There's a specific kind of tired that has nothing to do with sleep.
It shows up a few weeks into the school year, when you realize the homework battle isn't about homework. It's about the assignment that never made it home, and the rest that arrived via the missing assignment email.
The work takes twenty minutes. The lead-up takes ninety. Everyone's exhausted. Nobody asks why.
Students understand the material, know the rules, and are capable of the work. The breakdown happens in the translation from knowing to doing. Working memory, the system that holds instructions while you act on them, is reliably and measurably impaired in ADHD. Not occasionally. Consistently. A task with multiple verbal steps, no written reference, and no clear starting point doesn't just feel hard. It targets the exact system that works least reliably.
Point that same brain at the right problem and it's remarkable. The student who can't track five verbal directions can solve a spatial problem faster than anyone in the room, make a connection no one else saw, or recall a conversation from three years ago in precise detail.
We built a system that measures what these brains are worst at and called the result a deficit. We never asked what they were good at.
The Show Your Work tools exist to help parents ask a better question. Not "why can't my kid do this," but "what about this task is harder than it needs to be?"