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My ADHD makes me a better IELTS writing teacher. I didn’t believe it for years. Now I’d put it on a business card.

Here’s why. IELTS Task 2 — the academic essay — has a specific failure mode that kills most students’ scores. They know the grammar. They have the vocabulary. They write five hundred words and score 5.5 anyway. The examiner’s comment: “not sufficiently focused,” “ideas not clearly developed,” “coherence breaks down.” The student reads it and blames their English. Their English is fine. The problem is structure.

Structure is invisible to most people. To me it is the only thing I see.

An ADHD brain cannot hold a loose argument together. Too many threads, too much interesting detail, too easy to follow a tangent off a cliff. So very early on I built a scaffold I could use *without relying on working memory* — a skeleton so rigid that even my most scattered day couldn’t collapse it. Position statement → two supporting points → each point: claim, example, explanation, link back. Full stop. No detours.

That scaffold is now what I teach. Not because it’s the only way to write — it isn’t. Because it is the fastest way to a Band 7 for a student who has twelve weeks, a job, and no patience for theory. It is constraint as liberation.

The lesson itself runs in twenty-five minutes. I give the student a question. They write one sentence of position. We check it: does it answer *all parts* of the question? No hedging, no “there are many opinions” — a direct answer in one sentence. Then they write the two supporting sentences, one per body paragraph, before they write the paragraphs themselves. A plan that takes three minutes and prevents ninety percent of coherence problems.

Then they write. I don’t correct grammar in real time — that switches their brain to editing mode and kills output. I read the draft for one thing only: does each sentence serve the point it’s supposed to serve? If it doesn’t, the sentence goes, regardless of how well-written it is. This is the hardest thing to learn. Students fall in love with their sentences. Good examiners don’t care about sentences; they care about argument.

After Cambridge, after CELTA, after hundreds of hours in front of students, this is what I know: the brain that cannot rely on working memory learns to make the structure external, visible, and uncheat-able. That’s a gift, not a deficit — and it turns out most students need exactly that.

Band 7 is not a mystery. It’s a repeatable skeleton, executed cleanly. I’ve seen it work every time.