Living with ADHD can be a constant battle. My 14 year old son is very intelligent and he has ADHD but he won’t take any medication to help him control his symptoms because he doesn’t like the side effects. He is in his second semester at the local community college and currently has a 3.5 GPA there. Recently he was diligently trying to get his grade to an “A” in his Anatomy class although with a “B” he had the 6th highest grade in the class of 42 students.

Unfortunately he just can’t control his mouth, he talks constantly. So after completing a difficult exam last week in Anatomy he and a fellow student, that happened to be a 30 year old single mom, were discussing the difficulty of the exam and some of their answer choices. The problem was that they hadn’t turned the exams in yet, so a couple of students accused him of sharing answers with her, i.e. cheating. The result was that the teacher had to zero out their grades for the exam because she hadn’t actually witnessed the exchange and therefore she could not disprove the claim of cheating.

Lane is a real perfectionist and also prides himself on being exceedingly honest so you can imagine how devastating this was for him. Getting a zero on the exam has dropped his grade to a “C” so he called me from class to see if he should drop the class rather than have such a low grade. I assured him that a “C” would still transfer to a four year college and that they only transfer the four credits, not the grade, so it would be fine for him to stay in the class. I was surprised to learn that even though his grade dropped 11% his standing in the class only dropped from 6th to 10th so maybe the instructor should take a look at her teaching or grading methods. He had another discussion with the instructor and she assured him that if he continues to get 100% on the quizzes he can get his grade back to a “B” before the semester ends.

Perhaps I should reconsider having him attend college at such a young age as it seems to be very stressful for him because of his perfectionist attitude. On the other hand he was quite bored with regular high school work and frequently complained about doing it because he claimed to already know all the material. That is why I sent him to the college in the first place to CLEP Freshman Composition. I told him if he could pass the CLEP for English I wouldn’t make him take anymore high school English classes. That was how he got his first six college credits and ended up attending college in the first place.
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