Re: New professional career and having concentration problems!

[Anonymous]

sugargremlin,

You sound a lot like me. I take hours longer to prepare my day’s work for my students and to assess and grade it than any other teacher I’ve ever met. My colleagues walk out the door hours before me everyday with empty arms while I still have to carry home work to complete! While I’m driving, I look at the traffic lights and think, “It’s green. Green! Green? What does green mean? Go? Stop? Think! think!” Then other times after I’ve just driven through an intersection I panic and wonder what colour the light had been. Had I just run a red? I quickly check my rear view mirror and am pleased to see a string of cars following me so I know I was on the green.

It’s a terribly stressful time for me at work right now due to a colleague issueand I’d more than anything just like to go off on a holiday! Walk away from it all. The work issues: someone else is having problems and they’ve decided to rain on my parade. Can I complain about it? No, the colleague is a best personal friend of my ‘boss’. It’s the end of the year and I’ve still got a unit of work to plough through. A huge chunk of my report card writing needs to be completed this weekend because our school board wants them FINISHED 3 weeks earlier this year!! (So what will be be ‘teaching’ for the last 4 weeks if all the reports are signed/sealed in envelopes ready for handing out??!!! How to best warm a bench?)

Anyway, kids have been away so they’ve got missed tests and assessments that now have to be individually administered, I’ve meetings to attend re: my special needs students with stacks of reports needing to be readied and several hugely distractable students with major LDs to contend with (oh yes, they are unmedicated ADHDers). And those students aren’t even my legally identified special need students.

So now it’s my lunch break and I decide I’m actually going to sit down and eat something for once, a quick bite, a container of yogourt. Somehow or other, I end up taking home the full lunch that my husband so kindly prepares for me each day. I mean, when would I have time to sit down and eat on a regular day in my life? Why my hubby hasn’t given up on making a lunch for me each day baffles me. So I sit down at my desk, awash in layers of tests, reports for meeting, lesson work to still be done that day and up walks Mr. ADHD. “Wow, you sure have a lot of papers piled up your desk everywhere! It’s covered!!”

My thoughts at that moment were less than kind. 👿 Somehow or other I refrained from murder and quietly asked him to return to his desk to eat HIS lunch. (Are you able to tell this particular student is the one who consistently finds my Achilles heel?) I’ve had students who were actually much more ADHD but for some reason, this one has totally destroyed any of my own adaptations for dealing with my ADHD issues. He is pure Kryptonite.

I say all this because I hear you when you say that it takes you hours longer to complete your work. My desk during the day? A mound of papers waiting to erupt like Mt. Vesuvius. Like you, I was an ‘A’ student. On Thursday, I told my principal that I’ve applied for other positions within our school board. I decided that the stress from employee X is more than I can bear to deal with for another year along with just trying to do my job well.

The feel good moment is the “What can I do to make you stay?” My employers have always loved me because they say I’m one of the best teachers they’ve met.

Internally, I’m embarrassed when I hear that. How can I accept hearing that because I know exactly what I have to go through each day to appear to be “an excellent teacher”. A real excellent teacher would be much better organized. I’m stressed beyond words because I’ve done 2 interviews in two days and have another at 7:00 am on Tuesday morning (before I even start work at my school).

I’m easily qualified for all of them but would much prefer one of the positions, but with a big BUT. It was one I held previously but left because I was having physical issues that my PCP kept brushing off (she thought I was a ‘head case/bi-polar’ that needed to go back on meds- reality, a pancreatic tumour occupying most of my abdomen. Surprise, surprise, I am alive still).

The big BUT is that the position is an hour and 15 min drive (each way) from my home. When you take hours longer than everyone else to prepare for the next day…..the extra driving time becomes an important consideration. My current drive is 15 minutes each way.

Our brains are certainly different than the rest of the world. I’d love to walk out the door with everyone else but it just isn’t going to happen. My employers all KNOW that I’m ADHD and haven’t given me any problems over it. In fact, I’ve never been asked to lead a grade level team. The ‘bosses’ seem to sense it would be my undoing and work with me on it. I mean, however would I be able to lead and manage 6 others when I’m spinning in circles on my own?

Instead, I’m given all the extra needy kids and the SpecEd ones because they know I LOVE those challenges and LOVE those kids. They drive the other teachers insane because they so often just don’t get it. We don’t try to annoy others by our behaviours, it just happens.

So I try to be kind to myself by acknowledging that I do have some strengths. Just not the same ones as everyone else. Why, that would be boring anyway, wouldn’t it?

Meds have been wonderful for me. They certainly didn’t make my ADHD go away but they certainly slowed my brain down enough to allow me to get a bit more organized and to catch myself when I’m getting caught up in the wrong activity or straying down the wrong path. It’s almost like I’m able to sit on my own shoulder and ‘see’ what I’m doing right or even better- what I’m doing wrong. When I catch myself going off on a tangent, it’s a whole lot easier to get myself refocussed on the right thing.

Meds help me get focussed, and refocussed and refocussed again and again. But at least it happens more and more frequently as I work on that skill.

I use Concerta 72 mg each day and can use ‘regular’ Ritalin to top me up when I have important things to accomplish in the evening. Like writing report cards or sitting through an opera (however do I get roped into them?). In fact, I found out post-meds that opera isn’t really painful as I thought it to be. LOL It was just having to sit still and quiet for so long that was the problem.

As you know, there are different categories of ADHD meds, with one type working for some and not for others and vice versa. My psychiatrist informed me that I was misdiagnosed by the first 2 psychiatrists I’ve dealt with over the years. I was NEVER bipolar, just a whopping case of ADHD. Luckily for the world, the first 2 are now retired. Hopefully, the new younger docs are more well-versed on ADHD and its presentation in adults. Is your psychiatrist (not the PCP) a specialist in ADHD? If I’m not mistaken mine had mentioned that ADHD can be treated in conjunction with BP as long as the symptoms of the latter were well-controlled. (He deals primarily with ADHD patients and BPs).

Good luck! We’re all in the same leaky canoe, paddling as fast as we can.

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