Consider what a child with ADHD might write
in a diary…
I’ll
Do Better Tomorrow
Mom's yelling that
I need to turn out the light, but I know I'm supposed to write this diary thing
for Dr. Baker. He says that if I write about what was good and what was bad every
day, then he can help me more. He says that I'll be able to figure out how to
use strategies to help myself during the day (WGBH
Educational Foundation, 2002). Dr. Baker is a behavioral psychologist; I've
been going to Dr. Baker for a while now, ever since I was told that I have
ADHD. ADHD means that I have trouble staying focused on the right things at the
right times, that I look like I'm not following directions or listening, and
that I forget stuff a lot. Every year, it seems, teachers have been telling my
parents the same things: "if Jon would just try harder" or "Jon
needs to take time to do his work better" or "Jon constantly
distracts the class by interrupting" (Friend & Bursuck,
2009, p. 282). Dr. Baker told me that I shouldn't feel bad about all those
things the teachers have said because it wasn't like I was choosing to act that
way. So he told me to do this diary so that he can help me see what happens
each day and what I can do to help myself -- he calls it learning coping
skills.
Today started out like any other; mom knocks on the door
and wakes me up...then ten minutes later, she comes to my door and finds me
sitting on the floor zoning. She yells get going or I won't get breakfast, and
I look around me at the pile of clothes on the floor and reach for a shirt and
a pair of pants. I know she's going to take one look at me and ask if I'm
wearing clean clothes; the fact is, I don't know if they're clean or not...I
try to remember to put the clean ones away and the dirty ones in the basket, but
most of the time, most of my clothes lay in a heap on my floor. Mom
says she has to choose her battles and pretty much leaves my room alone.
Sometimes when mom finds me zoning, she just says "focus;" that's
kind of been our code word since I was in pre-school. She even taught my
teachers to whisper or mouth the word to me if they
found me zoning in class. Now that I'm in middle school, though, mom is
less patient and just yells.
Anyway, I walk to school and hang out in the library before
school; I don't have many friends at school, but a few of them hang out in the
library too. Most kids think I get in trouble too much or say I'm dumb and
don't want to hang out with me. My friends in the library are okay with me
and we usually talk about computer games. If I didn't have to go to
school, I would be so high up in WOW (World of Warcraft) by
now; on Saturday, I did a three-hour dungeon run with
my guild members...we rocked that raid! My guild is so cool; they always
say "lol" after everything I say...they're really
my real friends. When I told Mr. Roy, my history teacher, about the
dungeon run, he looked at me and said how on earth do you
play a game for three hours when you can't listen to me for ten minutes! I
guess he doesn't get it...WOW is different. Maybe if Mr. Roy would break up his
talking with a raid, well, I mean, like a group thing where we talk with people
near us and...hey, yeah, I know...like today in class he was talking about the
industrial revolution...what if he let us form groups and come up with our own
industry and see if we could make it work and how long we could make it work
and we had to make sure we were working with the other industries and no one
could just sit and everyone had a job...well, I think I wouldn't zone so much
if we did stuff like that in class (Weinfeld,
Barnes-Robinson, Jeweler & Shevitz, 2002, p.
226).
After history, I went to math...I hate math. Every year I
get a D, if I'm lucky. The teacher usually thinks I'm lazy because I don't
always do the homework; sometimes, though, I did the homework but I couln't find it. Now, mom makes me take a
"Planner" to school so that I can write down all my assignments --
I've had three of those planners this year and it's only January -- I try to
keep it in my backpack, but then I get in trouble for not using it, so I take
it out when I'm supposed to be writing something in it and when it's time to
leave class I don't have time to put it back in the backpack and I just carry
it with all the other books or papers that I don't have time to put away and
the next thing you know, it's gone...along with the papers too, come to think
of it. Mom just keeps getting me a new one and we start over. She says that I
live "in the moment and plan to improve later" (Lovecky, 2004, p. 184). Dr. Baker says that it will become
a habit to use it, but I've been trying for almost a year and I still don't do
it right.
Mrs. Michaels showed us something in computer class that I
want to use; she showed us how Google calendar lets you put stuff into it and
you can color-code the things so like all my assignments for computers
could be in blue (because I like blue) and all of my math assignments
would be in orange (because I hate orange!). I told Dr. Baker about Google and
he said he wants to see an example next week; he says that the color code could
help if it helps me see the differences in the classes, like how much work
there is in one class and how much in another, but that it won't work if I
just like to see lots of color (Zentall & Kruczek, 1988, p. 357). I think I know what he means
because in English, my teacher does these power points with every line a
different color...oh, and then when each line
comes onto the screen, it shoots in with a bell or beep or flash...sometimes I
just sit there predicting how the next line is going to come in and forget to
listen to what she's telling us to write down. I hate taking notes in class. I
can be sitting there, all set to take really good notes like the teacher wants,
and then maybe the kid next to me asks me for paper so I open my binder to get
a piece of paper out and then three other pieces of paper fall out and I have
to pick them up and stuff them into that pocket-thing so they don't get lost
and then the teacher gets mad and asks why I'm not paying attention and I was
but that kid needed a piece of paper. If I didn't give the kid the paper, I
wouldn't have gotten in trouble; but if I didn't give the kid the paper, he
would call me a jerk. I'm tired of being called jerk.
Every day some kid calls me a jerk. Sometimes a kid calls
me a jerk like today because I accidentally hit him with my backpack, but I
didn't see him...I heard the bell ring for lunch and jumped out of my seat so I
could get to the library right away to get one of the computers
before they were all taken and when I swung around, the kid was there. Of
course, he yelled at me so everyone heard, and the teacher made me sit down for
being rude...and so of course I got to the library late...that was okay,
though, because the librarian sometimes talks with me and
today she let me put books back on the shelves for her...until I forgot that
they had to be in order by the number, not just the author's name...and
then she got frustrated with me because she says I don't pay
attention to details (Friend & Bursuck, 2009, p.
282).
At least today
wasn't as bad as yesterday. Gosh, when the counselor, Mrs. Bright, showed mom
that graph with all the bars and said that the bars showed all the classes and
how much I am failing, I felt like a real jerk then (Collins, 2003, p. xii). Mom didn't get mad,
though...she told Mrs. Bright about this diary thing I'm doing and some
other things that Dr. Baker is doing. Mrs. Bright didn't seem too
interested...she doesn't think I can change, I can tell. I hope I can change. I
don't like feeling like a jerk. And I don't think I'm really that dumb like
some kids think; some stuff in school is really fun like when we got to do
reports on marine life. I can tell you everything there is to know about
elephant seals, and that's cool, because most kids can only tell you that
elephant seals are big and ugly. Dr. Baker says that my elephant seal report
shows that I just don't learn the way that some
teachers teach and that I might be able to teach the teachers some things
(Collins, 2003, p. 27). He told my mom that some teachers do what he called
"ability profiling," and I heard him tell her that it means that some
teachers won't give me a chance. He was just talking to my mom then, and I was
in the hall waiting, but I heard and remembered what he said...I liked what he
said because it made me feel like it isn't always my fault when I get in
trouble...some teachers just think I choose to forget and to be messy
and not write like they want me to (Collins, 2003, p. 26).
Man, mom just yelled that I have to turn off the light and
I didn't even finish this diary thing...I didn't write about all my classes or
even get to after school...man, I hope Dr. Baker isn't mad at me for this. I'll
try to do it better tomorrow.
References
Collins, K. M. (2003). Ability
profiling and school failure: One child's struggle to be seen as competent.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Friend, M., & Bursuck,
W. D. (2009). Including students
with special needs: A practical guide for classroom teachers (5th ed.). Upper
Saddle River, NJ:
Merrill.
Lovecky, D. V. (2004). Different
minds: Gifted children with ad/hd, asperger syndrome, and other learning deficits. London: Jessica Kingsley.
Weinfeld, R., Barnes-Robinson, L., Jeweler, S., & Shevitz, B. (2002). Academic programs for
gifted and talented/learning disabled students. Roeper
Review, 24(4), 226+.
WGBH Educational Foundation. (2002). Misunderstood minds.
Retrieved March 13, 2009
from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/misunderstoodminds/index.html
Zentall, S. S., & Kruczek, T.
(1988). The Attraction of color for active attention-problem children. Exceptional Children,
54(4), 357+.
The above written by
Laurie Hagberg
March 15, 2009
