Neurodiversity as talent

I had a student who played his own rhythms while I was explaining something else. Not out of defiance — he heard something in the pattern that grabbed him and he simply had to play it out. His school report spoke of difficulty following instructions. His primary school music teacher had written that he lacked discipline.

I saw someone who made lightning-fast connections between what he heard and what his hands wanted to do.

That’s not the same thing.

It took me years to get that straight. The tendency is to categorise a student by what he doesn’t do — doesn’t sit still, doesn’t follow along, doesn’t finish what he started. But when I look at that student from the other side, from what he does do, the picture tilts. He associates broadly. He improvises instinctively. He doesn’t get stuck in a single interpretation. And those are exactly the qualities every advanced musician tries to develop.

The problem isn’t the wiring. The problem is that the learning environment was built for one type of wiring.

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I think a lot about what neurodiversity actually means in a music lesson. The term has something reassuring about it because it steps away from medical vocabulary — it’s not a disorder, it’s a variation. But in practice, it’s still often used as a euphemism for “difficult.” As in: this student is neurodiverse, so bear that in mind. What “bearing it in mind” means is usually: be more flexible, be more patient, expect less.

That’s not right. Or at least: it’s not enough.

Bearing neurodiversity in mind means something more active to me. It means looking for where this student’s variation gives him something that a neurotypical student doesn’t have as naturally. That’s not romanticising — I know that dyslexia can make reading sheet music genuinely hard, that ADHD can exhaust a student through the constant self-regulation a lesson demands. Those are real burdens. But they’re rarely the whole story.

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A student with synaesthesia hears colours in sounds. Her descriptions of music are unusual, sometimes cryptic, but they help her distinguish timbres with a speed that others have to train for years to approach. She’s never had to practise something that simply comes naturally to her.

A student with autism has a memory for structure that still surprises me. He can reconstruct a composition he heard once three weeks ago in considerable detail — not perfectly, but more accurately than most of my students after repeated listening.

A student with dyslexia who avoids sheet music has learned to work by ear in a way that ultimately makes him freer than students who leaned on notation for too long.

I don’t mention this to suggest that neurodiversity is an advantage. I mention it because I’ve found that when I look only at what a student lacks, I become blind to what he has. And if I’m blind to what he has, I can’t teach him well.

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The hardest part is the expectations a student has already built up about himself before he arrives at my lesson. Children who have been told for years that they have trouble concentrating, that they’re impulsive, that they don’t work well in groups — those children often believe it themselves. They wait for me to be disappointed. They brace themselves for failure.

That pattern of expectation sits deeper than the behaviour I see in the lesson. It’s in how a student holds his stick when he gets a difficult pattern — shoulders already slightly raised, eyes already apologetic. It’s in the way he corrects a mistake before I’ve said anything, as if he wants to get there first.

What I try to do then is not reassure — that doesn’t work, because he doesn’t believe reassurance. What I try to do is shift attention to something concrete he just did that was right. Not as a compliment, but as an observation. You pulled that beat back before you’d even registered it. That’s a skill. You didn’t have it yesterday.

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There’s something in music that makes that conversation easier than in many other subjects. Music has a direct, physical component — you feel whether a stroke lands, you hear whether a chord is right. The judgment doesn’t sit with the teacher; it sits in the sound itself. For students who have long carried the idea that others know better how they’re doing, that direct feedback can be a revelation. Music doesn’t lie, but music doesn’t judge either.

And then there’s rhythm. Structure that moves. For many neurodiverse students — particularly those with ADHD or sensory processing differences — rhythmic repetition regulates the nervous system in a way that abstract instructions never do. They don’t calm down by doing less; they calm down by doing something their body understands.

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I don’t know whether the student who played his own rhythms while I was explaining ever really learned to wait until I’d finished. At some point I stopped pushing quite so hard for it either. What I learned was when to let him go and when to bring him back, and that boundary shifted as we got to know each other better.

He plays in a band now. Not as the most technical drummer, but as the drummer who hears something in what the others are playing and responds to it immediately. His bandmates say he keeps the group open. That he doesn’t let things harden into habit.

I sometimes wonder how many students who dropped out because they didn’t fit the mould had precisely that.

What if it wasn’t a deficiency at all?