Navigating Unique Learning Challenges + Resiliency with Lois Letchford (part 1)

When Lois's son faced a wall in his learning, she didn't let it block their path – she found a way around it. Their journey, steeped in resilience and innovation in education, will touch your heart and open your mind to the sheer power of individualized learning techniques. Our conversation with Lois is a deep dive into how she harnessed her mother-in-law's insights to transform her son's struggles into success, using rhyming and patterns to defy a low IQ assessment and reignite his curiosity. We also peel back the layers of my own struggle with undiagnosed dyslexia, which only came to light in the process of teaching my son Nicholas – a revelation that has reshaped my understanding of literacy and the educational system.

In a world where standardized education often overlooks unique learning styles, this episode sheds light on the need for adaptability and understanding. We share stories of how a simple word like "saw" can become a stumbling block in a child's learning journey, and how privilege can open doors to alternative teaching methods that accommodate these differences. From our discussions on the deficit theory in literacy education to personal anecdotes of discovering dyslexia, we highlight the importance of resilience in overcoming life's educational hurdles. Join us as we conclude with strategies to keep the spark of resilience alive, hoping to inspire educators and parents alike as they forge their own paths in supporting diverse learners.

Transcript

Pamela Cass: 0:06

In the grand theater of life. We all seek a comeback, a resurgence, a rekindling of our inner fire. But how do we spark that flame? Welcome to Reignite Resilience. This is not just another podcast. This is a journey, a venture into the heart of human spirit, the power of resilience and the art of reigniting our passions.

Natalie Davis: 0:30

Welcome back to another episode of Reignite Resilience. I'm your co-host, natalie Davis, and we are so excited to be back with you. Pam, how's it going today?

Pamela Cass: 0:38

You know what it's fabulous? It is a clear blue sky, it's like 70 degrees and I'm ready for spring, so I am in a good mood today.

Natalie Davis: 0:47

I love it. Good for you. I had to stop and think about that the other day because we've had some questionable weather in Colorado the last couple of weeks. I was like it's not spring yet, is it? And then it was that reality of oh no, it's fully spring. It's just not behaving that way.

Pamela Cass: 1:02

Yes, that's typical Colorado. It it's just not behaving that way. Yes, that's typical Colorado. It likes to tease us a little bit.

Natalie Davis: 1:06

Exactly Not fun. Nothing at all, no, oh, my goodness. Well, I am excited for today's episode. We have a guest joining us. I would love to hear more about her, her work and her own discoveries as we talk about resiliency today. Welcome, lois, how are you?

Lois Letchford: 1:23

Thank you for having me. It's wonderful to be chatting with you both.

Pamela Cass: 1:27

Yes, well, I'd love for you just to kind of share your story, because it started when your son was at a young age and he failed out of a grade and so did you, it sounds like, and you kind of stepped in and homeschooled. So I'd love to kind of hear this journey. How did it start In?

Lois Letchford: 1:47

1994, my son went to first grade in Brisbane, australia, which is where we're from and our home, and he had seemed to do okay in kindergarten but I was worried about him. Okay, but the kindergarten teacher said oh, he'll be fine, he'll be fine. He's a bit slow but he'll be fine. So we send him to school. He's terrified of going to school with a stick insect that we found. And he comes home and I say did your teacher get to see this? And he just shook his head and he's biting his fingernails, he's wetting his pants and he's staring into space. So on day six I see the teacher and I say how's he going? And she throws up her hands and said well, I don't know how I'm going to teach him. You know, he's so far behind, I don't know what to do.

Lois Letchford: 2:31

Oh, wow and every day through that year he did those things wet his pants, bit his fingernails and just stared into space. And you can't learn anything when you're so terrified and he was terrified. Yeah Right, absolutely. At the end of the year we get testing. The testing reveals he's got no strengths. He can read 10 words and he's got a low IQ. Wow, and immediately you're put into the discard basket, can't do anything, incapable of any future.

Lois Letchford: 3:06

My husband is a professor. We live three kilometres from the university. We are at the school to go to. Anyone would think this is the best place for this child to be, and it's a disaster. The following year my husband has study leave in Oxford, england, and he did his PhD in Oxford. So he's going back and the family goes with him and I decided I'll take Nicholas with me. We're taking the three boys with us, but I'll teach Nicholas from home and I take this series of books called Success, for All Single words on a page.

Lois Letchford: 3:46

Nicholas starts decoding them with what he can and he gets to the end of the page, comes back to the beginning, no memory, like he's never seen it before. Wow, and it's just a disaster. And I'm getting upset and more upset and more upset and his shoulders are getting higher and higher and higher and there's no growth anywhere. And my mother-in-law is with me and she said Lois, put away what's not working and make learning fun. Wow, I needed something to break that pain and that tension. And her words did it. And I thought, well, what can he do? And I knew he could rhyme words and I knew he could see patterns, they were his two strengths. Well, what can he do? And I knew he could rhyme words and I knew he could see patterns, they were his two strengths. So I thought, what can I do with that? I'll write a little poem. And I wrote this tiny little poem about a mug of a bug, you know, and then he illustrated it and we read it over and over and over again and we found the rhyming words and we you know he could read it by the end of the session. He could read it Because one poem worked. We did another and another and another.

Lois Letchford: 4:52

I met one lady in Oxford who spoke to me because when you travel you know you're an outsider and she gave me this series of books called Hear it, see it, say it, do it. That helped him learn to decode and they were hands-on stuff that was transformative. But I kept writing poems, kept writing poems and 00 comes up, as in Cook Look and Book. And I write this poem about Captain James Cook, the last of the great explorers. Do you know of him? He completed the mapping of Australia. So the world was almost complete.

Lois Letchford: 5:23

Australia was incomplete and I wrote, captain Cook had a notion there's a gap in the map, in a great big ocean. He took a look without the help of any book, hoping to find a quiet little nook. Very simple poem, huge ideas. And while we're repeating this and finding it, nicholas says to me can I see Captain Cook's original maps? And I thought this question doesn't come from a child with a low IQ, no, exactly. And then he said to me who came before Captain Cook? And Smarty Pants here says well, that was Christopher Columbus. That's easy, that's Christopher Columbus. And he said and who came before Columbus? Right, I don't have an answer. Yeah, but what I had to do was I had to do the research and then I had to take that research and put it into a poem, because if I spoke to Nicholas already and he was gone, he just shut down. So I'm writing, writing, writing. Here's me, you can't write, writing, writing, writing these little poems so that we can talk about it and discuss it and go on.

Lois Letchford: 6:29

We return to Australia. I am over the moon with what Nicholas has learned he's. You know he progressed in reading as at a snail's pace and of course you know in many ways I'm panicked about the amount he's reading, but I could see this brain that was working and he was really engaged. And because we were in Oxford, england, we saw Captain Cook's original maps, we bought a book of Ptolemy maps, who was the predecessor to Columbus. We discussed so many things, we read about it, we wrote about it, we saw it, we did huge connections. So we returned to Australia and I meet this lady who'd done the testing 12 months prior, and I say to Australia, and I meet this lady who'd done the testing 12 months prior.

Lois Letchford: 7:11

And I say to her I'm so pleased, I'm so excited with what's happened with Nicholas. And she says to me well, I've spoken with the reading teacher and he's gone backwards and in fact he's the worst child I've seen in 20 years of teaching. I go home because when someone talks to me like that, I just shut down too. That's it.

Natalie Davis: 7:31

Let me do this alone. Exactly no one wants to hear that, right, like definitely, especially with the amount of progress that you knew you had just made over that time.

Lois Letchford: 7:44

I take a big breath, I spend hours away and I also get caught up in it. But I go back to her and I say to her if he is the worst child you've seen in 20 years of teaching, don't expect him to learn like everybody else. And that was huge, because the very next afternoon he comes home with the sight words. These are the basic words that you have to learn. There's a thousand of them, but you start with the first 10 and 20. And basic words that you have to learn. There's a thousand of them, but you start with the first 10 and 20 and 100, and that you must learn them. And they're challenging because they're abstract. And he came home with the word saw, s-a-w.

Lois Letchford: 8:21

And the sentences the reading teacher had given was I saw a cat climb up a tree. And the second one was I saw a man rob a bank Excuse me, I try not to laugh and Nicholas stood in front of me and he read I saw a cat and he stopped and he went back and he said I was a cat. No, no, no, no. And then he said I had a cat and I assed a cat and he just handed me the paper. He didn't even attempt the second sentence. When I work with teachers, I say what do you think's happening here? And they respond oh, he's dyslexic, he's this, he's that, he's the other. And I say, yes, all those things are possible, but what's the bigger problem? The bigger problem is that the teacher has provided one meaning for the word sore not the three yeah, and she gave the abstract meaning.

Lois Letchford: 9:11

The child is giving you the concrete meaning and there's a gap that cannot be met when the teacher's talking about one thing and the child's talking about another. I took the next hour and a half to teach that child. What did we see in England? Did we do? We talked about it. We looked at pictures and you give them the opposite meaning. When we saw a Gutenberg Bible, did we take a saw into the British Museum? Go, no, he's hilarious, laugh, laugh. What do we do? We looked at it and it's. What drove me was the combination of the extreme privilege that we had as a family to get Nicholas going and then the failure of the reading teacher to even recognize what she did was wrong, and that was my driver.

Pamela Cass: 10:08

So it was the teachers looking at only one way to teach and not understanding that each child learns differently.

Lois Letchford: 10:14

I'm going to challenge you on that one, please do, please do. It's not that each child learns differently, it's that we as teachers make an assumption about language that everyone has the same meaning. Got it. And if I give one sentence, I saw a cat climb up a tree. And the second sentence I saw a man rob a bank. Yeah, come on, who's seen that? Who wants to see that? Right, yeah, and then the other component of this was when I went back to studies.

Lois Letchford: 10:47

I read an academic paper that was published in 1990 by a man called Professor Brian Camborne, who's a well-known, well-respected academic, and he wrote the paper Beyond the Deficit Theory. And in that paper he said why do children fail to learn to read One? We give them incomplete examples of how the written language works. What did the reading teacher do to my child? Incomplete example Of how the written language works. Or we give them examples and they can't engage with them. How do we teach reading, a standardized text for children across a whole broad range of cultures? And then we say when the child can't get it, what do we say? They don't work hard enough, they're just not paying attention, they just can't do it. Instead of, what do I have to do to teach this child to read, and you?

Pamela Cass: 11:44

had the ability to do that. There's not a lot of families that have that opportunity to pick up, go to Oxford and then be able to stay and create that learning for your son 100% right, I can talk to you and you can say that a lot of people just skim over that like it's no big deal.

Lois Letchford: 12:06

It's a huge deal, huge deal, huge deal. It's a huge deal, huge deal, huge deal. And to be in a place where you had access to all of the documents that we need, that would happen. To be there, that wouldn't have happened anywhere, almost anywhere else in the world.

Pamela Cass: 12:20

Yeah.

Lois Letchford: 12:21

So you know I've become a passionate specialist for teaching kids who are different, because we're all chubbed in this basket and only a few managed to climb out.

Natalie Davis: 12:32

Yeah exactly, and we've discussed dyslexia on the podcast quite a few episodes it's actually come up and a lot more, I think, from the stance of like discovery and realization, you know, in older teenage, young adult age as well. So, navigating through life not knowing and not you know, and definitely not having someone to support you, to to actually help in filling in those gaps. Because even in that moment when I saw a cat, I saw a man rob a bank. To this day I haven't, I've not seen a man rob a bank, so I can't say that.

Lois Letchford: 13:15

And I hope no one's seen it.

Natalie Davis: 13:18

I hope I don't. That's right. Yes, that's right.

Lois Letchford: 13:23

And we you know, we make so many assumptions about literacy and I was, when you were talking about these people that come up. That was me. I went through school. I could read words I couldn't comprehend, and it was only when I started teaching Nicholas and I read through this little tiny book that said symptoms of dyslexia, and there were 20 of them. I had 17. I struggled my way through school. I struggled my way through college. Everyone blamed me, she doesn't work hard enough, she doesn't do this, and I couldn't. I read great expectations from cover to cover. I had no idea what half of it said.

Natalie Davis: 14:06

So how did you help yourself when you started to realize this, when you noticed that you had 17 of the 20?

Lois Letchford: 14:12

I didn't really do anything until I had Nicholas. Actually, I started to read more. That was the one thing. I joined a book club and that was really good for me, and you're being engaged in literature that you like or people are exposing you to, because one of my biggest struggles is choosing a book.

Natalie Davis: 14:32

I think that's something that quite a few children face and I know this is you as an adult but quite a few children face that you send them into a library. Well, at least in my day and age, you send them into the library and you grab a book, but you have various sections and topics and areas of expertise and it's overwhelming, especially if you don't enjoy it or it's a challenge for you.

Pamela Cass: 14:54

Yes.

Lois Letchford: 14:55

When I went to school, no teacher ever that's a lie read a book to us. One teacher in third grade read one book to us, or two books, and I remember someone reading a book about tugboats. We live on the land. There's not a boat near us. There's a river that you don't dare go down because you can't swim.

Natalie Davis: 15:20

And here you are learning about tugboats.

Lois Letchford: 15:23

Well then, we've moved around the world, and we were in Lubbock and I became the district reading specialist in Lubbock, texas, when the Voyager program came in. Okay, the Voyager program was a direct instruction program that was tied to George Bush, and people supported George Bush and they said if we get you in, you'll give this to us. Here we are in Lubbock, texas. The closest water is 800 miles away. What are we learning about? The sea, of course, and we wonder why children don't learn to read.

Natalie Davis: 16:04

Yeah, yeah, wow. Well, lois, you've taken this journey and you've put this. It's now a memoir, and so how deep do you dive in to the journey itself, for both you and Nicholas in the memoir? What are some of the things that we see there?

Lois Letchford: 16:18

Well, you, see the, the pain, the pain and the absolute struggle that I went through and with Nicholas, and then you've got the absolute joy of Nicholas making these little steps and big steps. A little, yes, and then you get the plummet the worst child I've seen in 20 years of teaching. So everyone, everyone goes with you down the tube and then you climb out and climb out and then you see how furious I get and then we watch how I resolve that and then we watch Nicholas, the other component of this story which still blows me away. Our family left Brisbane Australia in 1999 when Nicholas was 11, and he's reading on a third-grade reading level and everyone is over the moon that Nicholas is doing so well because we never expect him to read or write. We moved to this place called Lubbock, texas, which you know fairly well. Nicholas goes from the bottom to the top in the class and he graduates in grade in high school in the top 20% of his class. And I look at why going to Lubbock was so important. Yes, and a lot of it comes down to how we see this child. He's no longer a dumb kid, he's an average kid or just below average and he's got to do these things to go up. And Nicholas not only did these things, he did these things to the extreme. And because we're in Lubbock, texas, what did we do? We'll go back to what we did before you drive for miles. We listen to books on CD, yes, yes. And not only listen once, but you're listening again, and again, and again, and every time you listen, comprehension improves. Yeah, and you've got this kid who's behind. He's hearing the language of the best kids in the class. It was transformative moving to Lubbock, texas, and that would not have happened in Brisbane, australia, because we didn't have the libraries that were full of those things and no one encouraged us, no one said he's capable of doing Amazing, amazing.

Lois Letchford: 18:22

And then from there, in Lubbock, you know, I had my teaching degree and I'm waiting to do something. And I meet a mother whose 13-year-old son is non-reading, spent four years in a phonics-only reading program. What do you do? And I said I think I know what to do. I taught him over the summer. At the end of the summer, the school, the mother writes to the school district and said you employed this woman or I sue you. I got employed, very good. And then in my book I tell of some of the students I taught and the one that sticks with me is my little African-American boy who's 15 and a Hispanic boy who's also 15. Both come to me and they can read 10 words between the two of them. So they've spent 10 years in the classroom, every day failing, and I do my thing and do my bit.

Lois Letchford: 19:16

And I used a connector and that was turning a book into a play. And there's not a lot of choice turning this book into a play for students. So the first story that I loved was called Spaghetti Pig Out or something like that. No, it's Licked, it's Licked and it's about a father and a mother and a young boy and the boy's going to tease the father but the father's boss is coming to dinner. And I did this with my students and they sat there and they just went down and down and down and I said, okay, boys, sorry, you know this isn't working. I'm really sorry this isn't working. Now I'm in trouble. Boys, I've got this other story, but the problem with this story is it's about girls. I'm not going to read about girls, boys, it's really funny. It's really funny. Okay, says Pedro, I'll listen, I'll listen. And then, yeah, I'll listen. And we got to the end of it and they roared with laughter Great, great, okay, we've got a story we can use. And then you know we're doing really, really, really well.

Lois Letchford: 20:32

And then one day, twain's sitting there and he's sitting across from me and he looks at me and he's just cranky. And I said Twain, what's wrong? You know, you're reading it so well. And he says we wouldn't say these words. We don't have a school play, we don't have this and we don't have that. Twain, I said oh, yes, but this is written by an Australian, that's why it's different. But we wouldn't say those words. And I said well, twain, we've changed these characters from being girls to boys. We can do anything. What would you like to say? And here's my student who has the most trouble with. Everything comes out. Well, he'd be the captain of the football team, there'd be this and that and the other. Boom, end of story, beautiful, wow. And it, just it showed me the power of children, students, making connections with what we've got on paper. Right, exactly, which is what we ignore. We think it's about decoding, we think it's about being able to say these words, but if our students cannot connect with what is there, forget it.

Natalie Davis: 21:35

And that was a huge learning lesson for me about cultural appropriateness for students her own child had dyslexia, but also discovering that she too suffered from dyslexia, and making it her life's work to discover and create and find new ways for individuals to learn and feel empowered through the power of reading. We hope to see you for part two. Thank you for joining us on today's episode of Reignite Resilience. We hope that you had amazing ahas and takeaways. Remember to subscribe on your favorite streaming platform, like it and download the upcoming episodes. And if you know anyone in your life that is looking to continue to ignite their resilience, share it with them. We look forward to seeing you on our future episodes. Their resilience, share it with them. We look forward to seeing you on our future episodes and until then, continue to reignite that fire within your hearts.