I found this on a t shirt:  I have more thoughts before breakfast than most people have all day.  The website was selling ADHD t shirts.  It really made me think about my dealings with ADHD children, especially one near and dear to me, and a little about myself.  In relation to yesterday’s post, this is why the fish seemed so inattentive.  They are thinking constantly.  Linking thoughts together and creating entire stories without opening their mouths or writing a word.  I do this often.  That’s how this blog came about and also why I don’t blog more often.  I have almost a constant dialogue with myself and I connect thought to other thought and if nothing else distracts me I can go for a long time.  No need to blog when the story is done as far as I’m concerned.

Case Study:  The entire family was out shopping and we drove up to a stoplight.  A semi pulled next to us and when it put on its breaks one of the family said, “That sounds like a horse.”  I responded that it was the brakes on the semi.  A minute or so passed and the family member says, “You know the Amish sell horses in bulk.”  Did you follow that string of connections?  I did.  My wife didn’t.  Let’s see if I can explain this:  Horse sound, brakes from a semi, horse sounds in the semi, must be a lot of horses in that semi, who would sell a lot of horses?  The Amish of course.  Makes sense to me.

The one t shirt that offends me on the ADHD clothing site is the one that says, “I have Attention Defi…Oh, Look a Butterfly.”  Not really how it happens.  The fact that ADHD people are distracted by everything isn’t necessarily based in reality.  As we saw in yesterday’s post, ADHD people are distracted by their thoughts. Those thoughts are generally about things that they can connect to.  At least I am theorizing or generalizing that from my own experiences.  Don’t try to put attention needy students in a box.  There is a heck of a lot of thinking going on.  It just isn’t always the thinking that you want to go on.

I know this is going to be a struggle for many people who deal work with attention students every day.  It is hard to grasp that people actually function this way.  Think of it this way:  ADHD students can’t believe that your thought processes function the way they do.