A little history - Grade School

I have known for years that something was different about the way that I operated. I always had a difficult time in school, work and home where others seemed to find things easy and even enjoyable I found difficulty, pain and frustration.

Throughout my educational experience ADHD was never mentioned, it was before ADHD was all the rage. I remember my Mom pushing to get me tested by the school system to find out why I was not doing well and the countless hours of testing and counselors who tried to find out what was wrong with me. The tests for the most part showed I was ahead of the game in most areas but lacked motivation.

I was put into an english class for learning disabled kids and had to take some classes in jr. high on how to study. These were mostly to appease my mother and show the school was doing something although it really didn't make sense to me and was a source of frustration and self degredation.

In Highschool I found a progrma where I was allowed to go to work for a few hours in place of classes and that really helped a lot. Later I transitined to a different program offering college classes at the local jr. college where I carried a B average, something I had never done in grade school.

Throughout my school years I had a really hard time with classes involving formulas or rules such as math and english, but I did pretty well in social studies and other elective classes.

I never could never remember the rules or sequence required to get to the right answer. I could look at an equasion and know about what the answer should be just by using common sense, but to follow the formula or remember it was beyond my capabilities. I remember my parents and teachers being very frustrated when it seemed that I was refusing to learn what to them was a simple concept. My 9th grade algebra teacher passed me on effort alone because I cam e to school early every morning for about 2 months for tutoring althogh I still failed the class if you looked at my scores.

As I look back people were trying to help me, but nobody really knew what to do. Here was this bright kid who seemed uninterested and refused to pay attention. They couldn't really consider me learning disabled because I was testing beyond my grade level in most areas, I just was blocked when it came to learing.

It was a really frustrating time for me personally I dealt with depression and didn't like myself very much. I was generally not ver social and the few friends I had were screw-ups who started getting into realy trouble in high-school which lead to a parting of ways and isolation. There were no girlfriends in school, I didn't have the confidence to approach girls and probably put across an air of sadness that wasn't very appealing.

Eventially I graduated and went on to college, we'll talk about that later.