Re: Is it possible to be good in school and have ADD?

[Anonymous]

Scored in the 99 percentile in all areas except reading comprehension (adhd causes a reader to lose information as their mind wanders while their eyes keep moving over text), and spelling (can also be a flag, but not always). Admin wanted to skip me ahead a grade in elementary school but my mother refused to let it happen (my mother’s refusal to allow me into gifted programs and preventing me from skipping grades only amplified my feelings of failure and inadequacy stemming from my undiagnosed adhd, but that is another post).

The original poster’s last sentence apologizing for the “jumble of thoughts” and statement “I’m not the best writer in the world” is also a dead give away as well as evidence that your symptoms were present from early in life. Because the executive function is impaired, organizing ideas into unified paragraphs (or even into sentences in many cases) doesn’t “come naturally”. I, too, couldn’t write my way out of a paper bag and chose not to apply to any colleges that required essays on applications as a result. I took all honors and AP classes. My inability to write coherently finally started to limit my academic progress my senior year in high school. My AP Lit teacher almost kicked me out of the program (scored a 2 on the test- adhd limited reading a writing doomed me from the start) and my AP European teacher only let me stay in the class if I followed his outlines for all of my essays (scored a 4 on the test – my mind is a trap for knowledge and the essay was one of the essays he had outlined for me). However, my inability to finish books or even the assigned chapters was easily covered up by my “talent.”. I feel guilty that I, like G Dubya, didn’t finish a single book in high school and only a few of them in college and am now a successful individual despite this fact. Now, as an English teacher, it makes me feel like a fraud.

I made through college at a HUGE state institution (highly structured environment) in four years with a 3.0 (my report cards are littered with red flags- boring classes have low grades while interesting classes have high grades). I learned how I write in college and also learned how others need me to write so that they can understand it. It still can take me HOURS to write an important email. It took me two hours to write three sentences for my daughters pre-k application! This post has had three revisions and taken over an hour. I cannot publish/send anything without extreme anxiety over the quality of my writing. To this day, I wonder what my academic life would have been like with meds and knowledge of my condition from early on. To this day, it still irks me that no one caught my “twice exceptional” condition. But my experience also makes me a more empathetic and compassionate teacher.

So, yes, brilliance does happen as a “co-morbidity” with an adhd diagnosis.

REPORT ABUSE