Adhd didn’t exist back then.

Not being able to take a “mental health” day off, in both high school and college. In high school my parents wouldn’t let me (though I don’t fault them for that), and in college it was hard to keep up if I even missed one lecture. As an adult with a job , if I need a day to decompress, I can decide to take off tomorrow and nobody can tell me no. In school it was hard to keep on going with the tank on empty.

Undiagnosed ADHD until I was almost 30.

I found school incredibly inefficient. There were subjects in which I did so well that the standard curriculum left me feeling uninspired and bored because I wasn’t being challenged enough. In other subjects, the class moved too fast and I got left behind.

Also, physical education was often neglected in secondary and post-secondary in favor of more academic subjects. Given the cardiovascular disease epidemic, I think that was a mistake. How can you have a healthy mind without a healthy body?

Getting up on time

I loved math and was good at it until we got to integrals. I could do algebra, geometry, trigonometry, probability, and derivates…and loved all of them. But my brain went splat against integrals.

I barely passed Calculus levels 3 and 4. Honestly, I should have failed them. The professor wasn’t very good, he knew this, and he took pity on me. But it was ultimately my own fault.

It was kind of humiliating. I’d always done really well at math, and even tutored other students. Then I just hit a fucking wall with integrals. At that point, I fully understood how other students who struggled with math had felt all along. I had been empathetic to them. But now I suddenly knew what it was like.

I sometimes wonder if a virus or some other unknown medical situation broke that part of my brain. It kind of felt like it. Or maybe it was just beyond my natural abilities, period.

Depression.

Going without motivation.

I graduated college the first time with straight C’s and major that didn’t have much headroom. It was a struggle and I was a terrible student. Always late, always bargaining with professors for extra time, always “faking it”. I couldn’t find work fitting a degree, went on to do landscaping work, field surveying work, security, all minimum wage.

Then I got into firefighting, then wildland firefighting, then saw how computer science and geospatial data played in, and the motivation clicked.

I saved my money from a pair of very very busy fire seasons (lots of OT and hazard pay), Went back to school for CS and GIS with straight A’s, found the whole experience easy and enjoyable. (Not that I wasn’t challenged and had late nights). If you’ve dug ditches for money and don’t want to do that any more, the asks and challenges of college are comparatively trivial. Even in upper division classes the teachers are crystal clear about the expectations, the schedule, the tests, all of it. If you approach classwork like a job, it all falls into place in ways it never did when I had competing interests and really just wanted to fuck off, drink beer, and go skiing.

Everyone else wants to go do whatever during office hours ? Nah Im there. Every time. Etc etc

Motivation made all the difference, even when content was hard for me (linear algebra after 5 years of no academic math? Fuuuck that was some late nights for my dumb ass. )

All the fucking assholes

Sitting still and I wasn’t the only one, I didn’t have ADHD or anything, I was a boy who was in a class with a bunch of his friends and was told to sit still and quiet for 8 hours a day and if we were lucky we got a 20 minute recess but now of that was lining up and walking outside and back inside. Also, from the Midwest so odds are it was cancelled and we had to stay inside and read because it was too hot, too cold, too rainy, or too tornadoey outside.

I still get into arguments with my mom to this day about this. She told me I was “always getting in trouble” but it was because I was bored out of my mind and having to sit still all day. Me and most young boys are out into a lose/lose situation with modern schooling.

I didn’t struggle academically in grade school at all, with the exception of mathematics. And by that, I just mean that I had to put in a moderate amount of effort to learn it.

But when I started college/university in a new city, I was alone, wholly unprepared, and paralyzed by severe (and untreated) anxiety, depression, and ADHD. I didn’t know how to make friends by myself. The thought of having to interact with my dorm mates would send me into a panic.

Not to mention, I was not only having a crisis of sexuality, but I also convinced myself that I was an ugly, gross loser whom no one would ever want to be with sexually or romantically. (Jesus.)

I took a break for a semester because I was very suicidal. I started therapy again/taking Zoloft—the latter of which saved my life—and went back for another semester. But I knew, even before going back, that it just wasn’t for me. It really didn’t help that I already knew college in the US is a scam.

So yeah, I ended up dropping out. I have a lot of mixed feelings about it, now.

the fucking grift of it all.

tpaying a $60 license fee to pearson just to be able to submit fucking required homework.

Removed by mod

Well right now it’s that my prof speaks excruciatingly slow and makes sure to read the entirety of each slide of the PowerPoint.
This class is already boring. He doesn’t need to make it worse.
I’m usually just trying to stay awake.

Homework, I always did fine in class and on tests but as soon as I stepped off campus I wouldn’t usually get home until dark and half the time I’d leave my backpack in the gym locker so id fail because of the homework assignments. I even remember a teacher calling me out because I was the only one who passed a test but I’m failing the class to make the rest of the kids feel bad.