Draft Book Chapters
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 Hubris of the Lab Bench: Why ADHD Science Needs a “Reboot”
For decades, one of the recurring conclusions in ADHD research has been that children and adults with ADHD demonstrate poorer motor development or motor performance than their neurotypical peers. There are studies behind it, reviews behind it, and citations stacked upon citations behind it. And I am mostly convinced that a substantial portion of what […]