umkcdds said:
there is no such thing as ADD. it's nothing but an excuse for lack of discipline.
The evolution of your slippery slope, already snowballing:
Nor is there any such thing as depression. That's nothing but a vocabulary word for a state of mind. When someone who quits wanting to brush their teeth in the morning and stay awake in their waking hours is called depressed, they too are taking advantage of an excuse for lack of discipline. Their termination of self is the best thing that could happen to them.
I find it funny how neither scientists nor humanities specialists have diagnosed folks like you with some eleven-syllable disorder like Pejorative Rhetorical Sophistry. (PRS)
In defending yourself and your world without ADD, you will of course claim that there is no such place as a smallish liberal arts school where pretentious professors (ones who once begrudgingly failed P-chem or went to medical school on the first day and decided immediately that they couldn't stand sick people) only give one or two A's in a substantially-sized core pre-health class to a couple of foreign students who knew things that were neither in the book nor the lecture notes - things the entire class just "had to know," as the professor would say in a closed discussion. When your PRS kicks in you will more brilliantly conclude that every student but those two were too riddled with incompetence and lack of study habits despite all of the outstanding resources and promising opportunities the wonderful school had to offer. And no one will suspect you have this disorder called PRS until, after the professor tells the rest of the class they should have studied something they were interested in in the first place, you go ahead and tell the one guy or gal in the class who thinks he has ADD or ADHD to stop making excuses for himself or herself and go stock shelves at Wal-Mart because not everyone can always do anything if they put their hearts and minds to it.
Yes, your laconic but in the end conceited and generalizing assumption does fail to take into consideration that there are many small-school professors who never give a damn about anything but the illusory and likely, in the eyes of Adcoms 'fabled' or 'non-existent,' "hard reputation." You tell them they compete with their own students and these professors will call who else but you, umkcdds, to stand by their side as their official PRS Spokesperson and Praetorian. Their job is to draw their paycheck and publish their quota of research. Sure. Nothing more, nothing less. (Least of all would you ever see them motivate and train students to be disciplined for something. Pssh, discipline!) The students who can't pull an Edgar Casey on their finals should give up their dreams at their earliest convenience, right? Because some people are never adequately prepared to match demonstrated intellectual capacity and Herculean motivation with optimal work ethic in the eyes of a few Biology or Chemistry professors, right? Or because some people have what they think of as ADD/ADHD/depression when they are in fact brilliant victims of sorry university pre-health programs?
Or are they not spoonfeeding and babying programs?
Programs that are too lax on critical thinking relative to, um, whatever other school?
Regardless of the PRS symptoms with which you'll attempt to justify yourself, it was discipline, an emotional self-righteous discipline characteristic of those mendacious ADD bums (as you would call them), that saved me. It put me right about where Dental Mom is currently, GPA-wise, and I probably have more ADD than many people diagnosed with the condition. I've found myself thinking the exact same things she did for the longest time. So make some narrow-minded and logically ungrounded sweep-statement again and see who cares. It took a lot of discipline to write that I'm sure.
The only difference for me is that I was trained to have immunity to PRS.
