Behind the work · 4 min read
Why I Am Building This
I am building the education I needed: intellectually serious, structurally supportive, and designed for students whose ability and performance have never moved in a straight line.
In short
- I have been teaching since 2012, and I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult.
- Repeating an explanation more slowly rarely helps. Changing the route in does.
- Tutoring is the first layer: research and access are part of the same project.
I began teaching in 2012, when I was fourteen, before I had any language for the kind of student I was or the kind of teacher I would become.
I helped classmates, tutored mathematics, statistics and econometrics, taught university students in Canada as a Teaching Assistant, taught in Italian secondary schools, and kept teaching while building a separate career in marketing.
For years, I treated the variety as a problem of indecision. I was supposed to choose the coherent path: academic or commercial, analytical or creative, stable or international.
The reality was simpler. I needed more than one kind of difficult problem to feel fully engaged.
01 · 30 sec
The diagnosis changed the interpretation
It did not explain me away. It explained the pattern.
I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult and later understood my gifted, twice-exceptional profile more clearly. The diagnosis did not reduce my life to one explanation. It did explain why exceptional performance and basic difficulty had always existed beside each other.
I could complete demanding academic work and still struggle with ordinary routines. I could focus intensely on a complex problem and fail to begin a simple one. I could build a career across countries and still feel that the standard structure of work required constant negotiation with my own brain.
02 · 30 sec
The students made the idea concrete
Montréal, statistics, and a pattern I recognised.
The turning point came while tutoring university students in statistics in Montréal, many of them with ADHD.
I saw versions of a pattern I knew personally: students who were intellectually capable but blocked by the way the task was presented, organised, or emotionally experienced.
Repeating the explanation more slowly did not solve the problem. Changing the route in did. Making the structure visible did. Respecting the student's intelligence while directly teaching the missing process did.
Support should remove unnecessary friction, not remove the thinking.
03 · 25 sec
Tutoring is the first layer
One student at a time, because that is where patterns are real.
The work begins one student at a time, because that is where patterns become real. Tutoring lets me observe how students understand, avoid, compensate, recover, and gradually take ownership of their learning.
But the ambition is larger. I want to develop an approach for gifted, ADHD, and twice-exceptional students that combines serious academic challenge, explicit executive-function development, thoughtful use of data, and respect for the student as a whole person.
04 · 35 sec
Research has to be part of it
Good intentions are not evidence.
Work with exceptional minds should not rely only on good intentions or the charisma of individual teachers.
It should be able to ask which structures work, for whom, and how that is known. That requires research, ethical data practices, collaboration, and a willingness to revise the approach when the evidence demands it.
My quantitative background and long-term doctoral goals are part of the same project: not simply to teach differently, but to understand why certain students remain invisible and what actually helps them build durable skill.
What I needed and never had shouldn’t stay a private theory. It should become something that can be examined, improved, and shared.
05 · 20 sec
What I am building toward
Teaching now. Research and access next.
Concretely:
- Specialised one-to-one education that helps students now.
- Resources that help families tell the difference between ability and execution.
- A research agenda on ADHD, giftedness and twice-exceptionality.
- Access structures, so this is not only for the families who can most easily afford it.
- A community willing to question what “doing fine” really means.
Note to self
Children like the one I was do not need to be made less intense, less curious, or easier to categorise. They need an education capable of meeting them.