This morning I am thinking about paying attention.

I had a student tell me the other day that he thinks he has ADHD. He based this self-diagnosis on the fact that those with ADHD have great difficulty in setting deadlines for themselves, that they get distracted too easily and too severely, and they also suffer anxiety when forced to do a task they find difficult or unpleasant. They have trouble focusing, in other words, and this is no surprise.

Butt I was surprised when this young man told me he thought he had ADHD; because I’ve taught him for four years, and I’ve taught and known a number of people with ADHD over the years — and no. No, he does not have ADHD. He’s just a lazy teenager with bad priorities.

I say that with no judgment: I was a lazy teenager with bad priorities, and I was far worse about it than this young man — who is graduating with a high GPA, who has been accepted to multiple colleges, and who has won scholarships based on his academic achievements. The problem with his focus and his ability to accomplish tasks in a timely manner is actually that he’s so smart that he can do an excellent job on his work with very little effort or time; he can blow through an essay in a couple of hours and write something better than what any of his peers can do. He’s known this, certainly for all of high school, probably for all of his life, and so he lets himself do exactly that: he puts off homework and assignments until it reaches the point where he has just enough time to do them, and then he does them.

Then, of course, the issue grew complicated. First it became a point of pride, as it always does, because everything in our culture is competitive. Someone in the class says “Did you do the project?” And someone who works very hard in school responds, “Yeah, I spent all weekend on it. Almost killed me.” And then the smart one says, “Huh. I threw something together at the last minute. Took me about an hour.” Then the projects come back with grades, and the smart one has the same grade as the hard worker, or even a better one, and the hard worker expresses some sort of envy. “Man, I wish I could do that. You’re so lucky.” So our smart one does this as often as possible, in order to win that praise, even if it’s only from himself, looking down at his test grade and thinking, “I didn’t even study for that. Damn, I’m smart.”

The eventual result is that this smart young man can’t bring himself to put real work into anything, because he likes the accolades he gets when he does minimal work that still turns out well; and he loves the freedom that he gains by working this way, by taking perhaps one-fifth as much time to complete his work, which leaves him four-fifths of his time to play video games or watch YouTube. And life is grand: until, of course, the inevitable happens, and the work gets difficult enough that he can’t finish it in one-fifth the time. Things don’t go as well then, and his grades start to slide, and the accolades dry up — and then he starts looking for excuses. Then he develops ADHD. (The really funny part of this, by the way, is the H, the Hyperactivity: this dude can barely bring himself to get out of bed in the morning, and he slouches and trudges his way through his entire school day. I’ve never seen a less hyperactive student.)

It can certainly come about in other ways: a student who is not as bright, not as capable, but who  is charming and well-liked, and so gets out of assignments because the teacher likes them, or who gets other people to do work for them; they too never develop the ability to do hard work for an extended period of time — and they too decide that they have ADHD. Or simply someone who was never pushed to complete tasks, who is in an environment that is not very concerned with school, and is therefore allowed to spend study time playing instead; they never learn to focus and pay attention, and eventually, lo and behold, ADHD.

If you genuinely have ADHD, or you have seen someone with ADHD, you know it. It’s called a disorder, which I don’t agree with, because the only problem with it is it doesn’t conform to the type of behavior we generally prefer in our children and in our students (Which still adheres to the old Puritan ideal of “seen but not heard”); but when people have it, it is unmistakable. The fact that people are using this very genuine condition as an excuse for just not wanting to work very hard is, frankly, disgusting. I don’t really have a suggestion or advice here, other than — well, shut up and do your work, you lazy punks.