Paragraphs, Not Panic: Dyslexia-Smart Strategies with Russell Van Brocklen

What if a fifth grader could turn a pile of ideas into a clear, grounded paragraph—every time—without leaning on AI? We bring back dyslexia researcher Russell Van Brocklen for part three of our series to show exactly how: start with a hero, a universal theme, and a villain; distill three good reasons into one-word themes; and anchor everything to a real quote. The result is a body paragraph that’s honest, teachable, and repeatable—plus a writing process students can explain step by step.

We also address integrity in the AI era: students must show their process or redo the work, then later use AI as a research coach rather than a shortcut. By the end, you’ll have a clear path to scale from one body paragraph to three, then add a thesis and conclusion that help students pass state tests and feel proud of their writing.

If this helped, follow the show, share it with a colleague, and leave a review. Grab the free resources in the notes, and stay tuned for part four, where we break down concrete, classroom-ready examples.

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Transcript

Welcome & Series Context

Russell Van Brocklen 0:01

Hello, and welcome to the Defining with Love Podcast. I am your host, Jackie Pelegrin, where my goal is to bring you information, tips, and tricks as an instructional designer. Hello, instructional designers and educators. Welcome to episode 92 of the Designing with Love Podcast. Today, I'm so excited to welcome back Russell Van Brocklen, the New York State Senate-funded deflexia researcher for part three of our series. In our last conversation, Russell shared actionable tools to help students in first to third grade strengthen their writing and reading skills so teachers can help them cross the finish line. Today we're diving into how to teach students to write a basic body paragraph. Once students understand the structure and flow, teachers can then send the paragraph home as practice and ask students to find a quote based on a universal theme to connect to their learning even further. And as Russell emphasizes a learning concern, if a student can't naturally explain how they completed the work without using Chat GPT or another AI tool, then they need to redo the assignment. It's about making sure the learning is genuine, internalized, and truly their own. Welcome back to the show, Russell. Thanks for having me. Great. I'm so excited to have you back on for this part three. It's wonderful. So to start us off, can you walk listeners through how you introduce the concept of a basic body paragraph to students, what its purpose is, and how do you help them understand the role it plays in strong writing? Well, I first need to want to tell your educators and curriculum designers a story about a book I'm working on. The book title is going to be Literacy and Reading and Dyslexia Reading Turnaround. Oh, great. It's about uh Kimberly, who I mentioned before. I'm going to mention again because the results were just so stunning. I want you to get similar results. December of 2024, I met Kimberly on December 27th. She recently paid, which I didn't know at the time, $700, the state of Ohio to test her children. Okay. Her son was reading and writing at the uh at the beginning third grade level. So according to uh I think they're using a map something or other, not sure exactly what it was. But if he were in public school for the rest of his grade, he was expected to increase by 1.86 points. 1.86 points. Simply got him using these methods to increase by 20 points. Wow. Okay. Literally about an 11x better than was expected. Here's the important thing. He was a little bit above grade level. I'm just gonna call it grade level at the end of fifth grade. Then his friends came to him and they said, Reed, we want you in public school with us to be with us socially. Now, if that happened in January, he would have been placed in special ed. His school wouldn't know really how to effectively work with him. He would have been away from his friends. Very frustrated kid. Now he's turned, he's still 10, almost 11. He's in fixth grade. He's doing very well in mainstream classes. His complaint was, I don't like to do writing in math class. So what we had to sit down and say, Read, you can do this now. Yes, you're a little slower than the other students. You can do this. You are going to do this. And he bucked a little bit and you know was testing the limits, and now he's doing just fine. Okay? That's great. Every mom's dream. So we're gonna go into that tonight. Great. I love it. Okay. So where we left off last time, and you're going to need to go back and really listen to the second episode to really bring us up to speed here. So what where we left last time is I left with you with a with a simple sentence. Okay. It was a hero, it was the universal thing, and it was a villain. All right. Now, what I want to go back and to remind everybody about the science of where this is coming from. So there's a book called Overcoming Dyslexia, second edition, from Yale, Dr. Sale Shaywitz, top book in the field of dyslexia, page number 78, figure 23. Shows that the yeah, so when you look at that, the back part of the dyslexic brain is almost no neuroactivity, but the back part of a general education brain is going nuts. But the front part of the dyslexic brain is two and a half times overactive. All right, that deals with word analysis followed by articulation. So what I did when we finished last time, we had a base universal theme, a final universal theme. That was a more advanced version of word analysis. Now we're going to go into articulation, just like we did when we did the basic sentences, but this is at a much more evolved level. So when we're doing, after we have our hero, universal fame, and villain, we're going to add because and not three reasons. We're going to add, we're going to add three really good reasons. So here's my question back to you. When you're dealing with asking a student between a normal reason and a good reason, can you give us any advice on how you could tell a student to come up with the best reason that they can? I would say make sure that they do research so that they can understand what it is that they're trying to come up with that that best reason is, and then connect it to what they know. Okay. So let's say they're in fifth grade. How much additional research do you think they would need? That's a good question. Uh, since I've only taught higher education. I would say depending upon how much they're writing would need to kind of depend upon the research. So if they're writing, say uh two to pay two to three page paper. No, no, we're at the paragraph level now. Oh, we're at the paragraph level. Okay. Remember, they're 10. They're in fifth grade. They're just yeah, so they're not writing full papers yet. Yeah. So I would say probably like at least a couple of sources at a minimum. Probably. Okay. So you would have that so that so the good thing is to help these kids go from basic reasons to good reasons, have the teacher come up with a source or two that they can help the kid discuss it.

Jackie Pelegrin 6:40

Right.

Language Kids Get: Action vs Connecting Words

Designing for Dyslexic Brains

One Book Focus During Intervention

Finding Quotes That Match Themes

Russell Van Brocklen 6:41

So that so that it's based on something. Right. Exactly. And it's not just their own personal opinion or something that they heard from a friend or something like that. Right. Right. So because what is different here than the basic sentences is the quality of the reasons determine the quality of the paragraph you're going to write. So just again, so the teachers understand and the curriculum designers understand what I'm why I'm doing this. When I train New York say New York City public school teachers every year for the past 10 years, what I keep getting, what they keep telling me is our gen ed teachers tell me that until the kid can write a basic five-body paragraph, I said five-paragraph essay, they don't know what to do at a C to B minus level. So then when I'm asking them, I'm like, if I can do the three-body paragraphs, can you do the thesis statement and the conclusion? They said, of course. I said, okay, so what you need is how to do a three-body paragraph. They said, yes. I said, okay, if I can show you how to do one body paragraph, can you do three if it's the same steps? Yes. Okay, so how do we simplify this? With word analysis followed by articulation. So what we just discussed here for the articulation was remember, they're fifth graders. All right, so going and finding a source, or maybe two, to help them come up with better reasons is an excellent idea to get a much better reason. Okay? Right. Okay, so now I'm gonna tell you to come up with three good reasons. I'm gonna give you an example on one. So they come up with a good reason. Now, what you're going to have to do is to reduce that reason to a one-word universal thing. Okay. Okay. So uh now I'm gonna go back and ask you this question. So these are 10-year-old kids. They came up with a reason, the best one that they can come up with. Do you have any general guidance on how to help reduce that to a one-word universal thing? I would say have them eliminate anything extra, probably, or anything that the that's not needed to get them to that universal theme. So take out the extra components. Okay. So an idea on how to do that. So do you remember how when we were coming up with the half circle, we had the action words and the most important words? Yes. Okay. So one way of doing that is to first of all reduce the reason to your action words and your most important words. Get rid of all the what I like to call connecting words, the words like this, that, thus, just that that connect it to make it sound generally correct. Reduce it to your action words and your most important words. All right. And then what I would do is then ask the students, because what you have left, which one of these do you think best represents the reason? Okay. That makes sense. And then they narrow it down to one word. All right. And then from that one word, you can go and ask, okay, what universal theme do you think best represents this word? Oh. Okay. So let's kind of, yeah. So let's kind of go over that again. We take the reason, we we reduce it to the action words and the most important words. All right, we get rid of all the connecting words. And now we're down to just those two words, then we ask them to reduce it. Which one do you think best represents the reason you're trying to regret? And you get it down to one word. Now, what universal theme do you think represents this? And then that is your universal theme. Now, this is a very important kind of tangent, but very important. Have you noticed that I was talking about action words, most important words, and connecting words? I'm not using verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and all that other stuff. Right. Yeah, I noticed that. So you replaced them with uh with words that students would understand better, probably, than adjective and verb, right? Things that they can relate to. Yeah. This is an important point. This is what you're gonna want to take notes on. I'm not saying doing this forever. And as curriculum designers and teachers, you are professionals in this area. I do not release this to parents. Parents have to do them everything I say, everything I say in the order I say. As teachers, you're going to find that you're going to look at my ideas and say, I don't like this. And my response is, great, change my process to meet your teaching style and who you're working with. And it'll work just fine. I made that when I designed this exactly at the beginning, because when I did my initial program, the teacher saying said her name was Susan Ford, she didn't want to be a passenger, she wanted to be a co-pilot. I'm the only dyslexia researcher that does this. Right. Okay. So when you're talking to these kids, they don't know what an adverb adjective. That's the back part of the brain where we got literally virtually nothing going on. Right. So you're not connecting with them. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like asking, you know, the kid who's uh six foot tall and weighs 120 pounds, who's a walking skeleton. You know, these kids are not designed to be weightlifters, and then say, well, you you have to go and be a power lifter. We expect you to bench press 400 pounds. Right, right. Well, if you have another kid who's six foot seven, weighs 320, you know, you're an offensive lineman, yeah, he can probably eventually get up to three, four hundred pounds, but not the skinny kid. It's just it doesn't our brains don't work. Right. What I want teachers to understand is when you're working with dyslexic students, it's not that you're trying to be tough on them. It's just our brains are polar opposites. And what the way that you're teaching us works great for the 80 plus percent of the kids who aren't dyslectic or ADD, but it's really tough on us because it's not how our brains are designed to work. Right. And if you're leaving out 20% of the kids in a class, that's that's a bit that's still a big percentage, right, Russell? Right. That's the max because our field hasn't come up with exact numbers, but think 10, 20% of your kids. Yeah. What I did is I said we have action words, we have most important words, and we have connecting words to make them sound correct. Use that as, if you wish, as a crutch. Okay, until you can teach the adjectives, adverbs, and all that stuff. And I will tell you, I have done massive research uh creations, and I still can't diagram a sentence at all. I literally have 10-year-old students who will blow past me with that. Okay? So just kind of a size tangent. Okay. So now once you come up with the universal thing, this is important because, like everything I teach you, you start off doing it, it's really slow. To give you an example in my original program, the most advanced person I've taught it to was a dyslexic with an M master's in business administration from Columbia, Ivy League, and he did very well. So when I asked him, what's the argument that they're trying to make with this graduate records exam prompt for writing? What's the argument they're making? I could walk into any advanced placement, ninth grade class in this country, and any of those students would tell me that instantaneously. 14-year-olds. Took him almost a minute. So as you practice, they get really good at this. All right. And this is one of the key things I'm telling you. This is how you can change things to send a kid home to do his their body paragraph and to show you the work. If they can't show you the work, then they use Chat GPT and you just put an F on it and send it back home, or just send it back home and tell them to do it the right way. Teachers have been screaming at me, how can we send essays home? This is how we were trained to do it. We can't because of Chat GPT. This is how we get past that. That makes sense. That's why I'm spending so much time on this. Okay, now once you found the universal theme, now they go in their book and you say, find a sentence, find a quote, one sentence. As they progress, we shorten that sentence to a part of a sentence, but we start off with a sentence. Okay. Okay, now as now, this is what is going to drive the teachers crazy. You are told you have to go through so many books a year. So I'm just going to ask you for fifth graders, and why am I saying fifth grade? Because New York State just did a dyslexia task force. They want all the kids to be at grade level by the end of fifth grade. All right. So uh for for you for instructional design, how many books are is a fifth grader going to go, a typical fifth grader going to go through in one year? Just give me a ballpark idea. Uh maybe five. Maybe five books. Yeah. I'm going to tell, yeah.

Jackie Pelegrin 17:01

Okay.

Guardrail: No Quote, No Paragraph

Russell Van Brocklen 17:03

I'm going to tell you, working with dyslexics, that that is one of the biggest mistakes you can make until they're at grade level. So I'm going to call that an intervention period. As we've shown with Reed, once he's at grade level, he's fine. He can be in typical classes and do just fine. But while they're behind, Reed was one and a half grade levels behind, okay, when we start when I started working with him. Until you close that gap, doing multiple books is going to literally ruin the kid. You want to pick one book and have them work on that during the intervention period. And this is where teachers come and say, I can't have 30 kids on 30 different books. We just can't do it. Evelyn White Bay, she was on the New York State Dyslexia Task Force as a teacher because she was 3 to 4x as successful as a typical special ed teacher that's documented in New York State. We found out we're doing very similar things. What she, her idea is, and this is her idea, not mine, the teacher comes up with two or three books that the kids are at least mildly interested in. And you do those. Okay. Okay. And because the key thing for a dyslexic is you have to focus on their specialty, their area of extreme interest and ability, or at least something they're interested in, or good luck getting them to do anything. And for the teachers that say, I have attention deficit hyperactivity students, I can't get them to concentrate. You find something in their specialty, they're laser focus. All right, next thing is when you're teaching these dyslexics, a reminder again, do not teach them from the general to the specific. You have to teach them from the specific to the general. Because if you ask them the question, do you have ideas flying around your head at like speed, but with little to no organization, they're going to say yes. So then what we have to do is to force the brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output, then word analysis followed by articulation. So just a reminder. So now we have that universal thing. Send the kid back to their book, and you are going to need to have it on an audio book and an audio book and a physical book for them to follow along with. Okay? If you don't have that book on audio, there's an app called Speechify where the kid can pick their narrator. And this is something where, yes, it can read it without that, but it sounds like a real butt. And the kids hate it. They get to pick their narrator. I can't tell you how critically important that is. It's free to buy a dyslexic. You can probably get a license discount for a lot of students, but I would really say use that or a book with a with a human narrator. So as they're doing that, they're looking for, they're taking that universal fame, and now they're actively reading. They're like, what quote deals with this? Once they find a quote, you can stop there. Or I'm going to give you a big secret. I would continue and ask them if they are, if they're your top students or willing to put in the effort, find as many quotes as they can, and then have them look at two of the time which one is better compared to what the hero wants to do, and then find the best possible quote. Okay.

Jackie Pelegrin 20:27

Okay.

Who, What, When, Where, How, Why

Russell Van Brocklen 20:27

That's cool. Now, teachers always make this mistake. And it's because we're showing, I'm showing you a few steps to go through the entire process. A few steps. So this step might take, you might be on doing just this until the kid's really good at it. You might be on this for weeks, you might be on this for months, okay? And I hear teachers gasp, I can't do that. I gotta get to the body paragraph. And I'm telling you, I'm showing you how to build a skyscraper. If you don't have a good support midway up, it's just gonna fall over. Right, right. So we're we're building the foundation so that when we get to the body paragraph, it becomes a lot easier. Okay? So what so what we do at this point is just practice this. Here's the other thing that I think you will like. If you're familiar with Orton Gillingham, you know, what the millionaires use. The older the child is, the longer it takes. Because they have to go back from to the beginning of education, kindergarten, relearn all that stuff, plus what they're supposed to be learning now. Right. This, the older the child is, the quicker they will pick it up. A lot nicer. Yeah, that is so as they're going through this, you go and you find a quote, or you find a bunch of quotes, and then you say, well, two at a time, which is the best one. Now you have your quote. Here's the key thing. No quote, no body paragraph. So if the kids run home, they come back, look, teacher, I did the body paragraph. And there's no quote from the book. Or they can't point out exactly where the quote was. You know they use Chat GPT.

Jackie Pelegrin 22:12

Right.

Make the “Mess,” Then Fix It

Russell Van Brocklen 22:12

Put an F on it, send it back. Okay. If they can't take the F, just say you didn't do it, send it back. All right. So this is like math homework. And they show you how they reduce it to a universal fame, and then how they went and found it because they because they have to put in some effort. And I can tell you the kids get really good at this. And I mean, really good. Reed was already really good at this. And now I'm showing him a much more advanced way of doing this to do uh bring his writing up to the senior year of high school. Yes, he's he's uh still 10, almost 11, and he is in sixth grade, and he's now working jump his writing up to senior year of high school. That's our next step. Right. So now you found your quote. Now what you do is you tell the kids you're going to answer the basic questions. Who, what, when, where, how, why. Okay. Notice that I put why last because typically sometimes how can be the most important answer, but typically it's why, so we put it last. And you don't have to be exact with the who, what, when, where. If you don't know what country it is, give the continent. Okay? If you're yeah, and because this will drive the kids nuts. I've literally seen kids break down and cry because their teacher insisted something exact and they didn't know how to find it, and they just blew up because the complete meltdown because it was too much for them. We're trying to teach our goal here is a basic, basic five-paragraph essay so that the kid can pass the state exam. Okay. Once they're teachers, designers, you're professionals, you can take it from there. I'm just trying to get you to the basics. So when it comes to the year, let's say they didn't know what year was the American Revolution. You could say the latter half of the 18th century. Or World War II, sometime in the middle of the 20th century. It's not exactly exact. It doesn't need to be for our purposes. We're here to get the basic essay done. You can worry about the details later. Okay. That makes sense. Okay. So we answer those questions. Now, we want to get the kids to laugh because remember, we just we're stressing them. So then I say, we're going to start off. I'm going to reintroduce the idea of a plus sign. I'm going back to strategies for struggling writers, Professor James Collins, the three default writing strategies of copying, visualization, and narrative came from a million and a half dollar federal grant. My version of visualization is the plus sign. The plus sign says you probably, but don't have to, but you probably need to add words, subtract words, or move words around. Okay? So I'm now about to show you how to create what I like to call the mess. And yes, I found I tried all these different terms, and the kids look at you like a little weird. Like, you want me to make a mess? Oh yeah, we're making the mess. All right. It tends to get them more engaged. So what we do is I will start off with a quote and then plus sign. Well, first of all, we have them answer the questions. Who, what, when, where, how, why? Okay?

Jackie Pelegrin 25:39

Okay.

Read Aloud Loops and Rewrites

Tackling Common Grammar Errors

Russell Van Brocklen 25:39

And then as you're doing after they answered those, remember, because now we did the basic sentences and uh a little more advanced sentence. Now they can write sentences correctly. That's the whole point. All right, so they answer the questions, then we go, quote, plus sign, the answer for who, plus sign the answer for what, plus sign, the answer of when, you know, all the way through to why. Now, this is how we get the kids to laugh. I ask them to read that out loud without the plus signs, and I ask, does that sound generally correct? And they look at me like I'm on crack. Okay. And I'm purposely doing that to get them to laugh. Yeah. And they're like, no, this doesn't sound generally correct. This is a mess. I said, yes, you created a mess. Now, how do we turn that into a paragraph? What we're going to do, word analysis. Okay. We're going back to that one from part of the brain. I said, rearrange this so that it makes somewhat of a sense in order. Okay. So then they will, and this takes initially forever. Now you may want to do this for them or let the more enthusiastic is let them play around with it. They tend to have a lot of fun with this. Once you have it in the order it's supposed to be, remember the plus signs indicate meaning to move things around or add words or subtract words. Then I would have them read the first two sentences together and ask, does that sound generally correct? No. Okay. Get them to laugh again. Fix it. And they will go back and forth, you know, moving things around, combining things. You're not worrying about grammar or anything here. You just want it fixed so it sounds generally correct. Then you take that and you add the next piece. And I would have them keep reading from the beginning until the end of the piece that they're adding to keep reading force things. And if it doesn't sound quite correct, they'll go back and make minor changes. Okay. Okay. This takes a while. Yeah. Remember, initially this is going to take forever. Right. With practice over time, they will get it down and then they'll say, Does that sound generally correct? Yes. Did you spell the words correctly? You know, have them go through and check their spelling. Or I will literally have them retype paragraphs. Okay. Right. That's right. Until they get it correct. Yes. Retyping paragraphs, so you're going to get this look on their face. Like they just got like, like they're they just went through some tragedy. They're going to retype the entire paragraph. Yep. And you keep doing that until they get things spelled correctly. Yeah. Okay? And they and if they if you want to be, I'm not gonna, you're not a tyrant where um, you know, if if they made one mistake, they have to retype the whole thing. If they make a lot of mistakes, and it's one mistake, I would just tell them. You have to balance facts with making sure that they can they can type the whole thing correctly. Now you do that, it's spelled generally correct. So the grammar is generally okay. There's gonna be a lot of grammatical, small to medium ones, but it's something you can deal with. Now I'm gonna tell you something you don't want to hear. But this is the only the best way I found to do it. You don't have to do it this way. But my private practice, I would go and get a book from Amazon, you know, like the 20 most common mistakes that college students make, the 30 most common mistakes. And then I would just focus on showing them how to fix that one grammar mistake until they got it down. I found it's like 50, 100 corrections. It's insane. And it takes forever to go through. A lot of this I'll sign to the parents. You need to work with the parents, help them do the drudgery, and a lot of them are going to be very interested in working with it. Okay. You get through those 20 or 30 reasons. I send the kid to college, so generally about a three-year student.

Jackie Pelegrin 29:42

Okay.

Russell Van Brocklen 29:43

It's never going to be perfect. I want you to understand we are uh recording this in October of 2025. As per the job market, what I can tell you is artificial intelligence is already causing havoc with these kids. A lot of good kids this last year who graduated, real good grades from real good schools with real solid majors, they can't find work. Okay? They're going to be using the artificial intelligence, especially imagine where it's going to be by the time they're finished.

Jackie Pelegrin 30:15

Right.

AI, Research Craft, and Future Skills

Russell Van Brocklen 30:17

They're going to need to become very senior very quickly and be able to apply this to become you know, those that can do it will do absolutely fine. Those who can't, the CEO of Anthropic thinks that in five years after college entry grant uh jobs will be gone. That's not surprising. I can see that happening. Wow. Right. We don't know what is, but I'm just saying this is so what the secret is. Yeah. Yeah. What the secret is, is to learn the craft of research. I just showed you how to do context. See, we took a quote, who, what, when, were, how, why. You repeat that for the three-body paragraphs. We have three reasons. Okay. That's the context. All right. Learn the craft of research. Be able, I think the kids will have to become senior within six months to two years, so they can work really well. That's what I mean by a senior person. They just know this stuff well. And then right now, especially for dyslexics, artificial intelligence is made for us. I make sure that when I work with kids privately, when I'm finished, they're good enough to use the Chat GPT Pro, which is 200 bucks a month. Because when the when it thinks for 10 to 15 minutes instead of 30 seconds, you get a much better response. And for students who can use that, I do one, I have one going on on the internet, one going on in the app on my laptop, then I'm doing something else while it's doing while it's thinking. And that has more than 5x my productivity. Wow, that's amazing, Russell. Okay. So you're starting to show them what I do is once they get used to this, I'll tell students, well, go and figure out the context using the artificial intelligence. Speak to it, type to it, figure it out. Well, I don't really know. Well, I've showed you how to do it. Go do it. And with a dyslexic, we can we try all the, we have all these ideas flying around really quickly. We can try these different things until we get it to work. And I've even had uh 10-year-olds do that. And they finally came back, okay, I figured it out. I said, good, now you can teach other people. Well, I don't know anything about artificial intelligence. I said, yes, now you're an expert. And they found out that they were. Wow. So they surprised themselves. Yeah. I mean, it's a good idea. It shocked them. I did that with one 10-year-old. I'm just going to call him Steve, but changed the name to protect him. He went and showed his parents how to do it. His father said, I'm supposed to be learning this for work. My 10-year-old is teaching me. I said, Yeah. And last week he didn't know how to do it. Well, how do you figure out? I said, he's dyslexic. There are advantages to that overact different part of the brain. That's one of them. That's one of them. Wow. That's amazing, Russell. I love that. So it sounds like that follow-up that you were talking about, uh, once they've written their basic paragraph and they send it home for practice and then they find that quote tied to that universal theme. How does that follow-up help reinforce what they've learned uh in that process? Does it help them, like you said, it helps them to get to that level, but is there anything else that you can share that it helps them when they when they're able to do that? Right. So I want you to think about college students in higher education. All right. I want you to imagine they wrote a BS paper. All right. No quotes.

Jackie Pelegrin 33:39

Okay.

Showing Your Work to Prove Authenticity

From Paragraphs to Passing Essays

What’s Next: Concrete Examples

Resources, Thanks, and Support

Russell Van Brocklen 33:39

No is BS. Yep. I thought that upset is Yeah. How upsetting is that to you as an instructor getting one of those papers? It just uh yeah, it makes me think that the student didn't take the time or put in the effort to do the work and that they just uh either use something that they previous I had a student that used something they previously used in other course, which is a big no-no. That's academic integrity issue. So yeah, so it either makes me think that they uh they just yeah, they just don't want to take the time or the effort to do it. So yeah. Yeah. Now by definition, uh if each paragraph has a quote, can it be a BS paper? It could be. It depends upon the quality of the quotes, like if they're using Wikipedia or something like that. No, no, no. They they literally went to the book. Oh, it's a they literally found they went to the book and they found a quote, and each paragraph of their paper has a quote. I'm not saying it's a great paper, but can you see how by definition that's not a BS paper? Right. Yep, exactly. Yeah. So when I had a college professor, when I talked to him about one of my students, she was in tears. I said, This is not a BS paper. Those are real quotes. He's like, nah, they don't look right. I said, look where she got them. They're quotes from the books you wanted. Now I'm not saying this is a masterpiece. I'm not saying this may be just a C-level paper because of different writing concerns, but structurally, she got quotes. I think it was from a half a dozen different books, and he looked at it. Oh, I said everybody paragraph has one. This is not a BS paper. He apologized. Okay. Gotcha. Yeah. So the key thing is that this prevents this from being BS. The other thing is, especially for teachers, I want to over-emphasize this. You show the kids this practice. They come back with a paragraph and they say, I got this quote from the book. Really? Okay, here's the book. How did you do it? Now the kids that did it, they will say they this is how they went through the process. We discovered to create a universal theme. And they said, Well, I looked through it and I got uh it was this one from this page. Because they did the work. Right. Okay. If they can't, you know that they didn't do the work. Send them home to do the work. Redo it. Okay. And and parents come back and say, Well, not every parent parent cares. The kids that I designed this for are the ones where the parents reasonably care, will give reasonable support to the parents, and the kids at least have halfway motivation and halfway care. Okay? And what I found when I talked to teachers is if I gave you that, if that's a student that gave you a process, can you make it work? Yes. I can't fix the ills of society. And it's not just uh, it would shock parents that I say the the biggest problem that I have, people think, oh, it's the economically really challenged families. No, it's the rich ones. They're the biggest problem that I have. They don't like it when I say, Well, I can't help your child. That's yeah, that rubs them the wrong way, doesn't it? Oh, it really does. So you will have maybe you're in an extraordinarily wealthy public school district where good Greek have their own pools. Okay. Wow. I mean, full Olympic-sized pools. And the parents were just like, well, I don't have the time to look after this, or it's up to him, or I don't really care. Well, I don't know how to help you with that. But for the ones who give half the effort and are these, you know, they're they're trying reasonably. I expect teachers to get through the pass, get it through the finish line. The rest of it, there are some of you that are amazing at dealing with families like that. And I say you you're talking to one of your peers who has that gift, and they can help you a lot, a lot more than I can. I'm just showing you the structure. So you do this, you do those three-body paragraphs, you show them a thesis statement and a conclusion. And when Reed did that, he went from a grade and a half level behind, getting third grade level, to grade level in six months. Wow, that's amazing. And that was a homeschooling mom who did that, a homeschooling mom. Which is uh fantastic. I mean, because it takes more work to do that than having them in a public or private school, right? To have them homeschooled. Yeah. But they but she doesn't have a four-year degree in education, she doesn't have a two-year master's degree. Right, right. Okay. That makes all the difference. Absolutely. Oh, yes, definitely. I love that. Great. I love it. So is there anything else you wanted to mention before we close out this episode today? Yes. So what I gave you the theory, and I can just see what you're coming back to me and yeah, but how do I actually do this? Can you give me an example? All right. We'll be doing that in the next episode. Great. I love that. Um, so that'll be our little like preview of what's to come, right? This is examples, practical examples that are that my listeners can take and be able to apply right away. So I love that. Well, here's another key point. I'd like everybody to go and just Google New York State Education Department, Dyslexia Task Force. Okay. New York State spent, I don't know, like a million bucks or more on this, some some huge amount of money. Hundred of the best people in dyslexia in the state. And they said, using current processes, this is what we have to do to solve dyslexia at the end of fifth grade. So what I'm showing you here, especially teachers who are concerned about reading, when we did uh last time, when I said base universal theme, advanced universal thing, over time that builds up a vocabulary of dozens and then to hundreds of evolved words. That's the main issue on solving reading. Here's the other thing. Again, if the kid can write it, they can read it. Right. So I didn't teach read reading. He learned to read by going through this process. And as you know, trying to teach reading to a dyslexic elementary school kid, even if you're trained in Orton Gillingham and have the kid one to one or four to one, it's not easy and as slow as molasses. Right, right. Yeah, I love that. That's awesome. Well, Russell, thank you so much for coming back and sharing these practical strategies with us today. I know my listeners will really appreciate having clear, actionable moves they can use right away with their learners. Even with what we learned today, right? So um, and for those listening, don't forget to check the show notes because I've got the free resources. Russell, I included them in all these parts. So for part one, part two in this one, um, I've got all those free resources that are created to help all my listeners put these ideas into practice tonight with their kids. So and as we know, right, Russell, the best part is we're not done yet. So you'll be back soon for part four of the series where we'll go into detail by providing examples so you won't want to miss it. So as again again, Russell, it's always a pleasure having you here. Thanks again for joining me. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Thank you for taking some time to listen to this podcast episode today. Your support means the world to me. If you'd like to help keep the podcast going, you can share it with a friend or colleague, leave a heartfelt review, or offer a monetary contribution. Every act of support, big or small, makes a difference, and I'm truly thankful for you.