Just ranting about ADHD

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This.

The original tweet summarizes it pretty well. Fanfic tends to be popular among certain types of neurodivergent people (aka people most likely to read excessively as a child, and have burnout as an adult) for the same reasons that we tend to hyperfixate–neurochemical signaling (I hope I’m using that phrase correctly). What I mean is, for people who are really dependent on changes in dopamine/serotonin/neurotransmitter levels, who have low levels or wonky neural reward systems (perhaps the most common types of neurodivergence)…people like us rely on dependable external sources of those neurochemicals. In order to function, we spend a lot of our free time trying to level out our brain chemistry using things that can reliably bring us a steady stream of joyful moments (rewards) without costing too much of the mental effort that is already in short supply. 

significantly: the investment of reading has to be balanced with a steady “return on investment”–and this return has to start fairly quickly. because again, we don’t have a lot of attention/energy to invest on tiring things. we have perpetual “low batteries” in that regard.

that doesn’t mean these stories are “simple,” or that they lack complexity or value–only that the reward has to come in short regular intervals, and it has to have a low “upfront cost.” which is why fanfic stories are so perfectly formulated for neurodivergent readers–they are often beautifully written, but skip a lot of the upfront costs (of introducing new characters, of world-building, of getting the audience emotionally connected to the story elements).

the nature of fanfiction is that the reader has a pre-existing relationship with this world and these characters. that–combined with the shorter average length of fics–means that fan fics very quickly start “rewarding” the reader in a way that traditional fiction struggles to. that’s not a bad thing! and maybe it’s something more traditionally published writers should be paying attention to.

other people: no

So, I told him, "they're not unconnected- we were talking about going to the carnival, and the carnival is on the same fairgrounds they used to use for the rodeo, and one time at the rodeo my brother spilled sprite on himself and a bee went up his shirt and stung him, and bees die when they sting, but wasps don't, and I was wondering why, so I asked you."

people taking recreational stimulants would use vitamin c to get the drugs out of their system before taking a drug test. They would have to consume huge amounts of it (like, multiple vitamin c SUPPLEMENTS, not just a couple glasses of oj) to have a chance of passing, and even that didn’t always work.

these r the channels i use

basically organisation has my schedule and any random stuff thats happening or i gotta do

media is where i drop a youtube video, episode of a show, or fic im reading with the time of where i am in the video that i need to close so i can focus

plus it doubles as a catalog of stuff to do when I’m bored!

then document is links to things i need open to do work or any slideshow links i get for school

Diagnosing dyslexia. Diagnosing dyslexia. Diagnosing dyslexia.

After going through IB classes in high school, after finishing my BA while working full time, after failing algebra with the same teacher two years in a row, there is no kind of homework that has ever made me cry so hard as word searches did in the 3rd grade.

If you've got a kid who has been working on a word search for an hour and is crying and telling you "the words aren't there," if you've got a kid who never knows what the pictures are in connect-the-dots because they can't connect the dots in the correct order, if you've got a kid who can't read analog clock faces after months of being taught how to read time, if you've got a kid who retranscribes all their music class handouts as letters because they can't wrap their head around reading music, I'm begging you to get your kid tested for dyslexia/dyscalculia.

Adult: Why are you making this so much harder on yourself? Just read the music.

Kid *stares into the camera like The Office the memorizes the fingering for a three minute piece of music so they can pretend to read along with the class*

Adult: Don't count, just add.

Kid *head rotates 360 degrees like in the exorcist*

Like. That's the thing. Nobody is helping you and they're telling you you're lazy and making excuse and to just work harder so you make up these little systems and mnemonics and you flex your right arm because that's the pledge of allegiance arm and you've memorized that so now you can tell left from right pretty quickly and you can count the dots on the numbers without moving your lips and you've memorized enough words that you can mostly read at a college level so you don't get told to "just sound it out" or "just look it up in the dictionary" all the time and you've got this just MASSIVE infrastructure going on under the surface to just get by and then you're thrown a monkey wrench like memorizing the quadratic equation or learning the IPA and it feels like you're climbing a mountain but everyone else is just walking along in the park and then one day you read the symptoms of dyscalculia and maybe have a little cry and you go to the disability office on campus and they show you a test and it's this tiny little hill that would have looked huge to you fifteen years ago but you've been climbing mountains for fifteen years and you realize that you have to keep climbing mountains only you could have had some ropes or some crampons but nope, you're just clinging to the rock by you're fingertips and looking at the rope you COULD have had if anyone had asked you "does this seem like a walk in the park or like a slog up a hill?" And believed your answer when you were ten.

I can read time *now.* if you give me a second and understand that I'll get it wrong the first time, at least, I cam tell you what the clock says NOW because I've had 30 years of getting made fun of over it and it's expected and people treat you like an idiot if you can't read a clock. So I can pass your test with the clocks NOW but there's a whole bunch of infrastructure that I need to make that happen and apparently most people don't need that? So can I have some help?

"Why would you need help? You can read time perfectly well."

And your brain is a Rube Goldberg machine full of marbles and dominoes and apparently other people can just add the numbers without setting up a chute and a counterweight but nobody told you that so you keep feeding ever more complicated inputs into your contraption and eventually it collapses and people are just like "if you could do geometry by hand algebra should be easy, you just aren't trying" and that's about when you decide that failure is an acceptable outcome, actually, and your parents are disappointed in your wasted potential forever after.

And in spite of the narrative of "teachers drugged all the kids in the 90s" ADHD is significantly underdiagnosed, largely because the symptoms for the diagnostic criteria were the typical symptoms reported in hyperactive-type boys (boys with inattentive type ADHD were less likely to get diagnosed as children and girls with hyperactive symptoms are often criticized for being disruptive as chatterboxes instead of through physicality - boys with hyperactive type adhd are just most likely to present the kinds of symptoms that get them a diagnosis as well as detention, girls with both types and boys with inattentive type are more likely to be seen as minor discipline issues with inconsistent grades)

It doesn’t appear to be very well studied and people don’t seem to take it seriously because they’re like “well of course kids think it’s hard to learn music, it’s like learning a new alphabet” but apparently there are just a bunch of kids quietly writing “AAACDBE AAABBCC AAADCBE” in their notebooks and singing the letters to the tune in their heads and playing along to that because they get told to just try harder (and then they do by literally retranscribing the music when no one is watching).

Also hey, while we’re here: If you were a kid or if you are an adult with “stupid hands” and it takes hours and hours and hours of practice to learn how to fret one chord, like, more hours than it takes normal people, like you’ve stopped playing guitar several times because you can’t teach your stupid hands to play the guitar (or to make the signs, or to hold the crochet hook right, or to chop the onion) and you’re clumsy (though you might have fantastic reflexes sometimes - like you catch a random ball flying at your head out of nowhere and then trip over your own feet) look up “dyspraxia.”

People just learning to add learn by counting. People just learning music learn by going through the notes and writing down the letters above.

I took the same math class from Mr. Nichols two years in a row. Zero period my sophomore year, Second period my junior year. If I wanted the IB diploma I had to take calculus before I graduated and I really wanted the IB diploma, so I had to pass Honors Advanced Algebra II.

The first year I got a C+ my first semester and a D+ (69.5%, c’mon, you could have rounded up to a C-) my second semester.

The second year I came in to do homework before school started (my sister was in Band and Mr. Nichols got to school at 6:22 am* so I could sit in his class for 40 minutes all by myself and get help with my homework), I came into his classroom at lunch (to get help with some of the stuff that I’d messed up on the homework anyway), and I made sure to do all the extra credit and make up every test I missed.

First Semester: B+ Second Semester: D+ (at exactly 69.5% again)

I ended up taking Mr. Nichols Basic Algebra I class in summer school to get the math credits I needed to graduate (112%!)

Mr. Nichols was super nice about this all, by the way, he really really wanted me to pass his class and he tried really really hard to help me but he was a dude who had graduated high school at 16, completed his BA in math by 20, and had an emergency credential by 21 - I think he was 23 when I was in his class the first time - that was not a teacher who was equipped with a strong background in pedagogy and a firm understanding of learning disabilities in students who were just a few years younger than he was.

I guess my point is that there’s “stubbornly sticking at” and there’s “completely blocked by” points in learning a skill and at some point the people who are teaching this stuff at least should be able to tell the difference.

“Student who is uninterested in moving beyond the basics of this skill” and “student who is spending three and a half hours on this skill each day and is not making progress” are very separate things and I know music teachers and math teachers and reading teachers probably aren’t seeing each kid that much and aren’t able to give that much focused attention to each kid but this is on the parents too.

If your kid is working at a skill they are interested in and spending time on and they can’t move forward that’s the time to ask some questions instead of to tell your kid they can’t carry a tune in a bucket.

We should probably let KIDS know what symptoms of learning disabilities are and have them fill out a rubric once a year or something.

“This is difficult for everyone else too, I’m just especially bad at it and a failure” is a lot easier to believe if you’re never presented with contrary evidence.