My specialty at work (eg, what I tend to get thrown into) is wrangling clever but extremely poorly behaved children. (The children are adolescent, but children nonetheless.) They tend to be boys. They tend to have ADHD. (It’s possible that the focus on the clever rules out the ADHD girls, who have cleverly developed better masking skills by adolescence.)
The current bright and terrible-on-purpose disaster, A, is aware of the ADHD diagnosis but has apparently been told nothing about the disability. So a lot of our conversations go like this:
Me: Well, I’d ask you why you decided to start making richly detailed but extremely inappropriate jokes during class, but I’m pretty sure the answer is that someone started yelling at you for doing it before you realized that you were.
A, leaning backward, looking concerned: Are you following me?
Me: Yes, that’s what I do with the spare time I don’t have during the day, follow aggravating children around. We have so few of them here.
A, put out either because I’ve called him aggravating or because he’s not special and aggravating: Sarcasm isn’t very nice, Ms. T.
Me, sarcastically: I’m so sorry. Maybe you looked at the work first, thought boring, and then decided to be an enormous brat.
A: You can read minds?!
–
Me: Clearly we need executive dysfunction strategies for you, because if we don’t get in front of it you’ll be an adult who sits on their sofa for forty minutes yelling at herself to do the dishes and never does them.
A, trying to politely muffle laughter: Are you doing all right, Ms. T?
Me: Out of dishes, but fine. What’s working in your classes? Your Literature grade is good, why are you doing the reading?
A looks left. Right. Up. At his phone.
Me: … You aren’t doing the reading, are you? The other kids ask questions because they don’t understand it, and you figure out what it has to be about from the answers and never read.
A: Are you in my Lit class??
–
Me: Okay, look, ADHD brains are weird, and we tend to get them from our families, so these –
A, immediately: My dad.
Me, derailed from my drug interaction speech: Yeah, okay. When your dad has coffee, does he get calmer?
A, backing away: You’re stalking my whole family now?!
Tags:
#ADHD #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #embarrassment squick? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Brinens and Things 