ADD and ADHD

This is a response to several students' comments on a blog post of my teacher's about education.



More kids are under-diagnosed than over-diagnosed with ADD and ADHD. The woman who couldn’t sit still as a kid and went on to become a great dancer and had a hugely successful life, who’s to say that if she had been made to concentrate and learn in school she wouldn’t have gone on to discover the cure for cancer? And who knows if she has never been on medication in her life. Medications for ADD and ADHD have been around for the past 30 years. An adult with ADHD, who only started taking meds when he was an adult, once came into a Harvard child development class to say that he had only felt like himself after he started taking meds because until then he was never fully able to express himself. And a lot of these kids who aren’t on meds or aren’t given a real thought to what might be wrong with them, “problem children,” turn to self-medication with marijuana and other illegal, possibly harmful drugs. My great uncle was a brilliant man, he had something like a 4.9 GPA and he could have done so much with his life, but he never did anything because he just smoked pot.

A regular high school with core subjects, like ours, actually teaches kids about the real world, the world that they will be living in some day. They have everyday conflicts that people need to learn how to deal with because those are things that are never going to go away or change. Regular high schools have diversity, a mixture of cultures, they have mean teachers, they have people you don’t like and who don’t like you. These life skills developed in high school are necessary to succeed. Specialized schools don’t teach you that there will be some people who really don’t care about your ideas and that you might be forced to do things you don’t enjoy or find interesting from time to time. They don’t teach kids that they have to watch what they say to whom, how to stand on their own two feet and defend themselves if they want to be defended. Specialized schools create an incredibly sheltered environment where kids actually have the opportunity to not grow up.

Judith Warner set out to find kids who were over-diagnosed but ended up finding the opposite; that not enough kids were on medication for ADD or ADHD. She researched this for a year trying to prove her thesis of over-diagnosed kids and ended up changing her mind and writing her book about under-diagnosed kids.

Watertown High School Haiti Relief Project

On January 12th the capital city of Haiti, Port-au-Prince, was hit by a massive earthquake, a 7.0 on the Richter scale, which destroyed most of the city. Now a humanitarian crisis is occurring, and the Haitian people are suffering without food, water, or medical care. We are coordinating fundraising here at WHS to support the relief effort, and so far have collected $477.27 which will be sent to the American Red Cross Haiti Fund. Thank you for your generosity, and if you have not yet donated, please do!
We have also formed a club, called the Haiti Relief Club, and a Facebook group. We are planning a fundraising faculty-student basketball game, a raffle, and other events.
Haiti is located on the western side of the island of Hispaniola, sharing it with the Dominican Republic, and is the poorest country in the western hemisphere. It was once a French slave colony, with sugar plantations. In 1804 Haiti had the first successful slave rebellion, was the first black-led republic of the world, and became the first independent nation in Latin America. Yet a history of violent political takeovers has kept the nation poverty-stricken. In 1957 the CIA helped François “Papa Doc” Duvalier become president. Duvalier soon announced himself President for Life and proved to be a vicious dictator whose regime was marked by autocracy, severe corruption, and terrorism by his personal militia, the Tonton Macoutes. An estimated 30,000 were killed and thousands more exiled because of his tendency to use murder and expulsion to suppress his opponents during his reign. The Duvalier family continued to rule the country well into the 1980s, supported by American manufacturers and a trickle of U.S. military and economical aid that was supposed to help the people, but ended up going directly to Duvalier.
Today the average Haitian lives on $2 per day, and 45% of the population are children. Port-au-Prince was an overcrowded city stuffed with shanties and poorly-constructed cement buildings, which collapsed in the earthquake. Hundreds of thousands were killed, injured, and left homeless. The government was disabled, and even the hospitals, schools and police force were mostly destroyed. Haitians are living in tent-cities that are like refugee camps, and many organizations are helping to distribute water, food, and medical care. The USS Comfort, a naval hospital ship, is anchored off Haiti, and doctors and nurses are treating amputees, crushed organs, and broken bones. Aftershocks have caused even more damage and the situation is turning out to be worse than people had predicted.
I believe it is our moral obligation, as citizens of the planet, to help those who are suffering in Haiti. If you don’t want to donate to the Red Cross then please consider donating to other organizations, like Doctors Without Borders, Partners in Health, or the U.N.