justplainbil

Just Plain Bill

ADHD and Me

The other day, I ran across a San Francisco Chronicle article from August 23, 2015, entitled, Back to school with ADHD, with the subtitle “Here’s a road map for parents with trouble-making children.”

For some reason, I’d been saving this article, and with my return to the public school classroom after a hiatus of well over 30 years, it seems the right time to compare the ways schools deal with disruptive and/or “incorrigible” children with the ways used when I was a child.  

I attended public school a long time ago, in the days prior to medicating school children who did not “behave”, and even before the diagnosis of a condition known as ADHD. I imagine my school behavior caused my late mother incredible pain and angst, as, although I was bright, I just couldn’t stop talking or could not keep my hands “to myself.” Sometimes both. As early as kindergarten, I had my mouth taped shut, and my hands taped and placed inside a paper bag – teacher behavior that certainly would not be tolerated in this day and age – when the usual admonition “Billy, keep quiet”, or the irritating and consistent “shhh” didn’t work.  “Did any of that taping work?” you may ask? In reality, no, as it wasn’t until I was in high school that my need for attention (and recognition of any kind) stopped for reasons unknown.

I had a few students prescribed Ritalin when I started teaching (in the 60s). My initial reaction at the time was that although this drug allowed students to somewhat curtail their negative behavior while learning alternative ways to handle their problems, I felt that some children were “less than attentive, somewhat lethargic” while medicated. But that may have just been my imagination.

My recent experiences with students displaying behavioral problems reveal few changes since I started teaching nearly 40 years ago. “Send to the office” is the most common resolution I experienced and observed. For example, an assignment in a third grade classroom started by having one student immediately erasing most of the teacher’s message that had been written on the white board – erased by the student just because he “wanted to” erase it. Instructions left by the teacher suggested “having patience” with that student, but I really didn’t have a chance to demonstrate “patience.” It was clear the student didn’t want to be in class, so when the principal walked by, I suggested the student spend a little time in the office. An hour later, the principal returned the boy and we made it through the day by allowing him to work on a coloring activity that kept him engaged for most of the day, but resulted in him “learning” little, if anything at all.

So what’s next?