I have a son like that. He's great at the stuff that he is interested in, anything else and he's bored instantly.
ADHD to me is just a convenient label for kids that are different than that norm, so we trot out the medicine cabinet to make them conform instead of helping them to cope with the world around them we make it easier for the 'rest' to cope with them.
When I was in high school, a friend told me he had been diagnosed with ADD. His parents had him tested because his grades were suffering.
My friend and I have similar personalities, and my grades were similarly hit-and-miss. I went home and asked my mother if I had ADD. Her response: "Probably."
I'm grateful that I had parents who accepted my quirks as a part of my personality and not as problems to be fixed.
I guess I got lucky, or I would have been on ritalin or some other fashionable (or profitable) drug for sure.
I'm 43 now, 44 in March, when I was a kid ADD did not yet 'exist', and from my experience with my sons teachers the teachers in the schools that I went to were of a better grade than the teachers he has to content with (and that have to contend with him) today.
I think the latter is the biggest factor in the diagnosis of all these 'children that we can't handle', it is striking that the %age of these kids seems to go up with every generation. Hopefully soon there will be generation of teachers that is as fast and as smart as the kids they are trying to teach.
To some extent I think it is the influence of our media rich world, and next to that probably the enormous amount of technology and information available to kids from a very young age onwards that causes kids to be so tremendously fast at the stuff that these teachers can barely cope with.
Boredom is their lot, unless you can get them interested, and once you manage that better hold on to your hat.
One thing I have found to be universal in dealing with 'gifted' or 'fast' children (I prefer those terms), it is that once you have gained their respect it gets a lot easier to communicate with them and to get them interested in the stuff that they should know.
It's just that if you're a teacher and you get these knowledge seeking missiles that can run rings around you your visceral response is probably to want them to slow down to your level. I think that is the best way to lose their respect.
Congratulations to your parents, they seem to have done just fine :)
Hopefully soon there will be generation of teachers that is as fast and as smart as the kids they are trying to teach.
As much as I would love to believe this, I'm at a college that's renowned for its teaching program, and teaching majors came to me for quite a lot of tech problems. (Two didn't understand basic algebra - worrysome.) The problem is that people who decide they want to become teachers very rarely work well as teachers. My favorite teachers were all passionate about their subject first and foremost: many of them, even in high school, committed to their work outside of just teaching. The people who say "I want to teach and I don't care what" are very often the most problematic teachers.
I agree with you entirely about how enormous the world of media has become. That's part of the problem. There are so many things to pay attention to that the slow pace of the average classroom doesn't have enough to appeal to students. With the exception of perhaps three teachers' classes, I learned more online than I ever did in a class. (The solution is to develop teachers who are more singularly fascinating than the Internet, which is a difficult challenge.)
It's possible. My English teacher in junior year absolutely was. I went in the first day, tried to pick a snarky fight with him over James Joyce, and then stayed after class to talk to him about Ulysses and Nabakov's Lolita. (Ulysses is one of my favorite novels.) By the end of the week, he'd recommended two bands to me that I fell in love with; before winter, he lent me his copy of 69 Love Songs, which profoundly affected how I looked at music.
Later, he was the reason I befriended a kid I'd been at odds with for years, an arrogant film buff. When we started to have extended discussions covering literature, cinema, and music, I started looking for some of the films they were mentioning, and in doing so became close friends with the film kid. It led to one of the best summers of my life, driving around the state in his Wrangler to get a copy of Spaced.
(Meanwhile, the class we met in was a half-year course filled with a ton of kids with short attention spans, and he managed to get us to read something like 7-8 books and a ton of short stories, and crammed us with 5 excellent films in between.)
How you isolate people like that and identify them, I don't know. They exist, though.
Identifying people like that really would be a mission worth undertaking, food for thought there.
The game reference is a /. meme reference about 'duke nukem forever', a game that has been in production since '97. The running gag is which will come first: hell freezes over, duke nukem forever is released or the Hurd is finished.
ADHD to me is just a convenient label for kids that are different than that norm, so we trot out the medicine cabinet to make them conform instead of helping them to cope with the world around them we make it easier for the 'rest' to cope with them.