Article Archive
The Spatial Deficit: Why Scandinavia Is Abandoning the Keyboard to Save Mathematics
For over a decade, Scandinavia was celebrated as the vanguard of digital education. Classrooms across Sweden, Norway, and Finland aggressively swapped paper workbooks for tablets, standardized laptops, and cloud-based learning management platforms. Math instruction shifted from pencil-and-paper scratchpads toward keyboards, equation editors, and interactive user interfaces. Then the data arrived. Across successive rounds of the […]
The Architecture of Belonging: How Biology, Sports Psychology, and Spatial Scaffolding Restored a Traumatized Mind
In alternative and special education, severe trauma is almost universally mislabeled. An adolescent carrying the profound weight of seeing a parent dissolve under addiction, compounded by relentless peer bullying and shuttled between psychiatric facilities and alternative placements, is routinely categorized under the administrative umbrella of "Emotional and Behavioral Disorder" (EBD). The typical institutional reflex in […]
The Case of Rhys Darby, AuDHD and the Q Continuum
What Happens to an Interest-Based Nervous System When It Can Do Anything? There may be no more dangerous creature in the universe than a bored god. Star Trek has spent nearly forty years exploring some version of that problem through the Q Continuum. Q can travel essentially anywhere, manipulate matter, move through time, manufacture entire realities […]
The Anatomy of an Edge: Kurt Cobain, ADHD, and the Physics of Rejection
Kurt Cobain remembered the dividing line. There was the childhood before his parents divorced, and there was everything that came after it. “I had a really good childhood, until the divorce,” he recalled as an adult. Afterward, his “whole world” changed. He remembered the shame of coming from a broken family and desperately wanting the […]
The Case of Corey Clement
What an Undrafted Rookie, a Super Bowl, and One Defender Following Him Can Teach Us About State-Dependent Performance Nick Foles won the MVP of Super Bowl LII. Doug Pederson called one of the great offensive games in Super Bowl history. Zach Ertz caught the go-ahead touchdown, Nelson Agholor caught nine passes, Alshon Jeffery made one […]
The Case of Nick Foles
Finding a Well-Scaffolded Home Nick Foles should not make sense. If you look at his NFL career as a conventional quarterback-evaluation problem, the pieces refuse to fit together. He produced one of the most efficient regular seasons in NFL history, continued winning the following year until an injury ended his season, deteriorated badly enough in […]
In the Math Classroom: The Scoreboard Is Not the Game, the Journey Is
My son Ben once taught me more about mathematics with five putts than most assessment systems ever could. We were working with a new putting stroke, and I set up a ladder at roughly 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30 feet. The scoring was simple. Leave it short and you get nothing, because short putts […]
Rebooting Education: Why Doesn’t Public School Build a Road to Free College?
We keep talking about the cost of college in the United States as though the problem begins when a kid turns eighteen. It doesn't. By then, we've already spent thirteen years building the road that delivered the kid to that bill. So let's ask a different question: What if we built a different road? Finland […]
The Tyson Blueprint: Escaping the Home “Escape Room” Through Empathy and Scaffolding
There is a remarkably simple way to make childhood easier for an ADHD kid: don't make home an escape room. That doesn't mean eliminating rules. It doesn't mean permissive parenting, and it certainly doesn't mean letting children destroy the house, ignore other people, or do whatever the hell they want. It means creating a home […]
The ADHD Athletic Conundrum
The Executive Function Developmental Arc ADHD Research Has Barely Examined For decades, ADHD research has documented executive-function differences. We have studied inhibition, working memory, sustained attention, impulsivity, delayed consequences, emotional regulation, academic performance, medication response, and executive dysfunction. We have scanned ADHD brains and compared them with neurotypical brains. We have followed children longitudinally and […]
Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria
When Perception Becomes Pain Before we go any further, we need to get one thing straight about Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. RSD is about perception. That does not mean imaginary, fake, dramatic, or attention-seeking. It does not mean somebody with ADHD needs to toughen up, stop taking everything personally, or learn that the world does not […]
Toni Tyson Is the Mom Where Most ADHD Kids Wish They Had
There are children who grow up knowing that home is where they are understood, and there are children who grow up trying to escape it. Not necessarily because their parents do not love them or because anyone intends to hurt them. Sometimes the problem is much quieter than that. The child keeps receiving the same […]
The Extended Now: Temporal Pooling, Spatial Pooling, and a New Hypothesis for ADHD Time Blindness
At eleven o’clock one night, I sat down to edit seventy-two testimonial videos for the graduating eighth graders at Kids Community College. We had recorded each student with a lavalier microphone and a shotgun microphone. There were multiple takes and a second camera for cutaways. Each finished testimonial would run roughly one to two minutes. […]
It’s Actually That Hard
Before anyone can understand why academic research has spent half a century pathologizing ADHD, they must first understand the structural trap that governs modern scientific inquiry. The modern research university and its federal funding conduits do not exist simply to solve complex systemic problems. They are institutions organized around disciplines, departments, laboratories, funding categories, peer-review […]
The Case of Chuck Jones: Chuck Amuck
Chuck Jones does not need a retrospective ADHD diagnosis to belong among the heroes of this book. He grew up and worked before ADHD was understood in anything resembling its modern form, but he described himself, his childhood, and his creative development in ways that today fit comfortably beneath the much broader umbrella of neurodivergence. […]