Institutional Failures
The APA and the DSM
The walls Jeff Hawkins encountered were not accidents. They were the product of an academic and institutional system that had spent decades narrowing the kinds of questions behavioral science was structured to ask. Hawkins approached the brain with the instincts of an engineer. Observable behavior was evidence, but it was not an explanation. If working […]
Empathy as a Second Language: The ESL Model for Training Educators in ADHD
Part I: The Language We Never Taught Our Teachers We have a rather extraordinary contradiction in American education. We expect teachers to differentiate instruction for students with ADHD, yet we have never systematically equipped them with the training necessary to understand how those students become engaged, how they learn, or how their abilities develop. We […]
When Toughness Becomes the Escape Room: What the FBI Can Teach Schools About Trust, RSD, and Reaching Kids
There is an assumption embedded in American education that becomes especially visible in schools serving children under enormous stress: some kids need us to be tougher. They need consequences and structure. They need somebody who will not tolerate excuses. They need to learn that the world is not going to accommodate them. I have heard […]
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 […]
AuDHD Beyond the Diagnostic Line
Why ADHD Plus Autistic Traits May Be the Definition We Actually Need I think we may be defining AuDHD around the wrong boundary. The common definition is straightforward: ADHD plus autism. If someone meets diagnostic criteria for ADHD and also meets diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder, we call the combined presentation AuDHD. That definition […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Neuro-ESOL Imperative: Translating the Nonlinear Lattice of the ADHD Brain
There is already a precedent for what I am proposing. We train teachers to work with English-language learners because we understand something fundamental: a child can be intelligent, capable, curious, and ready to learn while still experiencing a profound educational impairment when the language of the classroom does not match the language the child can […]