Reply To: Did anyone else actually do well in school?

[gianmaria]

Hi,

I’m still waiting for my first screening with a neurologist. I have not been diagnosed with ADHD (yet). But I seem to fit particularly well with all the symptom-checklists I found so far.

I talked with my general practitioner, and he would tend to rule out ADHD mainsly because I never had any problem at school.

I wonder if he’s wrong, of course.

I actually did great at school, sometimes even when the subject or the teacher weren’t all that interesting. I had some difficult semester,s but in general my grades were above average.

But now that I think of it there have been quite a lot of motivational factors:

1) from second to eighth grade I was one year ahead. In an attempt by my parents to put me in the same classroom with a brother one year my senior, I was allowed to skip first grade and begin at second. I guess that made school a lot more exciting for me and kept me on the spot. (I evenutally lost that advantage, repeating the first year of junior high)

2) That first year of junior high I scored quite poor. guess what: I had chosen a science and math curriculum which was way off-mark for me. Once I reverted to arts, which I was passionate about, it went way better.

3) My parents always made it clear that with poor grades I would have had to find a job right after high school. No college. That was very motivationalç

4)Something strage happened at senior high. My school, and my class in particular were not very good. Actually I could have easlily got the best grades without doing much. That kind of scared me. I somehow realized that poor preparation, even if it would get me through exams, would never gear me up for college or life. So I began just studying for the sake of it. I would do extra-curricular activities or dig deeper in to certian topics at the library just to be sure that I was REALLY learning, and not rather “doing well at school”. That equipped me for college.

5) I has a girlfriend at high school which was smart and cultured.

6) I had a lot of older friends and a lot of smart firends, so I was sourrounded by stimulating individuals.

7) When college came, it was a blast. I loved attending, I loved the subjects (arts again) I loved the people. That helped a lot.

—

Now that I think of it I guess that I managed unknowingly to tap in to the right strategies to keep my focus.

(hell, now that I think of it maybe it means that I should pursue an academic career or a teching gig…)

 

My conclusion is that school performance alone can hardly give you the right frame for ADHD.

 

 

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