Deliverance from homework hell

ADHD: A Path to Success
Chapter 3 of first 6 Chapters

A Personal Experience of ADHD

(continued)

With great effort, I brought myself back to the tedious, repetitive task at hand — writing another sentence. A large cup of espresso coffee helped increase my willful control over my attention. With the coffee, I temporarily regained the power to make my mind do the required task for a little longer.

Finally, after hours of this struggle, I logged onto the Internet. In just a few seconds, my attention and energy improved dramatically, though I had not changed my position at the very same computer, the very same desk, next to the very same window.

My attention went unbroken for the next hour as I searched the Internet for things that interested me.

Thinking back over this scenario, I see my experience exactly parallels that of the ADHD child. I was forcing myself to do a dreaded task, much as a teacher forces a child to do his work in the classroom.

My writing the computer system was very similar to the ADHD child doing math or spelling. Both of our tasks required continuous, sequential attention to detail. Both were repetitive of a similar process with detailed variations. Both were boring because of the repetition, and both of us were required to do the task to achieve a goal.

Though I could keep my body at the task just as the teacher keeps the child at his desk, the unpleasantness of both our tasks soon conditioned our attention to switch to more interesting things. For the child it might be staring out the window, playing with an eraser, talking to a friend in the next row, or wandering around the classroom. For me, it was staring out the window, making a phone call, and reading a magazine.

We both achieved relief from these boring tasks by automatically, against my conscious intention or the teacher's will, learning to avoid the aversive tasks by shifting our attention away from them — "spacing out" or becoming distracted. Relative to the tasks assigned to us, we each had an "attention" deficit and were being "hyperactive."

In fact, my cup of espresso worked just like the child's dose of Ritalin (or Dexedrine or Cylert). Ritalin allows the child to focus his attention on his work in order to please his teacher. Caffeine helps me to force my mind to do what I want it to do, as opposed to helplessly following my learned defense patterns and not performing a tedious task that I don't want to do.

Both Ritalin and caffeine help us redirect our attention back to the task we intentionally wish to address. Both Ritalin and caffeine are powerful central nervous system stimulants.

(As a sidelight, before stimulant drugs came into widespread use, mothers of ADHD children discovered that a cup or two of coffee in the morning would help their youngsters survive the morning hours in school.)

My time on the Internet also worked like a child's time on Nintendo. As many parents know, ADHD children can attend to Nintendo for hours, even though they may have been very distracted from the school work that immediately preceded it. My ability to focus my attention rebounded in exactly the same way when I logged on to the Internet.

The Internet and Nintendo share a common feature in that they have no negative history that make a person want to "space out" instead of doing the needed work. At our chosen tasks our attention was flawless. It would seem to take a very peculiar neurological deficit to account for such sudden variation in both of our attentional patterns.

Do I have ADHD? I doubt it as much as I doubt that most kids labeled as such have ADHD, at least as it is normally conceptualized as a neurological disorder. We have to give up the idea that the ADHD child's mental processes are strange, unusual, defective or inferior. They are just one more variation of the perceptual distortion that all of us use everyday to survive in an often-crazy world.

Your Personal Experience of ADHD

One way Zen masters teach meditation is through painting. But before a Zen master will let you paint a flower, he insists that you become the flower.

You must meditate on it until you no longer just see it. You must experience it and know it as part of you. Only after you understand the flower in that depth, does the Zen master believe can you meaningfully paint the flower.

This is even truer when you are trying to "paint" the transient nature of attention. Not only is cognitive understanding not enough, it is, in fact, not even useful.

Let us try an experiment that will help us move beyond a mere intellectual understanding of the distractibility of an ADHD child.

Stop reading now and think back over your own experience of having to do some boring, repetitive task for a very long time.

Remember how easy it was to space out or become distracted.

Did you ever try some coffee to help get you back on task? How did it work?

Remember how easy it was to focus your attention on other tasks that captured your interest.

Compare your attention under these two conditions — boring task vs. interesting task. If you can do this, you have walked in the ADHD child's shoes, and you have taken a major step in helping them.

Personal History of ADHD

My formal learning career started off poorly. I am told I never stopped moving. I took everything apart — a toy, a clock, or the house.

Though my teachers seemed to like me, I was always in conflict with my peers. I was a big kid, and my clumsiness put me on the short end of such fights.

My issues were not confined to school, like most kids with school and learning difficulties. I had more important things on my mind -- my parents' fighting. Thinking about their battles made it hard for me to focus on school.

Even though their fights were limited to strong words, their hostilities preoccupied my mind. My emotional arousal was too high for any real learning to take place. I was worried and anxious. These conflicts with students and parents took precedence over school. Soon I fell behind my peers.

This started a destructive chain of events. I began to get negative feedback from students and teachers. This in turn made me feel anxious when I had to answer in class or was put in any evaluative situation.

My repeated failure at academic tasks, particularly reading, sparked raw terror in me. In elementary school, we had regular reading circles.

Six or eight kids would sit around in a circle taking turns reading.

I would sit there in a cold sweat as my turn came closer and closer. It was my teacher's version of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum." The reading blade kept coming closer and closer.

To try to save face, I would count the number of children before my turn to read and try to calculate which paragraph I would be expected to read. Then I would go over and over this paragraph trying to work out every word. I would try to memorize it because I knew I was so anxious that there was no way I could actually read it in front of the other kids and teacher.

Despite and because of my high anxiety efforts, I usually botched even the simplest reading task. I became even more humiliated, embarrassed, angry, depressed, and degraded. I could think of few things in life worse than reading.

What was more sinister than Poe was that the reading blade did not kill you. You would have to face the reading blade the same way tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day for what seemed the rest of your life.

Several times a week a remedial reading teacher would take me and some of the other "dummies" out of the classroom for an hour or so, to practice our reading.

I was always aware of being in the "sparrow" reading group because everyone knew that it was for the dumb kids. (In spite of adult efforts, kids quickly pick up on the real facts.) And yet, I cannot remember any different procedures being used by this teacher than had been used by my regular classroom teacher.

Though her efforts were valiant and well intended, they were just another dose of the same old toxic solution that I eventually learned was the source of my problems. I made little progress.

How could I? To me, reading was associated with school, reading groups, reading out loud, peer ridicule, and poor self-image.

The harder the teacher tried, the more upset I became, the worse I did, the dumber I got. I saw this as just another opportunity to face the terror of the reading blade. I began to fight passively the very process of what felt like stuffing things down my throat. I did not learn to read until I was in the seventh grade.

Eventually, I did learn to read, not because of more sophisticated efforts by my teachers, but because I developed a driving need to know, literally. I was interested in hot rods.

I wanted to know about the most technical aspects of cam timing, fuel injection, and suspension systems.

Since no one in my world, including my car mechanic father, had an in-depth knowledge about these things, the only way to learn about them was to read.

At first, the reading was difficult. I picked through articles word by word, read captions on pictures, and guessed a lot. Despite the difficulty, I was powerfully motivated to decode this information system that held the key to what I wanted to know.

Within two weeks, I was reading well. And reading was no longer the terrifying school subject that made me feel incompetent. In fact, it was part of a world that had nothing to do with school. It was something I did alone at home for hours, pouring over hot rod books and magazines. Alone at home, reading was easy and fun. Alone at home, it became my bridge from one world to another, simply through my urgent need to know about hot rods.

Also on my own, away from school, unbeknownst to my peers, parents or teachers, I had worked out my own simple system of trigonometry. My methods even included basic look-up tables for a variety of what I later realized were standard trig functions. This was my own private system of calculation not a trigonometry that I had learned in school. Thank goodness I did not even know a discipline of trigonometry existed. If I had made the association with math in school, likely this calculation system would have been stymied by the transfer of negative emotions from school.

Rather than this calculation system coming out of school assignments, it rose out of a curious observation. One night while riding in the back seat of my parent's car-watching search lights bounce off of a low cloud ceiling. I wanted to figure out a way to determine how high the clouds were by measuring the angle of the searchlight and the distance between the searchlight and the spot directly under where the light bounced off the cloud. It was a very practical concern, not a math homework problem that drove my thinking. The first round of calculation was on the fog on the back window of my parent's car. Thank goodness it was a large back window. That happened when I was in the fifth grade.

My newly acquired skills also began to have payoffs outside my bedroom. The formerly dumb kid now had the keys to unlock the rest of the school tasks. Those were the days of Evelyn Woods teaching JFK speed reading, and I became adept at speed-reading. By the end of high school, I had become the fastest reader in the school. This did not mean that all academic hurdles had been solved with one fell swoop, but a giant step had been made. I was easily getting A's and B's, but I still felt like the dumb kid.

I am sure Mr. Hurd, my 8th grade English teacher would have been shocked by my improved grades. In order to take Spanish in high school I had to get permission from Mr. Hurd. When I presented him with the form to sign he took me to a large cloak area in back of the classroom so we could talk privately. I will always remember what he said, "I will sign this because you are a nice kid. But, as soon as it gets too hard, drop it. If you work hard we think you can graduate from high school." Then he signed the form. I was hurt, angry, determined, and confused. A sense of determination welled in me, and stayed with me for years there after. I would show him.

To you, Mr. Hurd, it is "Doctor Weathers."

I only went to college because a high school counselor noticed I was getting good grades and called me into his office. When he suggested that I consider going to college, I had no idea where to find one. I was so naive about education that I was shocked when, during my junior year of high school, the school superintendent got his doctorate and then did not open an office to practice medicine. I didn't know there were any people other than physicians who had the title of doctor.

Despite the gains, despite the fact that I now have my own doctorate degree and am called Dr. Weathers, the scars from the reading circle are still within. To this day, I avoid reading aloud if at all possible. But reading and trig were exciting mental adventures for me. And these isolated contemplations were to me what Nintendo is to the current crop of ADHD kids.

Like Nintendo, my trig and reading about hot rods had no relationship to my failure experiences. There was no negative learning history associated with them. Without the anxiety, I could learn quickly. In a similar way, the treatment proposed in this book, CAER, extinguishes the anxiety, so that formerly ADHD children can learn easily.

ADHD Discussion Group - In order to begin offering help quickly, after ordering you will be emailed your FREE ADHD Discussion Group membership. This group limited to parents of ADHD and Aspergers children. This is a like-minded group because all members have read my book and are struggling with similar issues.