Classroom Strategies for Dealing with ADHD
Here are a few classroom strategies for dealing with ADHD and school that were shared with me when I was collecting “success stories” a few years back.
One of the greatest struggles smart Hunters with ADHD experience is when they advance in school to the point where they hit a class where they actually have to pay attention. Many Hunters are able to “fake it” for a while, but eventually, usually in high school but often not until college, it catches up with them. This often results in a tragic “crash and burn,” from which some people never recover.
Here are a few classroom strategies for dealing with ADHD and school that were shared with me when I was collecting “success stories” a few years back.
From Jane, the mother of an ADHD teenager in Philadelphia:
Our first breakthrough was getting a commitment from Jared to do his homework. It was something he’d never had to do before, because he was smart enough to get by in school just paying partial attention and then doing well on tests. But in the eighth grade homework was his downfall.
After he committed to doing the homework, he was really good about it for a while. Every day after school, he’d come home, sit down and spend an hour or so doing his work. But by the end of the first week he was hating it, looking for excuses to put it off, and pretty soon we were back to the same old routine. He was either not doing it at all, or else bingeing it at the last minute.
When we sat down and talked about it, Jared said that doing homework was actually physically painful to him. After about fifteen minutes, he’d start to get bored, and then it was really difficult for him to sit any longer without somebody forcing him to do it.
I wasn’t about to play homework cop for the rest of my life, so I asked him if he found the first fifteen minutes difficult, and, to my surprise, he said no, that was easy. Then it got boring
It turned out that it wasn’t the work that he was doing that was hard or painful for him, it was how long it took him to do it. I guess he’s part of the MTV generation or something, but we found that he has an attention span that lasts for about fifteen minutes for boring stuff like homework.
So we split his homework into fifteen-minute segments. He does one when he gets home from school, then one before dinner, then one after dinner, then one before bed. This adds up to an hour; he now gets his homework done (almost) every day and no longer complains about how hard or boring or painful it is.
From a teacher in Atlanta:
One of the most successful things I’ve learned to do with ADHD kids in my classes is to move to them to the front of the class. I mean physically, as in the front row.
This way they don’t have other students around them that they can see and who distract them. That goes a long way for helping out kids with ADHD; if they have distractions available, they’re drawn to them like steel filings to a magnet.
By putting them in front of the room, I also can keep a better eye on the state of their attention. When they start to daydream or drift off, I walk near them to catch their eye. I try not to let the other kids know I’m doing this; I don’t want them to think that I’m singling them out. But it works to catch them just when they begin to zone out, and bring them back to the task.
Finally, I’ve found that if I can get them involved in things going on in class, that’s the very best. So I call on them a lot to talk in front of the class, and if I need somebody to clean the chalkboard or write things down, I’ll most often call on one of my ADHD kids. They need the stimulation, and they often are the most battered in the self-esteem department. These small jobs and accomplishments, which mean so little to the average student, are really important to them.
Bill is a college student in Ohio:
I learned about ADHD, and realized that I was Hunter (to use that metaphor), when I was a freshman in college. I tried Ritalin for a while, and it was useful — particularly when I had to cram for tests. But I’ve found another strategy that’s even more useful: small classes.
I started out at a major university. Some of the classes had over 200 students in them, and I was totally unable to concentrate. There was the distraction of all the other people in the class, particularly the attractive girls. And, of course, with that many in a class, quite a few were ADHD. Their eyes roamed around, catching mine, and it just all added up to a mess. In addition to that, I felt no connection whatsoever with the professors: they were physically far away, with no real opportunity for discussion. I couldn’t do well in those large classes, and my grades suffered for it.
I met with my counselor and found that most of the large classes were the required basics: that’s why there were so many people in them. And I could take some of those classes in the summer, or during the evening, or even at a local junior college, and not have to be in a huge auditorium.
So for the rest of my college career, I’m going to continue with the strategy I developed after meeting with my counselor. (It worked great last semester.) Before I sign up for a course, I find out roughly how many students are taking it or have taken it in the past, so I’ll know if it’s going to be a large or a small class. If it’s a small class, then I sign up for it. If it’s going to be a large class, I look for other options, or else limit myself to only one large class per term and that’s the one that I take the Ritalin for.
A friend of mine who’s also ADHD took this even a step further: he transferred to a smaller college. I’ve thought about that, but this place is my dad’s alma mater, and I get a tuition discount for that. I also have a small scholarship here, so I think I’m stuck with this university.
This strategy of looking for the smaller classes and knowing what works and doesn’t work for me, though, has been a huge help in improving my grades to where I need them to be.