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Health & Fitness / Re: Concentration gone to hell under lockdown
« Last post by ian on Today at 08:37:07 pm »I struggled at school, in part because I came from no great tradition of thinking and academic achievement, my parents left school at the first opportunity (in my father's case, a couple of years before it was legally advisable), but my brain doesn't work with a conventional lesson structure. I'm not going to pay attention for an hour. I work on a scale of minutes. I just assumed I was stupid and no one disagreed with my self-diagnosis. I also couldn't see anything because I needed jam-jar glasses but wasn't going to ask for them because it was better to be stupid than look stupid. So much of my childhood was blurry and dim in every which way.
I remember being grabbed by a teacher on the eve of comprehensive school. "You can't see, can you?" Sure, said I, used to bluffing it. "What's written on the board?" Normally, I'd have copied from someone else, but it was just me and I was so obviously caught. Anyway, that meant they dragged my parents to school (who also hadn't noticed) and earned me precisely the NHS specs of a telescopic prescription that anyone teetering on their teenage years feared more than anything else.
But anyway, I owe another teacher once at comprehensive school who took an interest in my apparent stupidity and knocked some sense of potential achievement into me. That and the fact I was always curious about stuff and spent my weekly paper round money on something called the Joy of Knowledge, a weekly encyclopaedia, each issue of which I consumed, and a library card that was perpetually maxed out. Anyway, I got a degree, a PhD, several years knocking out some top-notch molecular genetics. My younger sister got a couple of GCSEs and her daughter has all the intellectual curiosity of a rock and, currently, a career in the unemployment industry (not entirely her fault, she was doing some kind of childcare course that didn't survive its intersection with the current pandemic).
I'm not sure where we draw the line between people having individual needs and people having some form of pathology. Drawing the line sometimes seems wrong. I'm eternally thankful for the attentions of a few people and I understand how much of my life was luck (and honestly this is what royally fucks me off about the entitled, privately educated people, who never have to contemplate that so much of everything is circumstance).
I remember being grabbed by a teacher on the eve of comprehensive school. "You can't see, can you?" Sure, said I, used to bluffing it. "What's written on the board?" Normally, I'd have copied from someone else, but it was just me and I was so obviously caught. Anyway, that meant they dragged my parents to school (who also hadn't noticed) and earned me precisely the NHS specs of a telescopic prescription that anyone teetering on their teenage years feared more than anything else.
But anyway, I owe another teacher once at comprehensive school who took an interest in my apparent stupidity and knocked some sense of potential achievement into me. That and the fact I was always curious about stuff and spent my weekly paper round money on something called the Joy of Knowledge, a weekly encyclopaedia, each issue of which I consumed, and a library card that was perpetually maxed out. Anyway, I got a degree, a PhD, several years knocking out some top-notch molecular genetics. My younger sister got a couple of GCSEs and her daughter has all the intellectual curiosity of a rock and, currently, a career in the unemployment industry (not entirely her fault, she was doing some kind of childcare course that didn't survive its intersection with the current pandemic).
I'm not sure where we draw the line between people having individual needs and people having some form of pathology. Drawing the line sometimes seems wrong. I'm eternally thankful for the attentions of a few people and I understand how much of my life was luck (and honestly this is what royally fucks me off about the entitled, privately educated people, who never have to contemplate that so much of everything is circumstance).
I do have Reynaulds and increasing problems with arthritis in my hands.