I was diagnosed with ADHD in my late thirties. By then I had already taught hundreds of hours of English, managed teams in high-pressure hospitality environments, and built a professional life that looked, from the outside, well-organised. Inside, it had always been more complicated than that.
Getting the diagnosis was not a revelation. It was more like being given the word for something I had always known about myself — the way a new vocabulary item does not create the concept but finally names it. Here is what it has taught me about teaching and learning, from the inside.
Attention Is Not Binary
The common picture of ADHD — a child who cannot sit still — is accurate for some people and misleading for others. What ADHD actually describes, in adults who have learned to compensate, is not an absence of attention but an inconsistency of it. The attention is there, sometimes intensely so. But it is not reliably directed by intention. It is directed by interest, urgency, novelty, and emotional salience.
This is professionally relevant in the classroom because it means I understand, physically, what it is like for a learner’s attention to move away from the lesson without their choosing it. I do not mistake disengagement for laziness. I design lessons with attention in mind — not assuming it will be present throughout, but engineering moments that recapture it.
The work of keeping attention in a second language is especially demanding. You are simultaneously processing sound, decoding grammar, accessing vocabulary, and monitoring comprehension. ADHD adds another variable: the attention itself may drift before any of those processes have completed.
Scaffolding as Survival Skill
People with ADHD tend to be poor at creating external structure — and consequently very good at understanding why external structure matters. I use visible agendas in every lesson. I write objectives on the board. I summarise at the end. These are not habits I maintain because a training course told me to; they are practices I maintain because, without them, I would get lost — and I know my students can get lost the same way.
The CELTA principle of making the implicit explicit resonates deeply with how I process information. If the purpose is hidden, the brain (mine and many of my students’) cannot organise around it. State the purpose. Make it visual. Return to it. This is not remediation; it is good design.
What I Have Learned to Say
I am transparent about my ADHD with students when it seems relevant. Not as an excuse — I do not use it as one — but as information. When I catch myself repeating an instruction three times, I can explain that this is partly because I know information needs repetition to encode, and partly because I am genuinely uncertain whether I said it clearly the first time.
This transparency has a side effect: it tends to create a classroom where students are more willing to say “I don’t understand” or “can you repeat that?” Those phrases feel less like admissions of failure when the teacher has already modelled them.
The Honest Part
ADHD makes some things harder. Preparing detailed lesson plans requires more effort and more scaffolding of the planning process itself. Long administrative tasks are genuinely difficult. Time estimation is unreliable in ways that sometimes cause problems.
But neurodivergence is not only deficits. The hyperfocus that comes with ADHD — the capacity to be completely absorbed in a problem that genuinely interests me — is the same cognitive state that allows me to spend three hours designing a single lesson activity and finding it completely absorbing. The ability to see multiple simultaneous possibilities, to make unexpected connections, to generate energy through novelty — these are professional assets in a teaching context.
The goal is not to perform neurotypical. The goal is to understand your own cognitive architecture well enough to work with it.
For the full account of my experience with ADHD, Bipolar I, and Complex PTSD, see My Mental Health Journey. For how these experiences shape my classroom practice, see the 60-Day ELT Masterclass.