-date in mathematics than he was."

http://scidiv.bellevuecollege.edu/math/Kemeny.html

Is it common in the Swiss school system for students to take classes in four different languages (German, English, French, Italian), or did Einstein attend a special/elite school?

When I hear about geniuses that lived, most of the time I hear about how awesome their memory was ... which worries me, as I can't even remember the names of people I meet without effort and this would mean that I may never be good enough for anything, so why bother?

But Einstein wasn't one of those people. His IQ may have been great, but he wasn't one of those people that could recite all U.S. states or presidents at age 6.

What I like about Einstein is that he worked hard for his whole life. Whatever disability he may have had regarding his memory, he compensated multiple times by being persistent and obsessed with his work.

If you're not talented at math when you're younger, there's practically no hope for you to be good at it later. Given that Einstein did a good bit of math for the physics he was involved with, you can be pretty confident he was sharp when he was younger.

I seem to recall he had trouble getting into university... which I guess is supported by him being a patent examiner, instead of a student.

I fact he was the sole-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921

It wouldn’t surprise me since French, Italian and German are three of the four official languages of Switzerland. (I don’t know whether that was the case in 1897 but those three languages were definitely all spoken in Switzerland in 1897.)

Today students in Swiss secondary education have to learn at least two non-native languages (besides their native language), one of those two has to be one of the official Swiss languages. Einstein only learned one more language, that doesn’t seem extraordinary.

It would be nice if someone from Switzerland could shed some more light on this. The situation in, for example, Germany is as follows: If you want to continue on to university learning two languages is standard, learning a third language is optional but possible pretty much everywhere. The four available languages in my school were English, French, Latin [0] and Spanish and you could pick up to three of those. (Only certain combinations were possible, English was always the first foreign language and you had to take it.)

[0] I still hate myself for picking Latin. It’s beyond useless.

I remember reading in a book ("Sparks of Genius") that he went to a very specialized school. The book talked about there being a focus on the importance of conceptualization/visualization. If I remember correctly, the example that was given was of Einstein doing a physics problem involving a sail boat. He describes the importance of being able to feel as if you yourself were the boat -- to have the waves cut through your body, to feel the wind against the sail, to feel and hence form a deep and comprehensive understanding of all the large and minute interactions. This focus would clearly be a very important skill in theorizing...

German, French, and Italian being three of the four official languages, that wouldn't be surprising if it was common.

But Einstein did attend an elite university in Swiss, the Zurich Polytechnicum