ADD/ADHD

My first real school, beyond kindergarten, was a lab school for the teaching program at the college in town. There were lots of student teachers taking a crack out our ripe young minds. Early on they said I was smart. They took me out of normal classes frequently to work with special teachers and projects. They had me run through all kinds of neurological evaluation tests. However, I moved around a lot as a kid. The next school I went to after this was run by a music ministry coordinator out of a church basement. Yeah, religion played a major role in my upbringing. This "school" involved sitting at a desk and working on lesson plan booklets while some white haired maniac strummed out country rock versions of popular hymns on his guitar.

Thankfully that didn't last long. After the Christians it was on to the Catholics. I went to a catholic school for two years. One of the nuns caught wind that I was some evangelical devil child and decided to try and humiliate me every chance she had. She actively discouraged any of the other children from socializing with me. She warned the children to always accept communion or else they might end up going to hell like me. However, despite this woman being a science teacher and one of the judges, I still managed to win first place in the science fair that year. She was pretty pissed afterwards, which was awesome.

Anyways another move and another school later I was clear of the fires of damnation. This is when I first really started to experience academic difficulties. It mostly came in the form of failure to complete homework and assignments. I would do great in class and still did very well on tests, but focusing at home or after school was becoming a serious challenge. The homework would pile up, the project due date would get nearer. There would be this made flurry to try and get something together at the last minute, and when the day came to actually hand it in, I would skip school out of shame of having failed to complete the assignment. Pretty retarded defense mechanism in hind sight, but that's what happened.

Anyways on to high school...

So, despite not having passed several classes, and being very weak in math and grammar. I was pushed through middle school and went on to high school. Here nothing changed, in fact it got worse. Whenever I was in class I would do great with participating in discussions and grasping the material and frequently got the highest score on tests (which made some teachers suspect me of cheating). When it came time to hand in assignments I would simply try to avoid eye contact or try to be in the bathroom. Eventually the teachers and students simply didn't bother asking me for homework.

Home life was a bunch of not fun at this time. My mother was a divorced single parent, and this whole time period made her crazy with frustration. She did her best, but she was too soft on me. There had been no real effort to instill any sense of regiment or schedule or anything resembling time management. I was in complete denial and evasion mode at this point as well, so actually taking responsibility for the shitty life I had, was not a concept I was familiar with.

So life moves forward, the school is like... uh you failed every class for the last two semesters, and a series of meetings takes place where I am asked over and over again. "What do we need to do to help you?" To which I had only one answer, "I don't know." Eventually the Psychiatrist is called in, he diagnosis me with ADHD and depression. We proceed to run down a list of medications and I experience more side effects than I can remember, literally, I was blacking out a lot. I remember I was on Dextroamphetamine and Zoloft at one point... I don't remember the rest. Well I do remember the first day waking up and sitting in front of the T.V. and just kinda slipping into a zone. It felt like maybe 20 minutes had gone by with me just starring at the T.V. while it was off. Then my mom came home from work. I had been there for almost 6 hours straight. Eventually it was revealed that this psychiatrist guy was a nut job, he ended up threatening one of his patients, and lost his license. I had decided to stop taking all of the medications on my own a while before that though. My buddy was so depressed when I flushed all my pills, he kept talking about how much money he could have sold them for. I probably could have made some serious cash selling the "candy over the sink", but I feel I would have to be a pretty shitty person to capitalize on other people's poor choices.

Another part of this intervention had me go through a rigorous set of Neuro-psych evaluations. I recognized a few of the basic tests from my grade school days. I recently found the results of those tests when I was going though some old paperwork. It listed several recommendations, provided by the people administering the tests, in terms of what accommodations could be made for me. Basically it turns out I am really smart but have a learning disability beyond simple ADHD that I had been compensating for. This resulted in some surprisingly low scores in certain areas given the levels I achieved in others. Most of the areas I scored low in however were related to memorized systems, such as math and grammar and not comprehension or problem solving. Looking back and realizing I hadn't passed a math or English class since 5th grade when I was taking the test could be an indicator of those scores.

Anyways, recommendations along the lines of alternative methods of handing in homework, dictation into a tape recorder ect. were given. The school responds by taking me out of normal classes, and placing me in the remedial room, down in the basement, with the developmentally challenged kids. There I was to complete the huge backlog of assignments and projects that had piled up during my delinquency. Complete those and I would get credit for those classes. I don't think I did a single one of them. I sat at the desk in the back they had given me for all of 5 minutes. Then I got up and started talking with the teachers in the remedial center. I would carry on conversations with them, and probably acted as a huge distraction, but they didn't seem to care. There were like 3 teachers per kid down there, so there was plenty of people to talk to. I would draw pictures on the chalk board. I ran a betting game for the teachers for a while to see who could guess tomorrows high and low temperatures for various regions. We got several newspapers down there and I would keep track of results and listed out the statistics on who was the most accurate guesser. basically a million and one things that had nothing to do with those assignments.

Eventually I stopped going to this room altogether. I would show up around 10 to noon each day. Wait for my friends to get out of class and we'd go to lunch or leave the school and hang out somewhere. Then when they went back to class I either went home, or hung out in the library and read whatever till the end of the day and then we'd go hang out some more. I did this for about one whole school year, with some prolonged absences thrown in. At the end of that year I dropped out. I got my GED right before I moved out of the area.

I had set up an appointment for what I thought was a time to take the GED. Apparently the adviser at this adult education center wanted me to take an assessment test, and then enroll me in a 6 month preparatory course before taking the actual test. I told the guy that I was moving in a matter of days and either I took the test today, or I didn't, his choice. He said there wasn't enough time left in the day for me to complete all 5 modules or 6 or however many there were. I said, just hand me the first one, when I finish it, give me the next and we'll do that until you have to go home. So he did, and I finished them all with like 40 minutes to spare and got near perfect scores on all of them. Not the most impressive thing in the world, but given where I was back then, I am still pretty proud of that.

After high school I took some real shit jobs, doing maintenance work and scrapping junk until I joined the field crew for a surveyor. I did that for 4 years full time before deciding I wanted to go to college. Now this was a major step. Up to this point I thought I was some fuckin retard who couldn't remember to brush his teeth without a sticky note on the mirror (That had to be refreshed periodically or else the note just blended into the background). So I decided to go and get a surveying degree. I found a community college in my area that had a program. To enter they ask that you take a simple proficiency exam to see what level for each subject you were prepared to take and if you needed any prep courses. I was nervous and broke out the old GED books to refresh myself. I did really really well on this test. Again, not the most impressive thing in the world, but I think if I had done poorly on that test I may have just given up altogether as it would have just confirmed my belief that I was not very good when it came to school.

I did very well in the community college. I ended up tutoring the other guys in my program for food. They would buy me food and I would break things down for them to understand. My experience in the field made the schooling much much easier. But there was still lots of home work and projects, which I found myself completing this time around. Something was different, I was finding a confidence in my abilities I didn't have before and I understood why I was in school. It was to help me get licensed, and it was also costing me money. So I showed up on time (barely) every day and managed to complete 100% of the work. Although a lot of the work came down to the wire. So by normal standards I was barely making deadlines; by my standards I was doing infinitely better.

The two year program came to a close and I ended up transferring to a state university to acquire a Bachelors in my field. It wasn't ivy league, but it still required more attention and focus than I had experienced up to that point. However I had an amazing community college professor and I seriously rank his instruction and program higher than what I experienced at the university level. Anyways, going form a school of 1200 to 12,000 was an interesting shift. Deadlines were still tight, but I ended up transferring with a good friend I made at the community college. This helped immensely as I had a default study partner. Having someone that relies on me to help get something done is a massive motivator. I hate letting people down. Also, by this point I was getting pretty good at dissecting a course and figuring out exactly what was required to get an A. It's amazing how much fluff can be ignored.

I ended up joining a couple of organizations and clubs and participated in some student competitions for surveying at the national level both years I was there. We didn't even place the first year (which I thought was BS ) and took 2nd place the second year. Those projects forced me to really kick some habits with procrastination, but it seems like no matter how much time you give to something like that, there is ALWAYS last minute crap to clean up.

So I kinda blazed a trail 3 of the 4 semesters I was there, but that last semester I ended up slacking off. I know I could have done better, but some old tendencies crept up again. Some call it senioritis. All I know is that I could have easily aced one class I got a C in if I had held myself to it. It was just a lot of basic assignments in a low level course I was doing to finish a minor on my degree. And yet it was my lowest grade outside of high school. If the class had been harder, I would have done better I think.