Who’s this guy, now? 

Growing up, I loved to learn — but boy, was I bored in school.

I put up with it for a long time, but after my sophomore year I had had it. I opted out of school in order to homeschool myself.

I learned ancient Greek (yay)!
I kept up with science (barely)!
I fell terribly behind in math (possibly ADHD kids shouldn’t homeschool themselves?)!

Honestly, it was a mixed bag.

But then I realized I had to start studying for my SAT. And, without really realizing what I was doing, I put together an ADHD-centric way to prep.

And when I got my results back, I was shocked to discover that I got a 1590 out of 1600.

(The happy kind of shocked — not the other kind!)

That score earned me a National Merit Scholarship, and a free ride to America’s top honors college.

As the first person in my family to go to college, I didn’t realize how cool this was at the time! And, arguably, I didn’t know how to use college. I took whatever classes seemed shiniest — regardless of what academic departments they were in (or how they’d be useful professionally).

I loved every minute of it. College was joyous, hard work.

I fell into a double major in the humanities (world religions and history), and graduated summa cum laude.

Impressive, right? (Just wait.)

Here’s a question I probably should have asked more than a year before graduation: what do you do with two humanities degrees?

(Well, it’s not like careful planning had gotten me this far!)

So I let my ADHD lead me: I discovered that I love teaching, and I grabbed every wonderful, oddball teaching opportunity I could create —

• I taught a chemistry/philosophy/cooking class for elementary schoolers

• I taught gifted/talented middle school classes on philosophy

• I worked at a private hippie school and taught high school classes in moral economics, religions of the world, and Big History

• I led a college seminar in advanced reading techniques, and started a college club on evil, and the purpose of life

Somewhere along the line I went back to school to get a master’s in educational leadership. And I started helping people design new kinds of schools — schools that work especially well for people with ADHD.

Finally, I got a dream job: to help design the whole upper-elementary curriculum for an international school — and be in the classroom to teach it.

(Before the virus hit, every weekday found me posing riddles, talking about dinosaurs, and squaring off against very fast fifth graders in tag.)

But until recently, the trade-off for teaching the shiniest classes has been a hit-and-miss income — so, from the very beginning, I threw myself into test-prep coaching.

It’s hard for me to relate how fun it is to tutor the SAT and ACT.

I get to do only the things that actually work.

• How do you pay attention? Psychology already figured that out

• How do you remember what you learn forever? Psychology figured that out, too!

• How do you stay creative in the middle of a crisis? These things have been figured out academically — they just hadn’t been systematically applied in test prep

I even gave a TEDx talk on a pet project — how to gradually build toward a perfect score on the tests, by studying a single problem a day. (Interested? I’ve turned this into a webinar.)

Finally, I was hired as the test-prep guru of an elite tutoring company. (Once, I was bitten by a billionaire’s dog! Alas, it didn’t break the skin…)

And then I got the job of helping design an upper elementary program. It was a huge job — I knew I’d need total focus.

So I quit.

And I walked away from tutoring.

Want to guess what got me to come back to test prep?

Having ADHD is fantastic, and I wouldn’t get rid of it if I could. But it’s also the hardest part of my life. Both of my kids have been diagnosed with ADHD, too, and I see them already struggling with it.

And then I realized that between 5–10% of American kids have ADHD, and most of them will take the SAT or ACT — and almost no one was helping them prepare for it.

More than a hundred thousand neurodiverse people are throwing themselves at these tests each year, and almost no one was focusing on helping them.

Regular test prep? That’s everywhere. But test prep that uses ADHD strengths to help study? When I started, that didn’t exist.

It needs to.

Fixing this problem has become my mission. I decided to throw myself back into SAT/ACT prep, and re-make my curriculum from the ground up — just for students who struggle with scattered minds.

College admissions can be a dark time for students. I meet them in the midst of frustration and fears of meaninglessness, and help them think through how to use this type of brain we’ve been given.

It’s a joy!