Post-secondary or grade school.
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The chairs. My back hurt All. The.Time.
It’s impossible to learn in the midst of torture.
Not being able to take a “mental health” day off, in both high school and college. In high school my parents wouldn’t let me (though I don’t fault them for that), and in college it was hard to keep up if I even missed one lecture. As an adult with a job , if I need a day to decompress, I can decide to take off tomorrow and nobody can tell me no. In school it was hard to keep on going with the tank on empty.
Gym class. Why that exists in class format absolutely stumps me.
I thought so too, until i got to know someone who never had any decent physical education. It’s scary to see the lack of coordination and balance some adults can have.
Was it because of the lack of coordination or was that because of the lack of physical education? I know people like me who had that but never got anything out of it.
At the start of my freshman year, they hadn’t finished building the “new” gym, which was to be used for the gym classes, so the cheerleaders could practice in the old, big gym.
So the cheerleaders practice on one side of the old gym, and a bunch of horny teen idiots on the other. Dear God the shit they would say, unapologetic and just the worst; “i can see your pu$$y! Bitch just did the splits and left a hickey on the floor!”
Beyond “Hur dur”, this was straight up verbal assault. A few days after the worst of these comments, we were told to go to a portable classroom where we learned health crap out of a book, then i went up four flights of stairs to the actual health class.
No idea where the hell i was going with that, other than it seemed to be a way to tire us out, until the comments landed us in class, then it seemed just a way to keep us occupied until the gym teacher could follow her true, Lesbian Passion ®, girls volleyball coach.
That would happen to me just by waiting for the bus.
Math. I sucked at math since 3rd grade and that shit was a struggle all the way through college. I’m lucky i can even count, I swear to God. Had to pass THREE remedial math courses just to be allowed to take the course that counted for actual credit towards my degree. Lately I’ve been contemplating going back to college for a second degree, but I realized I’d have to take shit like pre-calculus for the degrees I’m looking at and I just don’t think I could do it. My brain is such a letdown.
Right there with you. Suffered with fractions in 4th grade, did okay from there until trig in high school (sophomore year?), then failed hard in calc 1 over the course of 5 undergrad tries. Finally got it, but damn, my brain could not handle the theoretical stuff. Maybe methods have changed in 20+ years, but that shit sits with you.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but in hindsight, not getting diagnosed with ADHD was the hardest part for me. I guess at the time, there were still a lot of misconceptions about it, so my parents and teachers never recognized it for what it was. Because I was placed in a “gifted and talented” program when I was young, my slipping grades were just attributed to laziness instead of a disorder. That spiraled into many other problems in school; failing classes, getting into trouble, and several lifelong anxieties that still follow me many years later.
Honestly, my whole life would probably have gone in a much different direction if I had actually gotten the help I needed as a kid. I don’t blame anybody for not recognizing it, but it does suck having slipped through the cracks like that.
No, no. Blame them. It’s ok to realize that it’s not your fault. As children, we’re placed in the safe and lovkng hands of those that raise us.
And when those hands are not only unsafe, but also incompetent, it’s perfectly natural to feel cheated at life.knowing that YOU are not the problem. Society picking those people to raise you is the problem.
It’s the reason I don’t have kids. I don’t feel like I’d raise kids the right way. I don’t want to ruin my kids life.
Your story sounds exactly like mine.
Yeah, I think a lot of us that grew up in the 90s/00s went through a very similar experience. Kids who excelled early were assumed to be advanced, but a lot of times that “advancement” doesn’t stick. And it’s compounded by the fact that those of us who went through this never really learned how to study; we were able to pick up on concepts very easily early on, so we never learned how to actually take notes or read material in a way that reinforced knowledge retention. We were able to get by with “skipping” the actual learning part.
So when we reached the grade level where we can no longer just effectively “wing it”, we’re trapped because we don’t know how to properly study, and teachers won’t teach you how because you “should have” already figured that out several grades ago, and if you passed those classes already then surely it’s because you knew how to study all along and are just getting lazy with it now, right?
This video by Dr K articulates this concept a lot better than I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUjYy4Ksy1E
I strongly recommend watching this if any of you were considered a “gifted” student. He touches on a lot of things that were very eye-opening and felt eerily similar to my own experience, so I feel like the things he talks about here probably apply to many of us.
That was really good! I saw how long it was and thought, I’ll give it a few minutes, but I sat through the whole thing.
I could definitely relate to a lot of what he said. And I’m going to steal his quote and make it my new mantra: “Dark Souls doesn’t care! (if your parents call the principal)”
I saw how long it was and thought, I’ll give it a few minutes, but I sat through the whole thing.
A lot of Dr K’s videos have this effect on me! He does a fantastic job of explaining things in a way that anyone can understand. He goes really deep into the psychology and neuroscience of everything, so I always come away from his videos feeling like I’ve actually learned something.
Indeed. It got worse as a got older and the rails were peeled away, peaking post college. It got easier as my wife and I divided tasks based on strengths. Got diagnosed 2 years ago when she mentioned she thought I might have adhd, brought on by my distractability around our toddler. It really makes the rest of my life understandable
How was the process of getting diagnosed for you? I tried seeking a diagnosis a while back, but was told that it would be difficult to do without any kind of prior assessments from childhood. With mental health being so poorly covered by insurance, I’ve been hesitant to go through a lengthy evaluation process.
It went fine? It involved filling out several forms including by parents or someone that knew me during childhood and I think a current one too which could be my wife. It was 3 sessions, an intro, the actual testing, and then going over the results. It was all remote for me. I believe I had to bring this up with my pcp first to get an order for testing. I got diagnosed at behavioral health clinic. Insurance covered it mostly, but my wife’s insurance is pretty good because she works for an Amazon subsidiary, so ymmv.
Now therapy and medication on the other side has been harder for me. First therapist didn’t seem to know anything about adhd (I went with a new place since the diagnosers didn’t have prescribing ability). I’ve been since then looking for something else but have been having trouble finding a place that prescribes/accepts my insurance/I just lose focus and stop looking for a few months, gee. I found two a few months ago, but one said prescribing appointments are a year out and the other said a provider would contact me but I don’t think had yet, and yeah since then I have not made an effort to contact, I really should
Sorry for the rambling and inexact details, memory issues 😜
Edit: I think the testing session was 2 hours? Also it was interesting to see some memory games during testing that I thought I was good at, and as it progressed I just completely disintegrated in my ability to do it
The 80km walk, in the snow and burning sun, bare feet on broken glass, uphill in both direction. - My dad
Grade school, just how slow and boring it was. Waiting, nothing to do.
High school - bullies, the stupid rules, and also trying to write essays in the days before the Internet.
College - juggling parenting, earning money, and school. Also finally getting classes I had to work at to pass.
Foreign languages. Never got a handle on it.
Now, with Google Translate and AI I don’t have to!
Getting up on time
The racism, discrimination, and segregation. As a Native American in a white school, it was frequently traumatic. Frequently assaulted and threatened by teachers and the principal to cut my long hair. Then had to sit in class to learn about how all those things I was actively experiencing were in America’s past was bullshit. <30 years ago.
I found school incredibly inefficient. There were subjects in which I did so well that the standard curriculum left me feeling uninspired and bored because I wasn’t being challenged enough. In other subjects, the class moved too fast and I got left behind.
Also, physical education was often neglected in secondary and post-secondary in favor of more academic subjects. Given the cardiovascular disease epidemic, I think that was a mistake. How can you have a healthy mind without a healthy body?
The damn 6 miles daily walk. From grade 4 until 12. Not in the USA, BTW. A shithole 3rd world country.
Personally, I really liked school. Even high school. It would have been easier if I’d had more mental health resources, but I learned a ton and had a lot of freedom in terms of electives. I was taking college-level history courses as a senior in high school and absolutely ate it up.
The only nuisance was that I am a good singer and my parents forced me to skip a writing course and advanced biology my senior year because someone the chamber choir had selected instead of me decided to quit, and I wasn’t assertive enough at the time to tell my parents no when the choir director called my mom and convinced her to make me do it, so my last semester I performed with the chamber choir and absolutely fucking hated every second of it. (Though I did put my foot down on weekend travel competitions, so at least I didn’t have to give up weekends for that shit.)
My only other regret is of the time-travel variety. A former schoolmate was high up in the RNC when Trump was elected, and I wish I could go back in time and intervene somehow.
Undiagnosed ADHD until I was almost 30.
Something similar, I’ve had sleep issues since I was young, wasn’t until I was 40 that I was diagnosed with insomnia disorder. Middle school is when it really took over, and I didn’t make it any further than grade 10. I got my GED at 25 and was admited to University as a mature student. These days I’m on a disability pension.
