What I find deeply ironic is that kids are told to sit still all day in school (and/or medicated to keep them that way), and then when they come home tired, and want to play video games, they're told that sitting still is bad and to "get active."
In fact, I believe one of the reasons school is so boring is that many people belive "boring = good for you, fun = bad".
Personally, I never had the kind of bouncing off the walls energy that other kids had. I have a mild form of anemia and was more than happy with the sitting still part of school. But I was still bored out of my mind. I loved learning too, just not in school. I missed several homework assignments because I was busy drawing theme park designs and magnetic flying car concepts on the paper. I was very happy when I switched to home-schooling in 5th Grade.
My mother also worked as a teacher's aide and was very upset when she saw a teacher call the office and say "(boy's name) needs his meds!!!" just because the kid was sitting in his chair in a slightly incorrect manner. (This teacher had a mean streak anyway - tearing up kids' drawing because they wrote their name on the front instead of the back, etc. - and she would win awards. Luckily, my mom later switched to working with a much nicer teacher.)
On the flip side, I was one of the only kids in my class with the attention span to sit through a movie. The teacher would almost always turn it off before the end because of kids acting up. Years later, when I worked for an after-school program, the kids were the same way. They were super-exited when the movie began, but by the halfway-mark, they got so unruly, the teacher gave them the option to do something else, and only three kids out of 30 chose to stay to the end. As a lifelong "movie person," this surprises me.
But bottom line, medication should only be used as a last resort, not an easy fix for teachers and schools.
(By the way, in 2nd Grade I started getting headaches, and the school tried to convince Mom I needed reading glasses...but they were really sinus headaches. Years later, I had an eye test and was told I had 20-20 vision.)