Introduction
My son’s graduation forced me to confront the challenges he faced as a gifted student with ADHD in public school.
This is the start of a blog. See Index and FAQ for more about it.
Contents
Graduation
My world fell apart when my son graduated from high school.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. There were plenty of signs. I had insomnia, was failing to work, and would forget to eat for days on end. But, “He who has a secret must keep it secret that he has a secret to keep.” My unconscious didn’t let me know that it had a secret it was keeping.
My son had trouble in school. In grade 1, he was identified as gifted, with severe ADHD. At first medication helped. But we had to give that up because of the side effects on his appetite and sleep. He was put on an IEP in grade 5. But he continued going downhill. He was well on his way to becoming just another victim of the Curse of the Gifted.
His home situation did not help. My ex and I started a bad divorce while my son was in grade 3. This involved conflict, money problems, and moves. In time it included my remarriage, a new step family, continued conflict between his parents, and so on.
Grade 8 changed that. I got him into to the UCI Child Development School. That is now The Craig School, and I highly recommend it. Grade 9 saw a prep school that featured personal flexibility. Other students used that flexibility to accommodate demanding extracurriculars. My son used it to be able to catch up from being years behind academically. Which led him to where he was. The SAT and ACT tests both put him in the top 1%. He already had 8 AP college credits. And he was going to a good UC school.
He was the happiest young man that you ever saw at his graduation. I knew what it took him to get there, and was proud to be his father. It should have been a perfect event.
Crisis
I was very happy for about 30 minutes. Then the school asked me to give a testimonial. During that, I mentioned my son’s experience in public school. I was hit with a wave of emotion.
Years earlier, my subconscious suppressed my feelings about public school. That let me continue functioning as a father. My subconscious declared the crisis over during the graduation ceremony. My son would never again face public school. It was time to face my feelings.
This caused me a mental breakdown. More precisely, I went into severe hyperfocus. Before, I could not think about what happened. Now, I had to make sense of it as best I could.
The Original Problem
Here is are the realizations that I had originally suppressed.
Classroom discipline is hard.
Ask any parent who has taken a group of kids to the mall how hard controlling them is. Then ask if they could handle 20 in a classroom. They generally can’t.Classroom discipline uses hidden verbal attacks.
Suzette Elgin’s The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense is the classic on hidden verbal attacks. It can feel natural to say, “If you loved me, you would help me.” Your loved one then wants to help. Neither of you is aware that you accused the other of not loving you. We just react.
Suzette’s book shows that these are everywhere, and come in many forms. She also explains how to defend against them. The defense is to make the attacker aware. For example, “For how long have you thought that I didn’t love you?” Saying it just once brings it to the attacker’s attention. And now the awareness of the attack stops the attacker from using it.
I read Suzette’s book. Then I noticed a teacher successfully using a nasty hidden verbal attack on me. I drew what I still believe is the correct conclusion. She must do the same thing in the classroom! She must do it to my son!
This brought frustration that I suppressed. Having suppressed it, I failed to draw the next conclusion. People can’t use hidden verbal attacks if they know about it. So she can’t be doing it on purpose. And so my frustration transformed into anger at the teacher. I was less successful in suppressing that.My son was under constant attack.
Intelligent children often ask inconvenient questions. Children with ADHD are often disruptive. My son had both problems, and was unable to tolerate medication. This made him the teacher’s constant problem. The teacher’s natural response was basic classroom discipline. Namely, hidden verbal attacks.
My son couldn’t precisely explain the attacks that he received. But he knew the cause. He regularly came home in tears, asking questions like, “Why does my teacher hate me so much? Why am I always getting verbal jabs?”
I understood. But my voluntary divorce agreement left my ex in charge of school decisions. I was powerless to help. This added to my suppressed anger and frustration.This caused my son academic problems.
According to the SATs and ACTs, my son’s abilities are now in the top 1%. He loves math so much that he wants to be a math major. But he gained no math skills in public school during grades 4, 5, 6, and 7.
How would you explain that?
I think that his mind was shut down from stress. He blamed his stress on the fact that, “Mean teachers say nasty things to me.”
I don’t know that they were mean. They just needed to solve the real problems that he caused.
A surprising number of gifted children drop out of school. How many of them have similar challenges to my son?
The Project
My first response was to organize my thoughts. Writing has always helped me. So I posted anonymously on a private forum. I saw that I hit a nerve from people’s responses.
I was inspired to take on a project. Namely, figure out a complete picture of what I had realized, organize it, and present it as a unified whole. I thought that this might take 2 days.
It did not. The act of writing created new realizations. I reorganized to fit that in, and made new connections. My project was growing faster than I could write. This negative progress inspired me to more effort. Hyperfocus allowed me to neglect trivialities like eating and sleeping. It compelled me to ignore more important things as well. Like my wife’s requests, and the pain of continuing to pace on fractured feet.
After about a week, my wife told me,
You need to sleep. You’re well on your way to octopus land. This is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to treat it like one.
Octopus land was a reference to my sister’s psychotic break. Like me, she went through a period of stress and lack of sleep. My wife was right. I wasn’t far from that.
The weird logic of hyperfocus responded. I immediately took a nap. I woke up with ideas about how to balance my project with the basic responsibilities of life. This enabled me to take care of myself, while I continued my project. My wife told me that I always sounded logical, but now I began to sound sane. I ran my ideas by others, and my project continued to grow.
This Blog
This blog is what my project has become.
This is not my first attempt. But in my previous attempts, I kept the idea of producing an organized presentation. This lead me to keep revising, reorganizing, and adding. Eventually I’d start a new editing pass from the beginning, then fall into the same trap.
Now I’m declaring that perfect is the enemy of good. I will limit how much I put in each post. Missing points that should have been in a past post, will require a new post. Maybe I can organize it after it is all written? I don’t know that, time will have to tell.
What can I say?
I have at least 6 months of material. Most in it has long been known somewhere. But I don’t think it has ever been put together in the way that plan to. I will benefit from having gotten it out of my head, and into writing. It is my hope that others find it interesting. Despite positive reactions to early drafts, I don’t know that this will happen.
The path started with issues around education and ADHD. But that is a relatively small part of what I have to talk about. My biggest topics are:
Why we hide things from ourselves.
The personal cost of doing so.
How to do it less.
How to act on what we decide to change.
The societal impact of people’s inability to think.
How that impacts us individually.
If you choose to follow along, thank you.
Why Pseudonymous?
While my son supports my project, he also would like to keep his privacy.
This project began with my having faced some of the ways that I feel I failed as a father. Failing to respect my son’s wishes would be another failure.
And therefore I have chosen to present this pseudonymously.
Tests and Deeper Dives
Skepticism is good. Doubly so when discussing epiphanies that follow insanity.
So be skeptical. This section points you at resources from which you can form your own opinions.
Read The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense. Then decide for how common you think hidden verbal attacks are. Do you think that teachers might plausibly use them? I will save my full reasoning for a future post. So for now, you need only decide if that is evidence of my continued insanity.
I plan to address the state of American education in a someone distant future post. Meanwhile, I’ll just comment that Common Core coincided with my son’s journey through public school. Reform movements regularly sweep through education, and I think that they’re generally a bad thing. If one happens to get something right, the next movement will surely ruin it. If you’re interested in the state of education, I recommend digging in right away rather than waiting to hear what I have to say.
The IEP process went poorly. My son failed to learn basic skills, at great taxpayer expense. In an appropriate environment, he excelled at below the average cost for his local school district. There’s a good case to be made that failing to teach basic skills to a gifted child means that you’re doing something wrong.
Some of this really wasn’t the local school’s fault. For example mainstreaming is required by law. You must keep the kid in class if you can. So one of my son’s interventions was an adult aid with a full-time job of constantly redirecting my son’s attention. This only seemed to add misery to his inability to focus. Other parents across the country that I’ve heard from received the same intervention, with the same bad result.
I suggested that they take my son out of the class, and turn the aid into a tutor. Appropriate pacing would have kept my son’s attention. And my son would have no longer disrupted other students. But as long as they thought that their intervention was appropriate, they couldn’t legally do that.
The IEP did one good thing. It reduced homework. Homework is particularly hard on those with ADHD. But read The Homework Myth if you want to see the case that we should be giving far less homework to everyone else as well.
Moving on, I claimed that my son could not tolerate medication. While medicated, his BMI was always below the bottom 1% on the height/weight chart, and he showed signs of malnourishment. He also suffered chronic lack of sleep. Which creates symptoms mirroring ADHD. We had this experience with multiple medications, tried over several years.
Doctors agreed with our choice to take him off of medication. People in the education system never stopped objecting to it.
In grade 12, he asked to try medication again. He found that it helps on special occasions. But using it for a week is bad, and for 2 weeks is a disaster. Medications are not a silver bullet that works for everyone.
About The Craig School. They work miracles. I have nothing good to say about any other behavioral approach we tried. And nothing bad to say about what Dr. Sabrina Schuck created. I won’t return to this topic for a long time, but I will have a lot to say about it when I do.
About my son and math. He was at grade level in grade 3, when Common Core started. In grade 5, a placement test put his skills at grade 3. With private tutoring, outside of school, we got him up to grade level. In grade 9, he tested at a grade 5 level. It is on this basis that I say he learned no math in school from grades 4-7.
In high school, it took a lot of work for him to catch up in math. That included dealing with severe math anxiety, that I blame on public school. His enthusiasm for math started at the end of grade 11.
About ADHD itself. There’s a ton written about it, and I have no particular recommendations about where to begin. Hyperfocus itself is a seriously mixed blessing. When compelled by it, I can work apparent miracles. But at a great personal cost. My family history shows that it can cause a psychotic break due to sleep deprivation. But this is the only time that I’ve come close to that scenario.
I will be happy to answer further questions in the comments.