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ADHD is the #2 genetically inherited condition in the world, 80%. If one or more of the parents have ADHD and don’t learn how to manage it properly, there will be worse outcomes for the child and will make the teacher’s job even harder. Here’s Harvard’s 5 minute Adult ADHD Screener test.

Other Articles for Teachers of ADHD Students

Online Forums for Learning Disabilities including ADHD

Ldonline.org Very active site, many posts. Here are some relevant forum topics:

• Teaching students with ADHD
• Teaching students with LD
• Parenting a child with ADHD
• Parenting a child with LD
• Adults with ADHD
• Adults with LD

Our 19th Century Educations

By John Shepler. Why our school system falls short for the world of today and tomorrow. ” The really scary truth is that we’re headed toward an entrepreneurial society that we’ve never been trained for.”

The Relationship Between ADHD & Self-Control

“kids with ADHD have trouble paying attention in only some situations.” Dr. Sam Goldstein discusses those situations.

Targeting Home-School Collaboration for Students with ADHD

by Candace S. Bos, Maria L. Nahmias and Magda A. Urban. Gives suggestions for parent involvement in assessment and behaviour plan, monitoring medication, coordinating homework, taking action, references, and resources.

William Farish: The World’s Most Famous Lazy Teacher

From the book Thom Hartmann’s Complete Guide to ADHD. Talks about how one man changed the education system from a learning model to a factory line assembly model 200 years ago. This is not intended to criticize current teachers,most of whom have to work in large classrooms and grade students due to factory education systems, but to provide some historical context why the system they may be in has become that way.

“Thomas Jefferson was arguably one of the most well-educated Americans of his time. He was well-read, thoughtful, knowledgeable in a wide variety of topics from the arts to the sciences, and the founder of the University of Virginia. The same could probably be said of Ben Franklin, or James and Dolly Madison. On the larger world stage, we could credibly make such claims for René Descartes, William Shakespeare, Galileo, Michelangelo, and Plato.

But there is one thing unique about the education of all these people, which is different from that of you, me, and our children: none ever were given grades. All attended schools or had teachers who worked entirely on a pass/fail system…

Students of the great teachers of history often became famous themselves because of the thoroughness with which their mentors had inculcated knowledge, understanding, skill, and talent in them. This is how things went from 98,000 BC to roughly 1800 AD. Then came William Farish.”

“Getting to know his students, one may suppose, was too much trouble for Farish. It meant work, interacting and participating daily with each child. It meant paying attention to their needs, to their understanding, to their styles of learning. It meant there was a limit on the number of students he could thus get to know, and therefore a limit on how much money he could earn.

So Farish came up with a method of teaching which would allow him to process more students in a shorter period of time. He invented grades.

Grades did not make students smarter. In fact, they had the opposite effect: they made it harder for those children to succeed whose style of learning didn’t match the didactic, auditory form of lecture-teaching Farish used.

Grades didn’t give students deeper insights into their topics of study. Instead, grades forced children to memorize by rote only those details necessary to pass the tests, without regard to true comprehension of the subject matter.

Grades didn’t encourage critical thinking or insight skills, didn’t promote questioning minds. Such behaviors are useless in the graded classroom, and within a few generations were considered so irrelevant that today they’re no longer listed among the goals of public education.

Grades didn’t stimulate the students, or share with them a contagious love for the subject being studied. The opposite happened, in fact, as the normative effect of grades acted as a muffling blanket to any eruptions of enthusiasm, any attempts to dig deeper into a topic, any discursions into larger significance or practical application of content.

What grades did do, however, was increase the salary of William Farish, while, at the same time, lowering his workload and reducing the hours he needed to spend in the classroom. He no longer needed to burrow into his students’ minds to know if they understood a topic: his grading system would do it for him. And it would do it just as efficiently for twenty children as it would for two hundred.” more on the website