A little mad, always fresh, sometimes a party. Best when shared. Helping teachers and students avoid insanity and calamity since 2006.

I have been diagnosed with ADHD. I have also been a secondary English teacher for seventeen years, run a tutoring practice, co-facilitated a youth leadership academy, raised children, and kept a journal since I was seven years old.

I say all of this not to perform functionality but to establish something specific: I know what it looks like to have a brain that works differently and to build a life that works anyway. Not by fixing the brain. By knowing it well enough to stop fighting it and start using it.

This is the thing nobody told me when I was the student in the desk instead of the teacher at the front of the room: ADHD is not a deficit in attention. It is a difference in how attention is allocated. I am not unable to focus. I am unable to focus on the wrong things on someone else’s schedule. Put me in front of something genuinely interesting, genuinely urgent, or genuinely mine — and try to pull me away.

The classroom was, for a long time, the right container for a brain like mine. Every day different. Every class a live performance with immediate feedback. The students in front of me were a constant source of genuine interest — which is not nothing, when you have a brain that runs on genuine interest as fuel. And seventeen years of figuring out how to hold the attention of thirty-five teenagers who did not necessarily want their attention held taught me more about executive function than any clinical framework I encountered before or since.

Should we be planning lessons and courses from the viewpoint of a content strategist or attention marketer?

Maybe. I’ve thought about this more than is probably professional to admit.

The questions that make a lesson work are not far from the questions that make any content work: why should someone pay attention to this right now? What makes this worth the cost of their focus? What happens if they don’t engage — and is that consequence real or performed? The ADHD student in the back of the room is asking all of these questions simultaneously and arriving at answers faster than the lesson plan anticipated. The worst thing you can do is pretend the questions aren’t being asked. The best thing you can do is build a lesson that answers them before they have to.

This is what seventeen years of teaching students with ADHD — and being one — gave me: an instinct for where the attention is actually going and a habit of designing for that rather than against it.

What I know about executive function I learned partly from research and mostly from necessity.

I know that working memory is not the same as intelligence, and that a student who can’t hold three steps in their head simultaneously is not lazy — they are navigating a system that was not designed for how their brain sequences tasks. I know that time blindness is real and that “just start earlier” is not a strategy. I know that the transition between tasks is where the wheels come off for most ADHD brains, and that the most useful intervention is usually the most boring-sounding one: make the transition smaller. Make the next step so obvious and so close that the brain doesn’t have time to wander between here and there.

I know that body-doubling works — that something about another human presence in the room, even silent, makes sustained focus more accessible. I know this because I have spent years arranging my own work environment around this fact without knowing there was a name for it.

I know that what looks like disorganization is often a filing system that makes complete sense to the person who built it and no sense to anyone else. I know this because I have been in both positions.

What I want to do with all of this is not mysterious.

I want to give students the map I wish someone had handed me — not the clinical version, not the checklist, but the honest one. The one that says: your brain is not broken. It is particular. Particular things require particular strategies, and the strategies are learnable, and learning them is not a moral achievement but a practical one. You are not trying to be better. You are trying to be effective. Those are different projects.

A little mad. Always fresh. Sometimes a party. Best when shared.

That’s been true since at least 2006. Probably longer.