The Student Who Changed How I Think About Neurodivergence

The Student Who Changed How I Think About Neurodivergence

What one AP Chemistry student taught me about the difference between looking like you're learning and actually learning.

There was a student early in my teaching career who forever changed how I look at students whose brains’ work differently.  I’ll call him Charlie. Charlie was on the autism spectrum.  At the time, we would have described him as having Asperger’s syndrome, a diagnosis that has since been incorporated into autism spectrum disorder.  Charlie was high functioning as hell, and had an attitude to match. 

A  source of near constant frustration for his high school teachers, Charlie didn’t take notes, rarely touched homework, he often appeared not to be paying attention, and he didn’t participate in class in a way that we expected students to participate.  In fact, Charlie displayed very few of the behaviors we would collectively come to associate with being a “good student.” 

His grades reflected it. 

There was a near-weekly email chain among his teachers.  

Has anyone gotten anything out of Charlie this week? 

Has anyone figured out how to motivate him? 

Is he doing anything in your classes? 

Any ideas?

We were all trying to figure out how to get Charlie to engage.  How to get him to perform the role of the student.  I was every bit as frustrated as everyone else.  

There was one thing Charlie did consistently - he asked questions, lots of them.  They were rarely the convenient kind of questions, either.  Charlie’s questions were obscure. Nuanced.  Sometimes only tangentially related to what we were discussing.  They could take us three intellectual steps away from whatever I had planned to teach that day. 

But if you paid attention to Charlie - not simply whether his pencil was moving - you could feel that there was an enormous amount happening beneath the surface. I just didn’t understand what was happening yet.  Then we got to balancing chemical equations in class, and Charlie did something I couldn’t explain.  Someone with no background in Chemistry prior to jumping into an advanced placement classroom did it in his head.  

Now, balancing chemical equations requires keeping track of the number of atoms of each element on both sides of an equation and adjusting coefficients until matter is conserved.  I was a geochemist before I became a teacher, and by this point, I’d taught advanced chemistry for years.  For complicated equations, I used paper and pencil - And Charlie looked at one of these equations and balanced it in his head. Not using any method I or anyone else had taught him.  Not using any method I had ever seen.  

Then, he did it again.

He had apparently created his own internal system for solving them, and I was fascinated.  I asked Charlie to explain what he was doing.  He couldn’t. Not exactly.  He tried, but whatever was happening inside his head didn’t translate neatly into the step-by-step procedure I knew.  

He just knew.  

That was the moment something shifted for me, because suddenly I had to reconcile two different versions of the same student.  

There was the Charlie I could see: The student who didn’t take notes, didn’t do the homework, didn’t practice the way that I asked him to, didn’t appear to pay attention and was failing classes.  Then, there was the Charlie whose mind I had just gotten a tiny glimpse inside - the two versions didn’t match. 

So We Made a Deal.

I stopped asking Charlie to learn chemistry the way I thought he should learn chemistry.  No more pestering him about taking notes.  No more insisting that he complete practice simply to prove that he had practiced.  

Instead, we made a new arrangement. For every new concept we learned, Charlie had to explain his understanding to me.  

Sometimes I would ask him questions.  Sometimes I would ask him to solve a problem.  Sometimes I would ask him to walk me through what he thought was happening chemically.  

There were two reasons for this:

1. I needed evidence that he actually understood the material.
2. I needed something I could put in the gradebook.

And Charlie agreed. From then on, he didn’t miss a day.  Usually with just a bit more than a hint of condescension - as though he couldn’t quite believe I needed him to explain something that seemed perfectly obvious to him - he demonstrated what he knew. And over and over again, he knew it.  

At the end of the year, Charlie took the AP Chemistry Exam, and when scores came out in July, he’d scored a 5, the highest possible score. 

We have been measuring the wrong things. 

I’ve thought about Charlie for years, because there’s something that bothers me about this story: 

Charlie didn’t suddenly become intelligent when I noticed it. 

He didn’t suddenly learn chemistry because I changed my expectations.  His mind had been doing extraordinary things all along.  What changed was my ability to see it.  We had been looking for evidence of learning in places schools traditionally teach us to look: notes, homework, participation, practice, organization, compliance with instructions.  

Those things aren’t meaningless.  For many students, they are incredibly useful tools for learning.  Homework can provide valuable practice.  Note-taking can deepen processing. Organization matters.  Follow-through matters.  

But somewhere along the way, it’s easy to make a subtle mistake: 

We begin treating the behaviors associated with learning as evidence of learning itself.  

They’re not the same thing. 

A student can have a beautifully organized notebook and understand very little of what’s written inside of it.  

Another student can appear to be staring out the window while making connections you haven’t even considered.  

One student can complete every assignment and forget the material immediately after the test.  

Another can skip half the practice and understand the underlying concept deeply enough to apply it somewhere entirely new. 

That doesn't mean we should stop teaching students how to “do student behaviors” like take notes, practice, organize themselves, meet deadlines, or navigate expectations.  Those skills matter.  

But they are tools. They are not the mind itself. And I think sometimes we forget the difference.  We don’t know this based on their eliciting specific “student behaviors”. 

What are we actually trying to measure? 

Charlie made me much more curious about students.  Instead of only asking: 

Why aren’t you doing what you’re supposed to be doing? 

I became more interested in asking: 

What’s actually happening here? 

 What does this student understand? 

How are they thinking about this? 

Where does their reasoning break down? 

What are they noticing that I haven’t noticed? 

Is this student struggling with content - or struggling with the way we’ve asked them to demonstrate their understanding of the content? 

Is this a knowledge problem? A skill problem? An executive function problem? A motivation problem? A communication problem? 

Or are we simply looking for evidence in the wrong place? 

Those questions don’t eliminate expectations.  They make our expectations more intelligent.  Because the goal of education cannot simply be to produce students who look like they’re learning.  The goal is learning. 

Your Child Is More Than Their Student Behaviors

I think this matters tremendously for parents, too. When a teenager is struggling in school, the visible behaviors tend to become the entire conversation. 

Why aren't you doing your homework?

Why didn't you turn that in?

Why weren't you paying attention?

Why can't you just take better notes?

Why do I have to keep reminding you?

Sometimes those are exactly the behaviors that need to change. 

But before we decide what a behavior means, I think we owe our kids something else. 

Curiosity. 

Because a missing assignment tells us that an assignment is missing.  It doesn’t tell us why. 

The Gradebook Is a Scoreboard. It Isn't the Story of the Game.

Coaches understand something that we sometimes forget in education:

The scoreboard tells you what happened. It doesn't tell you why it happened.

A final score of 42–14 tells you who won. It doesn't tell you about the interception in the third quarter, the injured starting quarterback, the missed tackles, the brilliant defensive adjustment at halftime, or the three drives that came within inches of changing the game.

You have to watch the game to understand the score.

The same is true of students.

A missing assignment tells us that an assignment is missing. It doesn't tell us why. A 62% on a test tells us how a student performed on that test. It doesn't tell us whether they misunderstood the chemistry, ran out of time, misread the questions, froze under pressure, didn't study, studied the wrong things, or understood the concepts but couldn't communicate them in the way the assessment required.

A string of zeros in the gradebook tells us something important. But it doesn't tell us the whole story.

The gradebook is the scoreboard.

And too often, we look at the scoreboard and believe we've watched the game. That's what I had been doing with Charlie. His scoreboard looked terrible. Missing work. Poor grades. Little visible participation. Almost none of the traditional evidence I expected from a successful student.

But when I finally stopped staring at the scoreboard long enough to investigate how his mind was actually working, I discovered something the numbers hadn't shown me at all.

Charlie understood chemistry. Deeply.

The problem wasn't that nothing was happening. The problem was that we had been looking in the wrong place for evidence of it. A teenager who doesn’t look like our collectively held picture of a “good student” may have far more happening underneath the surface than we realize. Charlie certainly did. 

The Question Charlie Left Me With

There is a question I wish I had learned to ask much earlier in my career: 

Am I trying to understand this student - or am I trying to make this student easier for the system to understand? 

Those two are not always the same thing.  Students still have to function in systems.  They need to learn how to meet expectations, communicate, follow through, and do things they don’t particularly want to do.  That’s part of becoming capable and self-directed.  

But I don’t want those things confused with intelligence.  And I certainly don’t want a student’s ability to perform “student” to become the limit of what we believe that student is capable of becoming. 

Charlie taught me that. Not because he became a different student, because eventually, I became a more curious teacher. 

And once I stopped asking him to show me learning in exactly the way I expected it to look, I finally got to see the mind that had been there all along. 

If you’re wondering what’s underneath your student’s behavior...

This is exactly the kind of work we do inside the Student Success Reset.  

We don’t begin with How do we make this student perform better?

We begin with: What’s actually happening here? 

Because once students understand how they think, what gets them stuck, what they need, and how to work with the mind they actually have, they can begin building something much more important than compliance. 

They can begin building self-leadership.  

Learn more about the Student Success Reset - I’m running my free workshop this Saturday, September 26, for students and their parents, to come and take the first step in understanding how they uniquely learn, what their friction points are and to create their own personalized 90-day plan to work with themselves, rather than against themselves.  If your student struggles with 

Procrastination

Motivation

ADD/ADHD

Anxiety

Perfectionism...

This workshop is for you. 

Register for free, and let’s see what’s possible for your child. [Click Here]