My reading and math struggles
From ADHD: A Path to Success
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.
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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.
First Sentence: With terror in my heart, I can still remember sitting in emotional and almost physical pain at Palm Elementary School in Beaumont, California.
Read the first page
Chapter 5 | Chapter 6
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.
