Have you seen 'Parenting a Child With Attention Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder' by Nancy Boyles and Darlene Contadino? The book is quite good as for as covering the subject from the conventional point of view. In fact, I think that it exhibits a considerable amount of sensitivity and insight. However, I keep wanting to reach out and shake the authors by their ears and yell "can't you see that you have carefully made the case for the genetic concept and then at the moment of conclusion, twisted it into a deficit". Numerous books (and my own observations) have stated that kids (boys?) with ADD run about two years behind in maturing. They are slow in learning to read and do math, etc. (what I call intellectual skills). The thing that they fail to say is that these same kids are about two to three years ahead of the non-ADD youth in conceptual skills. The above mentioned book says that school requires children to be good at everything, whereas the ADD child may have only a few selected areas that they are good at. Well!! I may be being picky but I think that this statement is pivotal to the discussion of my disagreement with mainstream ADD beliefs and education. I have come to believe that farmers have little or no idea of what conceptual thinking is and have left it out of the curriculum because they don't begin to understand the subject.

Except for art and music, our schools don't have a single course that uses conceptual thinking. The gall of them thinking that their schools represent all of the "important" subjects and the proper way to "think" about them. The beginning farmer students may have no trouble learning what I call intellectual knowledge that deals with abstract symbols such as numbers, letters of the alphabet, etc., but try to get these same kids to take something apart or deduce how something works and you will see them fall apart. Though, when starting school, my kids may have trouble with intellectual knowledge, they are outstanding "A" students when learning subjects that use conceptual, inter-relational, logical, image-based, hands-on style of learning. In other words, the language of creative science.

We adults have been so brain washed that down deep we suspect that being able to perform in the real world is unimportant and common, where-as being able to do abstract things with a pencil and paper is glorifying and worthwhile. It is obvious that both are important, but to have my kids marked down for not being good in one area and then being denied the opportunity to strut their stuff in the other, is reprehensible. (I must have eaten too many cookies a couple of hours ago, I am much to wound up on this). - Bill Allsopp