My commute takes fifty minutes if I’m lucky. I can’t drive, so I have to get two buses, one into town and one back out of town, over to the other side of the city. I do this every day, and the simple fact of not having a driving license means my life is far more complicated than it would have been if I had just decided to sit behind the wheel at 17. I don’t really mind, though, unless the buses are late and it’s dark and cold. The area where I work is in the top five percent of most deprived postcodes in the country. I’ve heard it described unfavourably on a non-negligible number of occasions, but I like it. It’s near where my nan and grandad live, where I spent a good proportion of my childhood, where I said my first word and my spent my first Christmas.
Before I started teaching I spent a lot of time thinking about how I was in school. I would have to push myself to the point of exhaustion just to keep my head above water and not get into trouble for forgetting to get my planner signed or missing an important assembly. My school bag in year seven was an overnight hold-all full of every single school book I owned, just so that I wouldn’t ever forget anything and get into trouble: to this day I am always in pain with my back, and I am increasingly convinced it did some irreparable damage to my shoulder and spine. Every single day felt like a quest to find new life hacks in order to make it to the finish line undetected, to survive without being snipered by a teacher who seemed to be actively searching for a reason to shoot. The effort caused so much physical and mental fatigue. It seemed to be so much more than anyone else ever had to do.
I read a study when I was applying for my master’s which said that 15% of people with ADHD hold an undergraduate degree and only 0.06% hold a graduate degree, as opposed to 48% and 5% respectively of those without. I don’t know how accurate the numbers are, but I would be interested to know the percentage of teachers who have ADHD as opposed to the general population. If it were below one, I could well believe it. There is a lot of talk about how hostile much of mainstream education is to children with SEND, but so much about teaching is also inherently at odds with an ADHD brain. Of course, a lot of this is to do with the fact that teachers are overworked and underpaid, and that the government is intent on making our lives more miserable in general. However, it goes even deeper than that: the way in which school as an institution is structured, which makes it such a distressing experience for SEND children, also renders it largely inaccessible to SEND teachers, too. Foucault’s concept of the panoptic gaze springs to mind on both sides of the pupil-teacher divide: you feel as if you are being hypersurveilled; every second of every day is rigidly structured; not a minute goes by where you are not being held accountable to someone for something, and the constant feedback on your work often taps into deeply personal things such as your tone, your body language and what you value in the classroom. Masking is imperative. You won’t survive it if you don’t.
I’m seven months into my training, and if I’m entirely honest, I don’t know if I will last the year. I enjoy the essence of it: my subject is fun, the kids are precious and I love working with them, and I have a routine that I lacked during the pandemic. People keep telling me I am too close to the end to give up, but right now the near constant doubt eating away at my general sense of self doesn’t feel entirely worth the piece of paper the qualification will be written on. Quitting would probably come as a shock to anyone who isn’t in my immediate circle of family and friends, as I have spent so much of my life being scared of looking incapable and having to deal with my problems on my own that I don’t reach out to people who could support me practically until it gets to crisis point and I physically can’t hold it in. Even then, I don’t expect anyone to help me. How could they when it feels like I am constantly talking at cross-purposes with everyone I try to explain it to? I have never been more tired of being asked what I need when I don’t even know myself.
I am cognisant of how lucky I am to have made it this far, though. I hate the framework of ‘privilege’ – as a buzzword it has been beaten like a dead horse, and it reduces important conversations on violence against the marginalised to ‘checking’ your position within nebulous different mechanisms of power. But the reality is that getting to this point as a teacher while having ADHD is a relative privilege. The fact that you are far more likely to find people with ADHD in prisons and job centres than in universities and professional roles is often frustratingly omitted in the spiralling online discourse often dominated by (white, middle class) women like myself, who were late diagnosed because they were “high-functioning” or “good at masking,” and who are reclaiming the narrative from (white, middle class) boys diagnosed because they were bouncing off the walls. However, as always, The Discourse has led people to forget that ADHD as a condition exists and has devastating and concrete consequences outside of people being annoying about it on the internet. At first glance, the lack of teachers with ADHD feels like a non-issue rooted in the empty politics of representation, in comparison to the oversaturation of the diagnosis in the carceral system and unemployed populations. Like, do we really need more girlbosses at BAE systems, or gays in the military? However, we will always need people to nurture and teach our children, and our children should be able to identify with those who are helping to raise them. So yes, we do need more neurodivergent people in teaching: their underrepresentation in the education sector and their disproportionate levels of unemployment and imprisonment are, in fact, two sides of the same coin, where said coin is a society that is at best dismissive and at worst genocidal towards neurodivergent people.
Back in November, I sat in a training session run by a leading government consultant in SEND education, which received huge applause as it reached its conclusion. As informative as I’m sure it was, the only thing I remember from it was an impromptu aside he made while running through a few statistics on pupils with ADHD and autism and their outcomes. ‘These pupils are the ones who find school the hardest, which, as teachers, is something we won’t understand.’ I have spent time in many places where I have felt unwelcome and uncomfortable and a burden, but this was possibly the most hurtful. It begins the minute you start school. The hyperactive ones lose their break time in primary, get isolated and excluded in secondary. The inattentive ones fly under the radar entirely, or get eyerolls and ‘concerns’ about their lack of organisation and laziness, or are diagnosed with severe and debilitating anxiety resulting from desperate overcompensation and no one can understand where on earth their distress could possibly be coming from. I can’t speak for people with the hyperactive subtype, but sometimes I feel as if I don’t even exist.
We talk a lot in training about identifying SEND in our pupils and adapting accordingly, scaffolding, dual coding, relieving the strain on their working memory. We talk even more about ‘high expectations’ regardless of need or ability or background. I find it hard to see any meaning in it when there is the implicit assumption that none of the adults sat in that room could possibly suffer with the same issues. It is incredibly difficult to verbalise the emotional toll it takes when you are expected to discipline a child in your class showing symptoms of their severe, undiagnosed and untreated hyperactivity, or their lateness, or their lack of focus, and having to maintain a level of professional detachment where you pretend that you do not understand how it feels. It is precisely because of this emotional toll and this lived experience that I find it so barbaric and upsetting that so much air time is given to jumped-up authoritarian behaviour ghouls like Katharine and her Birbalsimps, who are virtually salivating as they chomp at the bit to bring back corporal punishment. How can I punish a child for being like me? How can pupils with ADHD believe that they can achieve anything when they look at their teachers and rarely, if ever, see themselves reflected back?
I think I ended up back at school out of some sort of misguided saviour complex. Or maybe it was the prospect that I could be the person I needed in school, who could take one look at me and tell me the problem. If I could prevent even one kid from feeling like there was something about them that was irreparably broken, the way I did, that would be enough. Up until a few months ago, I had a lot of outlandish ideas about where I wanted to be at this point, and none of them looked like this. I had this vision of myself hopping from country to country, teaching English in France before catching the metro to my next apéro, or gallivanting around South America drinking Argentinian Malbec every night and doing a whole lot of sweet fuck all. Many of these ideas were not particularly rooted in any sort of reality, or any compulsion to make myself useful: I had convinced myself that in delaying any sort of career development I wouldn’t have to confront what was driving my avoidance. Hiding under all the comfort-blanket layers of my outward ambition and my bravado about wanting to feel fulfilled in whatever I did with my life was a strongly held belief that I was fundamentally useless. It was a thing I used to riff on, a defining character trait that I used to dress up in humour and anti-capitalist talking points about how being lazy is good, actually, but at the core of all of it was this conviction that I would never, could never, be of any practical worth. I knew that the only thing I would ever amount to would be thinking about things and writing them down, because I couldn’t be trusted with anything else that was valuable. All of the times that I had ever missed the mark or forgotten a task or said something stupid while talking to someone new formed the nucleus around which this conception of myself revolved.
As miraculous as it is that I haven’t managed to get myself fired, this feeling of uselessness has been put under a magnifying glass, much like a tiny ant rushing, panicked, away from the sunbeam that is about to poke through the clouds any minute now. I’m acutely aware of how fortunate I am to even be able to feel this way, or spend any amount of time ruminating on being terrible at my job instead of just getting on and doing it because I need money. But I think the truth is that my natural state feels like fucking things up, losing interest and focus after five minutes and crumbling at the slightest criticism, which doesn’t make me a great candidate for employee of the month. Multiply this state by thirty for all the faces looking up at you, and the resulting total by the number of classes you teach, and you start to feel the crushing responsibility for the outcomes of every child that walks through your classroom doors. When I fucked up before, it was almost comical. I was responsible for me and me alone. Classic me, how silly I am, how little common sense, look at my stupid little life. I could cope with the idea of being incompetent because all I could do was laugh about it. Now it is terrifying.