"If an ADD child is intersted in a topic or activity (and, I am saying this child was) they have a huge ability to focus. But, unfortunately most school systems require children to focus on many topics and activities, some of which they have little interest in focusing. There lies a problem for many children with ADD, as focusing on these becomes a challenge. In school systems sympathetic and structured to ADD, a child most often performs much better. But, I suspect few are so.

Children with an ADD condition should not be confused as being less intelligent than other children. In many cased their intelligence level is actually higher."


YESSSSSSS!!!!   Brilliantly written, Ed!

I have a brain that *will not* concentrate on anything at all unless it's something I'm passionate about. Recently, in my new job, I was told that I *had* to take part in 2 entire days of 'Induction', which included different 'modules' which all needed to be filled in. It's all to do with Health & Safety and countless other crap. This was planned for November...

Today, I gave my notice in. Why? Because my brain will never focus on such rubbish, because I'm not interested in it whatsoever, and utterly resent being told that I *have* to do anything at all.

I left The National Trust for the same reasons, because there I had three months to fill in a VAST manual about a job I'd already been doing for 2 years...It was so patronising, so trivial and so ridiculously boring that I refused to do it. I was then told the entire shop team would be marked down because of me, so I wrote to Fiona Whatserface, who runs The National Trust and told her where to stick her emotional blackmail and high-costing high-crap training manuels.

It was bad enough having to sit still and try to look interested during a two hour lesson in how to use a new till. I failed, wriggled, jiggled and joked all the way through, simply to stop myself from falling asleep or getting up and walking out the room in sheer frustrated frustration at all the lunacy that's going on today...

At school most of the class learnt logarithms, but I learnt what the sun did when it shone on the beautiful leaves of the tall silver birch trees outside the maths room window. I'd watch those shadows playing with the fresh green grass, patterning it with a spirograph of different shapes..and I'd 'think' myself outside, feel the breeze on my face. I failed my maths GCE, wrote "I give up!" all over my examination paper, because I was bored rigid, hot (why DO exams always happen in the summer?) and totally fed up with being made to answer stupid questions that were of no interest to me whatsoever...

I've never used a logarithm in my life, by the way, but I'm sitting here typing this in my Tree House upstairs flat, gazing out onto my beautiful Mimosa tree, and my Curly Willow tree, marvelling at being up with the birds and the squirrels, watching them in their secret hide-outs, where they're totally unaware that I can see them..

If I'd been taken out into the fresh air by my maths teacher, then been allowed to watch the patterns, and he'd introduced the science of geometry through those patterns, got us to copy the shapes, explained about the angles of the branches as they bent and bowed in that breeze, maybe I'd be a Mathematician by now...but I doubt it 'cos I'll always prefer SQUIRRELS!

;0)


I love painting by the way, decoratingy painting that is, and will quite happily paint for hours and hours...letting my mind drift away across a thousand oceans as I do so...Then I'll happily spend hours arranging things...getting the colours balanced right, the feeling of a room, the atmosphere of a shop....

Oh..and I quite like typing...and giggling...   ;0)

If I were a child today, I'd be drugged up to the eyeballs...for 'not concentrating' on a boring ol' fart of a teacher who was demanding that I learnt what THEY wanted and not what I wanted.

I guess I suffered from RITM - Rebel In The Making - as a child, and I still have it today.

Oh..and I found another job before I left my most current one, and it's not one that requires me to behave as if I were back at school...