My parents would come in talk to my teachers and nothing would change. I was smart but i got bored easily. Real easy. So after changing schools every year for five years i just gave up. My parents marriage was failing so they didnt notice and noone asked. I changed schools again at the beginning of my senior year and just forgot about everything before that. I graduated but just because none of the teachers knew me. I was really unsure about my us history class and that teached definately didnt know who i was. He said yeah i got no problems with you graduating.
I spent my summers working for my dad building homes and some general labor work. He didnt ask about school and i didnt want to talk about it. It worked out well. So basically noone knew there is no way i should have graduated. I hadnt read a single assignment in my english classes for 4 years. Noone noticed. It seems like a great tragedy to me. I went my whole life with noone realizing I had ADD.
This is still going on in our schools today. Teachers not noticing and children hoping they dont. I am not saying it is all the parents or the teachers or the children. I am sayin i used to print new report cards so my parents didnt know i was failing. my mom worked 80 hours a week my dad was a functionaing alcoholic. My teachers saw 200 kids a day. I didnt want to talk to them about it and I took the steps necessary to avoid those conversations. I dont think kids today have to try as hard as i did to avoid these conversations but who knows. I do think we need to change something drastically to avoid this from happening ever again and thats gonna be hard considering it happens every day in every school accross America.
This is going to take a major overhaul of our Education system. I think it will be time and money well spent. If we can take the time to sit with every student and do a learning exam and a priority exam and place our students accordingy. I believe a policy that puts a lifelong advisor with a student through his/her education will help create a schooling system that will bring America to the front of world education.
Imagine if teachers could maintain a 20 kid per room class and have each child converse once a week or month with an advisor. If we have our childrens scores and attendance on a website that is available to our advisors and parents and children. their will be constant trasparency for all those involved. I believe this transparecy with constant mandated minimum conversations between advisors and students will highly decrease drop out rates. This will also be a major blow to allowing children with ADD to make it through school with out ever knowing.
You may think what does it matter if a few children go through life not knowing they have ADD. Well these children are being cheated and pushed to the side as slackers. These same children can solve problems. World, political, economical, social all of these i can sit here and tell you how to fix. Not only that it is unsafe for these children to go unknown. Teens with ADD getting behind the wheel of a car without knowing they are predisposed to be bored with the task at hand. Teens with ADD are 4-5 times more likely to have speeding tickets accidents and get their license suspended.
You know our America is filled with many problems. Their is no silver bullet to solve any one of our American community problems. We can and we should take every opportunity available to us to fix our problems. I am not saying my ideas are the fix. I am saying my ideas are better than the current situation. If we can fix 2% of our problems every year this will be a great place in 20 years.
20 years is what we have to plan for.
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