i hope you don't mind that i've replied to this post from the bean thread here, but it really is OT for there and i can go at length here.
I breezed through school for the most part. Rarely took a book home and only struggled through geometry (because we had a poor algebra teacher the year before) and junior English (because he was a monotone bore). I too suspect I have undiagnosed ADHD because my mind is constantly jumping from one thing to another. When I develop an interest in something I tend to devour every bit of information I can on the subject.
similar to me in that i did not have too much trouble with school but i often found certain topics a struggle (until later when i matured a bit more and could also concentrate better) and once i got ticked off at a teacher it wasn't easy to recover from that.
too much of certain problems were that dyslexia meant that some things written on the chalkboard were gibberish to me. reading musical notation while i understand what the symbols meant i never spent enough time with it to get it drilled down where i would have needed it to get. but also general mathematical formulas if they were too complicated it would take me a lot longer than the other kids to figure them out. and then doing math homework was something i could not easily do unless i self-medicated (weed calmed me down and i could really focus) but that didn't help me at all when i went to college and stopped smoking weed... i had few study skills or self-discipline.
i drill down in topics too.
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As far as timing, it couldn't have been worse. I have had major ankle and knee issues over the past year and at one point my husband was so ill that I wondered if he'd ever come home again. I've basically took an unschooling approach as I feel that's more beneficial for all of us, but trying to sneak some fun reading and math curriculum in too.
kids will be curious and fun if you don't let others scare them away from a topic.
while i wasn't able to really understand concepts of algebra or logarithms in 5th grade i still had a teacher who lent me an algebra book to see what i could make of it. i eventually gave it back to him and said thanks.
later on in high school i did ok in that topic and also algebra 2 and trigonomitry and then geometry too. all that was fine. my big mistake was that i never had pre-calculus before going to college and because i really undrestood algebra and geometry etc. really well i advanced placed right into calculus but i was lost.
had i known what the issue was i should have immediately changed into pre-calculus it probably would have saved me hundreds of hours and a lot aggravation but i didn't know this until a few years later and by the time also a lot of money spent on courses that i sometimes had to repeat. what a mess... i'm just not very aggressive in some ways and i just didn't know. like i didn't know i could drop a class until after the date had passed and i never spoke to any counselor or math department person about any of this, or the placement exam and all that followed...
autodidacticism is how i spent many many hours as a kid because i was curious about anything (and still am if i have the time
) i could read and Mom was involved in setting up two libraries. i spent many hours in both of them.
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