I was talking to an acquaintance and he told me :“I’ve never heard of ADD before I moved to the States, in Taiwan if someone cant focus at school they just call him stupid and force them to focus”
he described his school some 30 years ago, is it still like this?
No. I’m currently helping a uni student whose course work is centered on kids with ants in their pants.
I probably have ADHD. You learn how to manage it. Deep breathing, green foods, barleygrass, magnesium.
Learn to slow down your tempo of thinking and acting…
Once you handle the downsides, it can become a positive.
you say probably, is there anywhere in Taipei to get tested?
I have ADHD. While going to school in Taiwan I struggled a lot. My teachers didn’t want to teach me and instead hit and humiliated me in front of my class. I didn’t get good grades and probably would have not made it very far. They probably thought I was stupid. The best thing my parents did for me is move me.
I finished my bachelor’s in the US with a perfect 4.0 with Latin honors. Which means I got 93/100 and above in every single class.
I finished my masters in a top 5 ranked finance program in the UK and finished with the highest mark possible.
I simply can’t learn by listening to people lecture and sit still and memorize through repetition. I can learn my own way on my own. A lot of teachers, not just in Taiwan, do not understand how to teach people who have ADHD.
One way to teach people with ADHD is “Fast pace, slow speed.”
They get bored quickly. They can’t sit down for long.
So you have some target vocabulary…:
Tree, Mountain, Apple,
Saffron, Rosemary, Thyme,
A Bull, A Rose, A Storm…
You have some words you want to teach the students. You need to get those ten words in their head within an hour. What you can do, is play 10 different games, all 5 minutes long… each game focusing on those 10 target words.
So, on the surface, the kids are running, jumping, drawing, acting, role-playing, whatever… the class is fast paced. But underneath, you are repeatedly drawing them back to those ten key words, and maybe teaching whole sentences once they get the basics. Repetition is the key to language learning, but you are masking the dull chalk and blackboard repetition with varied and frenetic surface activities.
The same principle could be used to teach any subject: Physics, chemistry, whatever. Choose a principle you want to teach (anode and cathodes, for example), and have the students go through 5-10 activities exploring anodes and cathodes in a 90 minute class.
I taught myself programming over 5-7 years. It was hard at first. But I learned to take a deep breath, and take detailed notes. I get over the boredom / short-attention span by doing 3-4 tasks at the same time, and switching between them every 5 to 25 minutes.
I found that many back-end programmers lean towards aspergers, any many front-end types have ADHD. You can imagine what it’s like, working together, at first… but you find a way.
Neither ADHD nor Aspergers are mental deficiencies, they are just different ways of approaching reality, like a browser upgrade that parses information differently.
I think I have it too. I always thought it, and my sister who’s a psychologist mentioned it. So even if I was never diagnosed, I think I have it.
Maybe not because of it, but in my case I can only learn something if I see how it fits in the whole puzzle; I usually cannot memorize things, but once I see the logic or the mechanism, it’s much easier for me. Again this might not necessarily be related to ADHD. I also have a teaching degree and one of the things I learned doing it was that there were two types of memory, the “relational” (mine) and the… “normal” one?
In my experience, folks in Taiwan seem to think it’s a disorder for kids, not adults. Was suggested I attend group therapy class, though I’d be the oldest one in class coz it was a class for kids. Clearly, I never ended up going haha
Also had a professor tell me I could try to pray my ADHD away. That was super awkward.
I was on medication for a bit, but stopped earlier this year. I’m doing alright.
I don’t know for sure if I have ADHD but I hate sitting through lectures, and unfortunately church sucks for this as it’s 2 hours of some guy lecturing followed by a mass evacuation as soon as the boring music/lecture ends.
They should put out snacks, and hire this guy, he probably has ADHD…
Yes. Although there are parents that will use ADD to try to get study drugs prescribed for their kids.
Treating ADD or ADHD without drugs requires a lot of effort. Teaching the person to start with little tasks and focusing for short periods to longer periods. Most people have about a 1 hour limit anyway before they need a distraction.
People with ADD or ADHD get lost in the distraction. So part of teaching them how to use what they have to their advantage is helping them to go back to the task they were doing.
There’s only a handful of doctors in Taiwan that treat ADD or ADHD. So that also becomes a barrier. And learning is different because their language structure is different. Which can create confusion in regards to diagnosis.
Probably the biggest issue is understanding education. Parents with degrees are more likely to have kids that go on to get degrees because they understand the value of education. Parents that don’t have degrees will struggle to help kids learn the basics of what is needed to pass these days. Especially presentation skills for assignments.
Teaching them how to click. They remember a lot. More than most to be honest. They just struggle to regurgitate it when the time comes. Once they’ve clicked with it and see how it can be used they see the advantages of their learning process.
Not really sure about this…
There are people with real disorders. The problem with the states is they are drug dealers trying to sell pills. Not everyone labelled actually has it there 
There are plenty here with it. but it seems increasingly more difficult to diagnose due to kids being spoiled, unhealthy life habits and being fed sugar and caffeine on the daily.
Just wait a year or two and they’ll blurt out what seems to be a bunch of random things about something but it was really something they were half listening to two years earlier.
Most of it is being interested in what’s going on. And most classes are boring.
ADHD meds did help me in the beginning. But the side effects made it a net negative for my life in the long term.
I couldn’t sleep at night with it. I would often self medicate downers to sleep. Neither of this made it good for restful sleep and I would compensate with more meds in the day.
You build a tolerance to the meds and have to increase it.
I couldn’t eat on it and lost too much weight.
Gave me increased and perhaps out of the norm sexual urges. This was a weird one.
Probably have it, parents thankfully just let me be me.
Great grades and unis, spoiled and privileged to a degree, creative innovator, loudmouth, class clown, impulsive and loving risk, loving creative collisions and rocking the boat…popular yet crude with the ladies…bored with rules and followers…a bit of a lewd rogue.
Having spent most of my life overseas, this has meant success in democratic countries, less so in authoritarian or quasi authoritarian ones (e.g. Saudi 
or Forumosa 
)
I am a fan of more work and stimulation with intentional failure traps.
Avoids the medicated and/or D bag results 
Kidding. But, it works. For functional folks. Some people truly do need chemical drugs. There is a middle ground between taiwans traditonal beating culture and Americas pill popping culture. Oftentimes it is time from family coupled with critical thinking exercises along with loads of physical exercises. Shit food, drugs, immature circles and screens probably arent the ideal route forward. This is somewhere the schools could really be useful for, in regards to homes that are less than ideal. Especially in Taiwan.
Yeah I’ve been on quite a few of the meds. None worked. Although I never developed a tolerance towards them.
Time has helped more than anything. Most ADD/ADHD people would probably benefit more from long term planning and goal management techniques. The problem with that is they essentially need someone to manage them. I wouldn’t be surprised if most modern day movie stars are ADD types. And for every successful one there’s how many that don’t have that support?
I’ve considered going back on meds but haven’t got exactly the same reason you mentioned. Loss of appetite. If anything I’d say that’s been the long lasting legacy of those meds. I find I have to force myself to eat. And it’s not uncommon for me to skip meals simply because I forgot to eat or was too enthralled with whatever I was doing.
Perfectionism is also quite a curse. Being paralyzed with fear of finishing, or sometimes even starting, if it can’t be perfect. So we get distracted part way through and start something else.