Not ADHD friendly

[Anonymous]

I saw the special on PBS which led me to this site and it presented a lot of great ideas for bosses to have their ADHD employees work around their weaknesses and play to their strengths. However, the work place is not sympathetic. Either to ADHD or to anxiety which I also have or anything else. Bosses want a certain type of employee and nothing else. They don’t want to make adjustments and eventhough their is an Americans with Disabilites Act it’s not strong enough. I know this from experience. Laws must be passed and strengthened to make the work place friendly to people with all types of disorders or syndromes, as well as people of varying sexualites, genders and races.

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[billd]

Here-here

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[Anonymous]

Miguel, I’m an ADHD person myself but I have to honestly say that it is difficult for me to work around others like myself. If I was on the end of the stick that was doing the hiring, I wouldn’t hire MYSELF or someone else like me! It’s not that I don’t like myself or feel incompetent. Quite the opposite.

It’s just that I know that a non-ADD person can do just as well and in most cases get the job done quicker without the need for ‘touch-ups’. In the world of business, time is money and that what it often has to boil down to for (BTW, I’m not in the business world. I’m a teacher.)

Just saying that I’m a teacher doesn’t sound like I’m terribly accomodating to my needy ADD students. That isn’t true either. What I do see is that the non-ADDers are just as creative and able as we are but don’t usually need as much time to get the task done correctly and efficiently. If I was in a position to be doing hiring for a company and had to also answer to someone for the bottom line on the financial ledger, I’d sure think long and hard before hiring an ADDer if an equally qualified non-ADD person was also applying for the position.

I guess it all boils down to getting tired of hearing that someone needs special accomodations. I think EVERYONE out there has issues that they have to deal with every single day. I hate hearing that we alway should be given special considerations for our ADD. We need to just learn to deal with it and move on with life otherwise we’ll be having to make special allowances for anyone with a hang-nail on their index fingers.

I don’t want to sound like a rant but everyone has issues of some sort. Life is all about us learning to make the best of what we have and not always wanting or expecting others to throw down their jacket (so to speak) to make OUR life ‘easier’.

We’re all able to achieve and even excell at whatever tasks we set our mind on accomplishing if we just takeon the ownership for its success!

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[Anonymous]

That’s why I favor the socialist alternative where the workers take over the work place which is something favored by intellectuals like the late Howard Zinn, Noam Chompsky and others. A work place where the workers owned the means of production would control the conditions of the work place so that people with adhd could excell at their strengths and hire out the weaknesses to other people.

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[Anonymous]

@miguel, don’t let the teacher get you down. while she does have a few valid points – ie everybody has issues, we need to deal with things, i don’t think she understands just how awful it can be out trying to work in that bottom line world she describes. i agree with her that sometimes accommodations go too far (i know of one local university that was forced to graduate a student who could neither read nor write english -why? she was deaf, and ‘english’ was her second language.) but there should be some degree of reasonableness of accommodations for ADD. at one job, i was given a noise reducing headset to help with the sounds in the call center where i sat (i didn’t do calls, i did statistics.)

@ zsazsa i hope you give your students more than “deal with it” and “there will always be somebody normal that should be hired instead of you”, because that’s how *I* felt after reading your post. yeah, i know you put in the last line, but i’ve heard that far too often from teachers to believe it

blind people CAN’T do some things no matter how hard they try and ‘take ownership for success’ – they just CAN NOT. why? the have a disability and have to work around it. we help them by making accommodations. some ADD people are in the same boat. all that stuff about “set your mind to it!” only ever made me feel like a failure – and i’ll bet i’m not the only one on here who feels that way.

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[Saffron]

I thought zsazsa’s post was brilliantly written.

I think it’s important to remember that your employer is not your teacher. Part of making the transition from school to the work world, no matter who you are, is realizing it’s time to shift your attitude from “What can you do for me” to “What can I do for you.”

Some of us have gotten ahead, and even achieved great success, by designing our own accommodations and presenting them to our employers in a win-win way, showing that we have the employer’s own goals as our bottom line.

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