O hai—

[tblue37]

10. Actually, “slow” is absolutely NOT an appropriate description of kids with ADD,

and certainly not of kids with ADHD (who operate at the speed of light!).

ADD, ADHD and other learning “differences” are often associated with a high level of giftedness. Often the very brightest kids in a school have ADD or ADHD!

I have ADHD, as do both of my (brilliantly successful) adult children. My daughter, who was a high school valedictorian with a 4.0 GPA and who received a full scholarship and took both general honors and biology honors as an undergrad (also with a 4.0 GPA) while majoring in biology and minoring in math and chemistry, was a Fulbright Fellow and is a doctor who is finishing up her second residency, so she will be double board-certified soon.

My son, who also received hefty college scholarships, has his BA in Spanish and international studies. He did get one “B” as an undergrad, but otherwise had a straight-A average. He also has a master’s in business, and he has completed part of another master’s degree at Georgetown (which, by the way, is where my daughter went to med school). He is fluent in Spanish and speaks two other foreign languages as well, though not yet as fluently as he speaks Spanish. (I also did extraordinarily well in public school, college, and graduate school.)

I will insist that neither I nor my kids are “slow,” nor are most of the other people I encounter who have ADD, ADHD or any other learning differences. The problem for some of those kids (though not all, as our success in school indicates) is that they have different learning processes and needs, and the one-size-fits-all approach our schools take to mass education simply doesn’t play to their learning needs.

Your girlfriend’s approach worked with that student because some students’ learning strategies involve tactile or kinetic translation and assimilation of information. (Another difference that could be taken into account in teaching some students is that some are primarily auditory learners. Another is that some are simply not able to sit still for long periods of time.)

Keep in mind that our brains did not evolve to read or write.

Having existed for only about 5,000 years, written language is a very new development for human beings. That means that unlike for walking, speaking, or other things that come naturally and pretty much automatically to us, we have not yet had time to evolve brain structures for reading and writing, so we have to harness brain structures that evolved for other purposes to do those reading and writing jobs. That being the case, it requires a huge amount of appropriate instruction and practice at the early stages to learn how to read and write and then to make reading and writing automatic.

Certainly some people will have a somewhat stronger innate aptitude for reading and writing than others, just as some will have a stronger aptitude for math, music, painting, learning foreign languages, or other complex activities. But students who have different learning requirements need individualized instructional and practice approaches (and often more time) during the early stages of learning how to accomplish these alien activities that our brains were not evolve to accomplish (i.e., reading and writing).

When the approaches used for them are inappropriate, not only do they lose precious time in learning these essential skills, but they also build up psychological obstacles to learning them at all.

If a student needs more time and specialized instruction to learn to read and write, but the mass-educational system demands that he hurry through the process on the same schedule as every other student, using the exact same methods, and if he faces constant feedback from his teachers and peers that makes him feel inferior, even hopeless, then pretty soon he will internalize the idea that he simply cannot learn to read and write, so instead of practicing more to overcome his difficulties, he will evolve avoidance behaviors. Thus he reads and writes less and less and less, compounding the problem over time. Meanwhile, since reading and writing are the keys to further learning, he also falls behind in other subjects, and soon education in its entirety becomes a hateful, hopeless thing for him, and he gives up altogether.

Your reference to students with ADD as being “slow” just illustrates my point—that the system unfairly labels such kids and sets them up for a lifetime of failure and self-criticism. And your heartrbeaking remark that you were yourself just such a "slow" kid illustrates my point that such students end up internalizing that horribly false view of themselves as being somehow less competent ("slower&quot than other students. Your intellectual abilities were not the problem. The problem was that you were stuck in an educational system that could not accommodate your optimal learning strategies!

I often tutor students with learning differences who have run into diffculties in school, and I can assure you that they are as bright as any other students--and with appropriate instruction, they end up learning just as well!