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The following is an excerpt from the book Reaching and Teaching Neurodivergent Learners: Strategies for Embracing Uniquely Talented Problem Solvers, by Jodi Asbell-Clarke, Senior Scientist at TERC, published November 14, 2023 by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Dennis grew up in a sprawling suburb of a large Canadian city and attended public school throughout the 1970s and 80s. While he remembers being pulled out of class for special reading instruction when he was younger, mostly he remembers trying to fly under the radar in school. He was happier not to get any special attention from teachers or peers, or really anyone else at all.

When Dennis was twelve years old, all he wanted for Christmas was an Atari computer. Even then, however, he realized it was an outlandish request for his parents’ household budget. He was gifted an old hand-me-down computer from a family friend instead, and he taught himself some basic programming skills. In high school, Dennis had a lot of free time since, as he says, his “social life consisted mostly of dodging abuse from other kids for being a weirdo and mowing the neighbor’s lawn.” He used the lawn-mowing money to buy more parts, and soon he started to build his own computers.

Dennis couldn’t afford the high-end graphics cards required for many of the newer video games, so he learned how to make his own command-line games that he played with others on the Internet using a dial-up modem he salvaged and repaired from the office where his father worked. On the Internet, he was able to play with other people around the world. They didn’t know who he was. They didn’t act like he was weird. They treated him like he was smart.

Dennis acknowledges that his schooling must have “done him some good” because he is able to read and write “well enough.” He can also do pretty complex math calculations in his head without any problem. His recollection of school, however, is a place of shame, pity, and defeat. Something he never wants to experience again. After barely graduating from high school, there was never any conversation of Dennis going to college. It was silently understood that Dennis would continue to live with his parents and get a job washing dishes at a local diner. For over a decade, he says, he was made to feel grateful to be paid minimum wage for cleaning up after people.

Because Dennis continued to live with his parents, however, he was able to save all his wages for a better computer. Even when he had enough money, however, he still chose to build his own because by this time, Dennis told me, he “couldn’t buy anything as good as he could make himself.” Dennis kept track of every cent he earned and all his expenditures. He gathered and organized all the necessary information to get the best price for all his computer parts. He monitored how long each component survived and tracked the long-term cost benefit of using one product over another. He spent hours poring over the data and macros in his evolving spreadsheets to keep up with cost changes and fluctuations in available parts, but Dennis didn’t consider this real work.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, Dennis also learned HTML and scripting languages so that he could build computer games of his own. He shared his games with people he met on the Internet, who loved them and offered to buy them. It still never occurred to Dennis that he could be a professional programmer or game designer. After all, he said, he was just a dishwasher who still lived in his childhood bedroom and who had nearly failed out of high school.

Among many other personal pet projects, Dennis built an extensive website to curate heavy metal hits used in the score for popular movies and video games, with links to the original songs. It started as a basic web page Dennis created out of his own interest after high school, and it grew into an entire fan site for over two decades. As with the meticulous accounting programs Dennis had created for his own computer financing, and the hundreds of computer games he had built for himself, Dennis never publicized his music website. He never shared it with the world because he saw no point.

But the Internet is a funny place. In 2016, Dennis received an email from someone who had stumbled upon his heavy metal web site and tracked him down through some fan forum chats. This emailer was a fan of heavy metal and of ancient video games and was thrilled to have come across all the material on Dennis’ site. He was also the CEO at a small tech company in Silicon Valley and the coordinator of a local human resources network seeking innovative talent. He wanted to know about other work Dennis had done.

That interaction eventually landed Dennis at a job fair targeted specifically at neurodivergent thinkers, a term Dennis had never heard before. Dennis was 44 years old. He had never been diagnosed as having autism, ADHD, dyslexia, or any other type of learning difference, but he soon realized that he had many of the indicators. He started with self-diagnosis tools online and then was able to enroll in a research study at a nearby university that came with a free set of diagnostic tests at the local hospital. He also found a group of professional adults with autism who met in a church basement just blocks from his house, something he didn’t know existed before.

Soon Dennis was hired by EY, a large consulting firm that goes to great lengths to attract and support neurodiverse talent. He is consulting on a programming team that serves banking clients around the world. Dennis is learning to interact more with clients and colleagues in team meetings, though he still prefers the time when he can work alone on a task until it is perfected. He says he is uncomfortable sharing his work with others until he feels certain all the bugs are gone. He has a rigorous set of tests that must be completed before he feels he can call it complete. Often the debugging programs he writes to make sure his code works perfectly take longer than creating the piece of code itself, but he wants to make sure every condition has been thought of and every possible use case has been tested. Dennis says he sometimes stays up all night to make sure this kind of perfection can happen, even though it makes him very tired in meetings the next day. He says he used to be able to go without sleep for two or three days at a time and still be productive, but that has changed with age.

Dennis wonders if he would have always been this thorough and diligent at work if he hadn’t gone through life thinking he was inept. “So maybe it’s a good thing in the end,” he ponders. He says sometimes he feels he needs to work harder just to earn the trust of his colleagues. He is still afraid he will let them down. But he also says he likes working with a team with others who complement his strengths. It makes him realize he doesn’t have to be perfect at everything. While Dennis is not sure he will ever want to be the team member who stands before a client and gives the pitch, or the one who soothes over any personnel issues, he feels confident that he is the guy they can rely upon to get the programming job done right. He will think of everything that could possibly go wrong, and make sure none of it happens. He likes his code to be perfect just because that is what give him personal satisfaction. “It just feels really good when it’s right,” he says.

As a professional programmer with a professional salary, Dennis has finally found the confidence and resources to move out of his parents’ home. He now lives with his partner, whom he loves very much—yet another facet of his life he had previously thought impossible. He had thought he was a loser in life because that is what other people had made him believe.