How an educator with ADHD built a classroom where neurodivergent minds thrive

A high school junior slips on a VR headset and becomes a detective. Her case: a facial-recognition system flagging the wrong faces. She interviews virtual witnesses, traces where the bias crept into the data, and weighs one value against another in real time. She has dyslexia, is multilingual, and three months ago told her counselor she "wasn't good at thinking." The world she's investigating was built by her teacher, David Conover, who has ADHD, teaches alone at a Pflugerville ISD high school serving North Austin, and has spent years redesigning learning for minds that work like his.

A classroom with no borders

"I have a classroom that's not just a classroom. It's a global classroom, and it's an AI lab," he says. He teaches digital arts, animation, and storytelling. As a curriculum developer with Glowdom, a creative-tech program rooted in South Africa, he's helping build a global AI skills framework. The room reaches past Central Texas into South Africa, India, and beyond, where his students take on UNESCO-aligned problems like AI ethics, sustainability, and space debris alongside engineers at IBM and Google and researchers at the University of Texas.

Pflugerville ISD spans roughly thirty campuses across six municipalities in the Austin metro; David's corner of it runs like a small international research outfit, and he staffs it alone.

For years, David has worked at running with his own mind rather than against it. Now he teaches students whose minds work much the same way. That is the through-line of everything he builds: he designs for how he himself thinks.

Software for minds that don't move in straight lines

Most project tools assume a tidy, linear worker: one task after another, in order. David's mind doesn't work that way, and neither do his students. Every tool built to organize him kept demanding those straight lines. ClickUp stopped asking.

The same fit runs in both directions. The system that finally moves to the tune of David's mind is the one he uses to rebuild lessons for students who learn the way he does: fast, lateral, rarely in the order a standard curriculum assumes. "I'm using ClickUp to reduce the compliance and make it understandable for the teenager who is dyslexic. That's a whole rewrite," he says. "Thank you, ClickUp, for allowing me to rewrite for how I think and how they think." A teenager with dyslexia, a multilingual newcomer, a kid whose attention won't sit still for a worksheet. Each one meets a lesson built for their mind, not the average.

The proof is in their projects

It shows up in what they make. The VR detective case is the current work; earlier, in a Minecraft world wired to IBM's Watson, a student piloted a nanobot through the bloodstream, hit something unfamiliar, asked the supercomputer what it was, and named the pathogen before the game moved on. His students have joined Google's AI for Social Good work beside peers in South Africa and India, kids who'd been sorted, somewhere along the way, to the edges of a standard classroom. The coordination that used to eat David's hours now hums quietly beneath the work, so his attention goes where it counts: the students doing things no one expected of them.

How other teachers can start

David is a maximalist. He built a hundred agents, and he's the first to say that's the wrong place to begin. "I didn't start here," he says. "I started overwhelmed, scattered, and convinced I was bad at teaching because I couldn't keep up with the admin side. ClickUp didn't fix me — it met me where I was and let me build a system that fit my brain."

His advice to any teacher who reads this and thinks I could never comes down to three questions: What drains you? What energizes you? What's one workflow you could hand off this week? Start with the draining part, like grading rubrics, attendance, or assignment feedback, and automate exactly one of them. His own suggestion: point a single agent at your Google Classroom assignments and let it sort them into ClickUp tasks. Watch it run once. "Feel the weight lift," he says. "Build from there."

The classroom he always meant to build