rainbow dash + ADHD/ADD
This episode was terrific and it made me cry
This is how you gracefully introduce kids with the concept that it’s not a bad thing to learn differently. I was really proud of this episode, I thought it was very well done.
Not a gamer
Here is a story that I have told time and time again about why I don’t play video games. Here goes…
When I was in elementary school I had an attention problem that went undiagnosed. My teacher could not figure out why I did not find copying poems about clouds off of a placard too terribly interesting. So I would day dream.
She called a parent/teacher conference and basically called my mom a bad mother and me an imbecile. She went on and on about a “lack of discipline” and a “broken home” (my parents divorced when I was 3) and how I had no future and I was some how dragging down the other students. My mom is rather old fashioned and she has never been in the habit of questioning authority figures, like teachers.
After we left that meeting, my mom was furious. She was mad that the teacher had suggested that I was stupid and a troublemaker, and that she was a bad parent. My mom worked her ass off working two jobs, raising two kids and keeping a clean house. So, my mom decided to take steps to correct the teacher’s perception of us.
She sat me down and demanded to know what I was thinking about instead of copying down “like scoops of ice cream in the air” or some other nonsensical crap they tried to pass off as poetry. I was too young to know what negative reinforcement was by name. But, I knew that something was going to be taken away from. There were only two things that really brought me any kind of joy in those days: my comic books and an old nintendo. While being interrogated, I quickly weighed the options. I decided that the comics were a much cheaper and more versatile form of entertainment. So I said “games” as the reason.
And with that, the old nintendo and the few games it had were put into a box, taped up, and put into a storage building. And, if I was forbidden from looking upon it again under threat of beating.
And that ended my interest in gaming.
Over the years, my mom would chase me away anything video game related like it was a stray dog I could get diseases from. Then they put me on ritalin and took my soul away. I never really had an attention problem. I was reading books like CS Lewis even then. I just realized that most of what we were doing in there was busy work and fodder. Years later my mom brought home an old PS2 and some games. I didn’t know what to do with it. It was like a piece of alien technology. I just set it on a shelf and never gave it a second thought. Even when I try to play games, suck at them so bad that I just give up.
I am sorry to ramble, but that is the story. It is just one less thing that I can relate to people on. It help contribute to me being an even bigger social misfit. When people make references to video games and RPGs it just makes me feel stupid.
