My Story

My report cards always said the same thing.  Kelly never pays attention, Kelly talks and disrupts others, Kelly never does her work, Kelly never does the homework, Kelly makes no effort, Kelly doesn’t even care that she is in trouble for not doing the work or not making an effort.

When I was in grade 1, my teacher used to draw snails on my work, because I was slow.  That was an understatement, I didn’t even do most of it.  I guess I just sat there day dreaming.  I remember one day sitting there with several weeks worth of worksheets in front of me while everyone else had free time, I guess I got busted and had to do them all.

In the car on the way to school on the first day of grade 3, I remember my Mum telling me, “you need to pull your socks up this year.” I wanted to.  I wanted to do all the work, and make her proud.  I promised myself I would try.

In grade 5 my teacher called me a daydreamer and used to call me out on it a lot.  The kids would laugh at me for being a space case.  I used to read in class with my book sideways hidden by my book tub, it was better than listening to the teacher going on and on.

In grade 6

In high school I never did any work, but I’d become sneaky enough to get away with it.  I also stopped caring about being a disappointment and accepted hat I sucked at school, and stopped trying.  I went from being the day dreamer to the disruptive one who was kicked out of class a lot and got detention every day.  I actually did my homework in detention because there was nothing else to do, so it wasn’t too bad.

I copied my friends homework a lot last minute before class.  I felt bad about it, but I had meant to do it, and next time I would, for sure.

I borrow paper and pens a lot, because I never seemed to have any.  I also felt bad about this, but once class was over would forget to deal with the problem.

Once I was older and could leave the school grounds without arising alarm I stopped going to most of my classes.  I ended up on attendance card and had to get each teacher to sign that I was there and hand it in at the end of the week, or I would fail VCE due to the attendance requirement.

I only passed 4 out of my 5 VCE subjects and received the lowest VCE score possible, an ‘under 40’.  I did however get one of the top scores in the year level for the GAT test, so I guess some of the learning sunk in after all.

No one ever noticed that I had ADD.