Attention span
on October 28, 2019 at 12:01 amChapter: Dorothy-Heartin'
Characters: David Walkerton, Joyce Brown
Location: Joyce and Walky's apartment, Ruth's high school
“I didn’t have the best of memory those days” because, you know, it was established that Walky’s brain was mindwiped like a zillion times. Enough for him to eventually be immune to it, as was important once.
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Was it catch and release? I can’t imagine they just let him go back out into the wild after a mindwipe
Or did Professor Doc get tired of him underfoot
I think that includes, like, being abducted for an hour then having that hour wiped out, not just full-amnesia memory wipes.
I find it interesting how this turned into his very evident (and rather recently noted by Mike) ADHD in DoA continuity!
Because, uh, yah, my memory is fucking shit and my attention span for most things is crap, and I got my adult ADHD diagnosis at the ripe old age of 28, and like…. you don’t require mind-wiping bullshit for that shit to be the case. Being an honors roll student and being a crap student are, hahaha, more compatible than most would like to think. The former turns to the latter on a fucking dime, when you hit a point where you can’t cost through on your other gifts and have to start putting in Active Work…
I had a very similar story, except my grades slipped earlier when my home life went to shit. Funny thing about being kicked out of the house repeatedly — it makes it hard to do homework. So I stopped caring and had to repeat some classes. You would have hoped some kind teacher would notice and ask me what was up, but no, I got in trouble for being late to class too often and that was about all they said to me. Adult diagnosis: ADHD, Autism, and CPTSD.
Also dyscalculia, which was a relief to find out after I bombed calculus in college. I was the teacher’s favorite student in class and barely pulled out a D because I tested and homeworked badly. Turns out I lose negative signs and confuse digits 4, 6, and 8 often, meaning I was working the problem correctly but coming to the wrong final answer.
Oh, man. That sounds like a really tough combo of things to deal with, it’s hard even without throwing trauma and resultant CPTSD in the mix. I was, I’m aware, very fortunate that I didn’t have home life problems. My parents weren’t necessarily right about how to handle some of my stuff but they were supportive and good parents.
I didn’t actually run into stuff I couldn’t coast through until college (much like DoA!Walky) — calc 3 is what finally got me. I eventually went looking for a diagnosis for my dyscalculia which causes me mostly to confuse 3s and 8s and flip signs or reverse the order of intergration, and got a diagnosis for the ADHD. The whole working the problem correctly but coming to the wrong final answer is my WHOLE DAMN LIFE. And is why I have a hard twitch at anything that sounds like “you just need to be more careful,” because holy shit do you know how many math teachers I heard that scold from growing up.
(Also, fun fact, apparently you can know too good at math for some clinicians to be willing to diagnose dyscalculia because obviously there’s nothing conceptually wrong. NOT THAT I AM STILL BITTER THAT THEY SPECIFICALLY SAID I COULDN’T HAVE DYSCALCULIA BECAUSE I WAS TOO GOOD AT MATH, OR ANYTHING. Like, motherfuckers, what do you think two decade of adapting and learning to mask MEAN, and do you not understand that there are forms of dyscalculia that are not *conceptual* but involve confusing digits?! But no, they felt that that was the ADHD rather than its own thing, despite my having never had remotely similar problems with *text* and presumably if it was attentional it would show up in my writing TOO.)
The good news is I did get actual treatment for the ADHD (I sort of gave up on doing anything more after getting the diagnosis because it’d been so much work and hadn’t even been what I was looking for at the time), when during my second go at college I had a chemistry instructor go “what gives, you clearly understand the material but your quizzes are awful,” and gently shoved me at disability services when I said that it was, largely, because my only ADHD medication was my coffee. So I went to disability services to arrange accommodations, and I also went to the doctor and got on meds, and suddenly I could focus and remember things. My memory problems are, actually, one of my BIGGEST symptoms. And yet somehow memory issues never top the ‘you might have ADHD’ checklists.
See, my impression is that dyscalculia is less about math and more about numbers. I mean, I can do math, but it’s kind of hard to get the right answer (or check your work) when I’m having problems telling the difference between 123, 321, or 456.
31.5?
Yeah, that bothers me too.
They always ask for whole numbers so that is a weird problem.
Good, I’m not the only one who that bothered.
Yeah, maths is very much not my subject, but I’m pretty sure that if you’re putting decimals in a fraction, something has gone badly wrong.
It’s not so much badly wrong as it is uncommon. Most of the time, like here, you’d leave the improper fraction be and simply reduce it down. So I’d expect the answer to be written as 63/2, not 31.5.
It’s unusual to see at the implied level of math here, but you’ll see stuff like this happen much more often in higher math and especially when you run into applied problems in physics or calc.
“Being smart was dumb” may be my new favorite line of this strip.
Now there’s a book title if I ever heard one…
Joyce and Walky book 12: Being Smart Was Dumb
lol
ADHD, just like his Dumbingverse counterpart.
This is like the exact inverse of Robin constantly trying to stop Ethan and Amber’s flashbacks by any means necessary over in Shortpacked!-land.