A person diagnosed with ADHD in middle school describes building his own learning system through asking questions and metacognitive techniques, thinking about how he thinks. He reframes ADHD not as a deficit but as a different kind of intelligence that required him to engineer workarounds.
Teacher called me the boy with the broken brain in front of the whole class. Maybe you could walk us through your early journey, your school journey.
They asked me at one point, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I said, I want to be a doctor. And they said, well, you better set your sights lower because you just, you don't have what it takes to do that. And so in the 7th grade, I got identified as having learning differences, ADHD. I felt like I had this hardware, but I didn't have software that was working for me. and I needed to program my own software and using an experimental approach. And so I start— I started to clue into, for example, the power of questions that when the teacher was teaching, my brain would just be flying in different directions and I couldn't pay attention for more than a few seconds. But if I asked a question, my brain would hone in, laser focus on the answer for at least a few moments. And whatever was being transmitted to me would be ingrained in my brain and I could connect it to other things that I knew. And I could recall it later. And so I started using the power of thinking about thinking. I started to tune into my observational powers. I started to tune into the power of questions and figure out how I actually learned.
For me, it's always been, it's not how smart you are, it's really more how are you smart?
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