ADD Students very often have poor short term memory. That’s why they often end up in another room with no idea of why they are there.
Our brains move very quickly from one thought to another. It’s the way an ADHD brain works. With all of that bouncing from one thought to the next, it’s easy to forget some things. Your mind hasn’t kept the thought long enough for the brain to store it, either because you’re on to the next thought, or you got distracted by something else.
Years ago, there used to be shows where a person would get a set amount of time – say 2 minutes – to push a shopping cart into a store and load it up. Anything that was in the cart when the timer went off was theirs to keep.
There is a similar car insurance commercial on now, where a guy in a red jumpsuit goes into a booth and tries to grab as many dollar bills as he can.
In both cases, there is always stuff left behind. The people are in such a rush that they can only pick up and retain a certain amount of stuff. At some point, they begin to drop things and they can never get it all.
That’s kind of a good graphic example of how our brains work.
When you’re studying or in school, that can be a real problem.
You might decide to take medication to help you focus more and that might help.
But regardless of whether you do or not, you will still have the problem to some extent.
Repetition is your answer.
Teachers are always assigning reading. The idea is that you read the new material at night and then come to class the next day to listen to a lecture on the same material. For students without ADHD, that amount of repetition is enough. For ADD Students, it is not.
Have you ever gotten to the bottom of the page and not had any idea of what you just read?
How is that going to help you learn?
What you need to do is break the reading up, doing a little at a time, and then use the power of repetition to reinforce it. There is a specific technique that you can use that’s effective and not mind numbing. You can find it here.
[...] other day I wrote about the importance of repetition in order to remember and retain what you’ve [...]