Childhood Memories

What was it like for me in school?
I remember one time in math class, there were 5 or 6 of us kids sitting around another student who would hold up flash cards of multiplication, and we had to blurt out the answer before anyone else. I don't think I got one of the cards first, or second, or third. I think that was the first time I recall thinking about my thinking process, and why it was different from the other students.
Why did it take me a while to process these new math concepts? This is now a theme that has driven my thinking since that point. When I looked at the numbers, I questioned their overall relation to each other, not only the predefined question we were supposed to be answering. I was having a hard time limiting my mind to the constraints the class was putting on me. It took me quite a while of thinking about why 5 and 6 where so similar, one number off, yet different. One was even, one was odd, 6 is a perfect number, having the same numbers, 1 2 and 3 that when added equal it, and when multiplied equal it as well. I had to let my mind wander through some of these concepts before it would settle down on the concept I needed to learn.
One thing that always frustrated me in math, was that I always wanted to know what the other buttons on the calculator did, but no one could explain it to me conceptually. In fact, their inability to do so, led me to believe that most people did not really understand what was going on with these higher functions. It has only been recently that I have been intrigued once again to some of the oddities of numbers that I was presented with back in the day.
School was quite frustrating back then. I did not yet have the ability to explain things in a cohesive manner. I would start talking and my subconscious would interrupt me with wonderful ideas, and I would start talking about those, or simply stare off in wonderment of these ideas that I could not yet explain or focus down into an intelligible level. Thankfully my mom home schooled me for the first three years, so she was able to encourage my creativity while still honing my inability to focus on one idea.


For the record, I am learning html so as to publish a website that will cover many ideas that are foundational to what I want to say. As I write this post, I am realizing I have not defined what ADHD is like for me, how I have overcome the obstacles while maintaining the positive attributes. Tons of things I would like people to know about. This is the frustrating thing about ADHD, I see many things at once, and can't decide which should come first. Just for fun, here is what I mean
-ADHD as a child
-Why I am glad I took ritilan for a short time, but also hate it.
-What ADHD is like in different situations
(must go off on this one)
-Driving
-Thrift Stores
-Reading Books
-The classroom
-Sitting in Starbucks
-Why brief respites of focused attention help to refocus attention
(This is the point at which I realize my stream of consciousness could go on forever, but where I also see it segwaying into several more subtopics, or back to my original point. I guess I will take it back to the original point, but that is not quite as much fun, I guess I will have more fun later, I will take you on a real ADHD trip... ha, ha, ha.)
So what am I doing about all of these ideas. I am slowly but surely working on writing a book about learning and ADHD, I keep journals that are highly unstructured but through natural selection of random ideas are becoming more structured, and this list could go on for quite a while as well. I hope this blog will forum for people to ask questions, give feedback on these ideas, as well as helping me refine my ideas to further help other people like me. We shall see where these ideas take us. My next post will have to deal with some of what I experience with ADHD, hopefully broad enough to encompass the aforementioned specific examples.