The Dyslexic Professor: Teaching Kids to Overcome Reading Difficulties | Ep. 111

Join us on the Falling for Learning podcast as TD Flenaugh and Russell Van Brocklen, the dyslexic professor, delve into effective strategies for supporting students with dyslexia. Russell shares his innovative approach, emphasizing the importance of leveraging students' special interests and teaching from the specific to the general. Learn how word analysis followed by articulation can transform learning experiences and empower students to overcome challenges. This episode is packed with practical insights for educators and parents aiming to foster success in dyslexic learners.

Reach out to Russell Van Brocklen
Website - https://dyslexiaclasses.com/

Follow him on Social Media:
YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_cqwfxn9FqFx1Idl0YbeHg
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/dyslexiaclassesus
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/dyslexiaclasses
X (Twitter) – https://twitter.com/dyslexiaclasses
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/russell-van-brocklen-2007ab87

Books mentioned during the episode: 
The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth
Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz 

Transcript

0:07

So I'm gonna refresh. Okay, you see me? Yes, I do. Okay, so, it says live already. I don't know. Okay, I think we're rolling. Okay. Hahaha! Welcome to the Falling for Learning podcast. I am TD Flanaugh. Today we have Russell Van Brocklin. Did I pronounce that correctly? Yes, he is known as the dyslexic professor. And he's going to talk to you about his own research and his own experience with dyslexia. All right, well, thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell us please, What made you fall in love with learning as a child or a youth? What was that thing? Uh, what made me fall in love was learning is in seventh grade, I literally had to go to a school board member across the street and what my parents did. And they forced me out of special education for history. And then the next year I did no studying. I had a first grade reading and writing level in college, I couldn't do it in middle school. And I just remembered everything that the teacher said and he made us think for the first time and I had perfect hundreds and all those tests and quizzes. actually got the history award for eighth grade. So that got me and then I forced my way out of special ed for everything going into high school. Excellent. All right. So that experience, it sounds like it's more like, you know, you were told you couldn't or in, and you got, or, you know, you were put in this restricted area and you wanted to push past that. Yeah, I was in special ed. I graduated in 1992 and they didn't know what to do with us. They didn't have the first clue. And I was stuck with a bunch of low performing students that weren't going to go anywhere. nothing again, was just I wanted to be with my peers. wanted to learn about, know, for example, in high school, I did advanced placement history, both American and European. Right. teacher had a PhD from RPI. And those are the type of students that I wanted to be in class with. Right, so you had to break out of that because some of those students, you know, because not everybody is studious, right? So those were students that weren't as studious and you want to be with students who were more into studying and having that. Can you tell us what RPI is? Rinsklin Polytech Institute. It's one of our first technical colleges in Troy, New York. Okay, so you're in New York, upstate New York? Is that where you're? All right, okay. So what were those activities or skills that you used as a youth that really help influence what you do today? Well, like a lot of dyslectics, I was told in elementary school that if I didn't pass some academic task, I was going to be held back, which I was. I had to go to pre first. I was going to miss being with my friends totally, you know, be completely in special ed, not for not mainstream for some subjects. And what I had to do was pass a certain academic task. So like a lot of people like me, I became in incredibly motivated to solve this. I became incredibly depressed to the point where it's clinically dangerous. And then through that massive frustration, the solution presented itself. And then as I went through school, that happened so many times, it just became normal. And what I found looking back and working with other dyslectics like myself, we started coming up with essentially graduate level ideas in elementary school because We had to. Nobody else could help us. We had to solve our own problems. Wow, that's amazing. So uh as a little kid thinking about, I've got to solve this because you had certain goals for yourself and what you were getting, receiving instruction wasn't working for you. That's an amazing story of resilience and self actualization as well. That's amazing. instructions I got was completely useless. I had to teach myself everything all along the way. Nothing I received ever in my education until graduate school was worth anything. I'm sorry. And that's not an unusual story for dyslexic researchers. That's actually quite common. Tell me about, like, give me some examples. Like, you're in, you know, fifth grade. What kind of work are you doing in school? Like you're saying, it's completely useless to you. Um, they're trying to teach me history and I can't pick up anything. And then when I finally reached eighth grade, the teacher actually required us to think. So for example, we're doing the civil war and he's saying, if you were, if you were Lincoln, what would you do? And I would say, well, obviously go towards Atlanta because it's railroad junction. And I explained all that. And then he'd give us quizzes that asked us those things. And I never studied. I couldn't, I couldn't take notes. So I would just literally close my eyes and remember everything the teacher said. It was just the skill I had to pick up. And then when I went to high school, the same thing happened. I ended up my first semester had an 87 average. And then my last semester I had like a 95.5, I was fourth in my class. And, you know, you know, for example, with spelling tests, I would memorize them, get a perfect score. Two periods later, I couldn't remember any of them. Yeah. Well, you know, believe it or not, I had that. didn't have dyslexia, but yes, spelling wasn't really something I would, like it was just for memorization. So I did forget it later on. I have the same, like, I don't remember it. But let me ask you about um the differences. Like you're saying that that eighth grade teacher was asking you critical thought questions, right? And in fifth grade, were they just giving you the book? or a worksheet, like what did it look like? no, it was completely useless. They were essentially treating me like I was in kindergarten. It was like the normal kids were doing pilgrims and I really wanted to learn about them. Because I had two ancestors who were on the Mayflower, the head religious person and then the biggest troublemaker. Yeah, that was a fun combination. And they were just giving me all this useless stuff. I learned absolutely nothing. So are you making like little crafts out of pilgrims but not learning about the pilgrims? couldn't. No, we wouldn't even do that. They were just sitting around reading to us or having us play with Legos or some other nonsense. It was beyond completely useless. So they didn't wanna stress you out with that information about the pilgrims. do. mean, we're talking about a level of incompetence that was so extreme, it would absolutely shock you. Okay, all right. So when you're saying you were at first grade reading level, can you tell us something as a dyslexic person? what, because what I hear, what we hear about, often hear about, which uh people are saying, well, the letters are floating or the letters are backwards or something like, what do you see or what were you seeing before you were able to remedy this issue? Well, for me to remedy what I decided to do is, uh there's a little back story. In the late 90s, I entered the New York State Assembly internship program. I had a first grade reading and writing level, so they put me in the program and council's office with three administrative assistants, and I gave an oral presentation for my research. The only time in the history of the program, they recommended 15 credits of A-. The political science department at the State University of New York Center at Buffalo said, we don't like these accommodations. So here's your 15 credits of F. So I decided to solve reading and writing and then to show everybody else. What's the most impossible thing to do? Law school. So after college, I audited contracts and property under a dyslexic professor. His name was Professor Warner. And I walk in, it's my second day, he calls on me. And most of the time you're blubbering bozo at that point because you just don't know anything. Everything changed for me. Everything lined up and organized. So what happened is he was going, we were polite, but we were fiercely going back to each, forth and between each other. I knew what he was going to say three moves ahead of time. So he knew the same with me. After 15 minutes, he said, you couldn't be any more correct. I have to move on to the next case in the interest of time. Then I started taking the quizzes and property. We were supposed to think for three to five minutes because they're so, they're really trying to fool you very slightly. I didn't think for three to five seconds, I did it instantaneously and I had perfect scores. Okay. And then I learned to write within the next couple of years. So what I found, just so everybody knows what's going on, this is the book in my field, Brain Images from Yale. overcoming dyslexia, okay? Who is the author? the author's name is Dr. Sally Shaywitz. OK. that in the show notes. There's dyslexia. Do you see the back part of my brain has almost no neural activity, but the gen ed brain is going crazy? Now do you see the front part of the dyslexic brain is about two and a half times overactive? Okay. Okay. So what I initially did is I said, okay, let's just solve the writing because if you can, if you, you have to learn to read, to write. So I just, let's just solve the writing. And I picked the writing, the graduate records exam, analytical writing test. the most popular writing test for going into graduate school. It was funded by the New York state Senate for multiple years. We took the most motivated and intelligent uh high school juniors and seniors. All right. uh They had middle school writing skills. We had their best teacher at Avril Park Central School District. name was Susan Ford. One class period A for the school year. We did articulation followed by word analysis, very limited amount, just like the brain scan said from Yale. And the kids went from middle school to average range of entering graduate students. All graduated from college, no accommodations. GPAs of 2.5 to 3.6. We were literally 3X as effective as Landmark College, the best-despected college at the time, for less than one-tenth of the cost. Well, then I presented in New York City, and I thought I did something amazing. I thought I was done. I was wrong. What they wanted was how do we drop this to typical students? I said, okay. First of all, what I had to do at the bottom, and this is now part three, we had to switch articulation followed by word analysis to word analysis followed by articulation. So just to show you how powerful that is, have you ever met an elementary student who, this is a direct quote from one of the teachers I trained in New York City. She said, my students are writing apparently randomly placed misspelled words. I don't even know where to begin. Sound familiar? Yeah. Okay, here's how we fix that word analysis followed by articulation. Two and a half times the neuroactivity, let's use it. So I want you to tell me about one of the students, change their name to protect their identity, all right? What's the name of the student who's writing randomly placed misspelled words? What? You want me to guess then? no, you've worked with kids like this. Think of a student who's writing randomly placed misspelled words and changed their first name to protect their identity. Okay, Dennis. Dennis, what is Dennis' speciality? What's his area of extreme interest and ability? um He loves video games. oh Video games, okay. So what we do is we have you type out hero plus sign, what are we talking about? Dennis copies it. It's a copy default writing strategy, Professor James Collins strategies for struggling writers. Then you switch hero for Dennis, Dennis plus sign, what are we talking about? Dennis plus sign video games. See how we got there? Now, 90 % of the times when I teach this a major dyslexia conferences, The teachers get this wrong because they don't follow what I'm asking exactly. It's very simple. You have to follow it exactly. Do think I can fool you? Possibly, I don't know. Okay, so let's see. Here's my question. got Dennis plus sign video games. We gotta replace the plus sign with a word to make it a proper three word sentence. Here's my question. Does Dennis like or dislike video games? I would say dislike. Well, you said, I asked what his favorite thing was and you said... he likes video games, but I'm saying I would put dislike just to irritate him. OK, so OK, so you're going to put this OK, so go ahead and give me the three word sentence. Dennis Dislikes Video Game. But that's not what I asked. I asked, is Dennis like or dislike? All right. And if I asked Dennis, he would say dislike. As an educated person, you automatically added the S. Dennis doesn't know how to add the S. So now I'm sure. Right. So now how do we get Dennis to add the S? Now I'm sure you're aware of like Orton Gillingham, multi-century structured literacy and all the, yeah. I'm trying to say that is way too costly. In New York state, that's $75,000 a year for four to five years, once they're in fourth grade or older. No, no, if you have a kid who's way behind in fourth grade, it's typically a private school like that for four to five years at $75,000 a year. I'm going to show parents how they can do this at home. My one assumption is that Dennis speaks proper English. That's the one assumption I had to make. Okay, so what we're going to do is I would ask Dennis, do you like or dislike? Well, you're going to throw it and you're going to say, Dennis, you have to put a dislike and he's going to pout. Dennis dislike video games. Okay. Then I asked Dennis, read that out loud. Does that sound generally correct? He's going to say no. Then I'm to say fix it. Dennis dislikes video games. Mm-hmm. So just by asking, does it sound generally correct? No, fix it. That corrects those horrific grammar mistakes that gen ed teachers don't even know what to do. That fixes that. We do that with 10 likes and 10 dislikes until the student has it down. That is a form of word analysis. Then we go because, reason one. Everything after because is articulation, the front part of the dyslexia. Right. Just so make sure people can follow you're talking about just talking out. Right. But here's, again, I'm going back to this, the front part of the brain, two and a half times word analysis, followed by articulation. This is how we use it. So then we have the students do that 10 likes and 10 dislikes. Now what you're going to find is they're going to start making a lot of spelling mistakes. How do we fix that? What we tell the student is that before you put a period down, you can ask any question. So let's say, Did I spell video games correctly? If the answer is no, he can retype just video games until it's correct. Once he drops the period, if there's a spelling mistake and a major, and I mean a major grammatical mistake, then he has to retype the entire sentence. These kids drop periods. So what happens? They keep having to retype usually between three and 12 times. They're gonna say, I'm not gonna make that mistake. I'm not gonna make that mistake. And then they keep making it until they don't. As they progress, they start getting extraordinarily annoyed with themselves and they hyper-focus to the point that you've never seen before. You can see sweat coming down their head until they get it correct. We do that until it's correct for reason one, then another 20 for reason one and reason two, then reason one, reason two and reason three. Okay, now you follow that and this could take an elementary school kid a couple of weeks or a couple of months. Mm-hmm. But once you're done with that, you're taking them from randomly placed misspelled words, kindergarten level writing to end a second beginning of third grade level writing. It's that simple. Okay. Now, but that is the third part of the model. The first one is what we've discussed pre-show is you have to, if you want typical kids to do this, you have to focus on their speciality, their area of extreme interest and ability. Typically at, yep. It's a Saturday morning, you can do whatever you want. What would it be? That's their specialty. Yeah, I just want to say earlier when I was saying like I wanted to uh irritate the kid, but it's just like a little funny thing because the kid will kind of perk up like I don't dislike video games, know, so that's the you know, that's the point not just really annoyed. But yeah, it's just to get them a little attention like hey, like no, I know it's just a joke, you know, but it does. m the most popular book when I work with kids privately is this. The What Disney. yep, Disney's biography, all thousand pages, and this is 11th grade material. Okay. Have you ever been to Disneyland or Disney World? Okay. Have you noticed that when you enter Main Street USA, it's a magical experience? Uh, yeah, I guess. I mean, I actually haven't been in a long time, but yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very exciting. They do something to make it exciting for them for sure. Well, that something is two universal things. So I would literally go over. Now you want to talk about solving reading issues. Remember, this is what I said, you have to work with the kid's speciality. So why are the kids so eager? They want to know what the Disney magic is. And I'm talking about what Walt did. passed away in, I think, 1965. So this is going back a while. Marceline, Missouri is where he was between age five and 10. And he spent his entire life trying to recreate that experience. So when you go through the book, the first universal theme is very easy. It's about 10 % of the value. The second one that's 90 % of the value, I've never had a parent find it. To give you an example, I started off with a young lady who was 10, reading that thousand page book. Two years later, her mom asked, well, I asked her mom to find the second universal theme. She couldn't do it. Mom has a master's degree. So her 12 year old daughter goes, mom, it's right there. And I told the mom, well, your 12 year old daughter can now, dyslectic daughter can now comprehend better than you can. Have I done my job? And I, and I have parents tell me all the time, because what I do is very repetitive. My kid won't do it. said outside their speciality, you're right. Inside their speciality, we're, we're golden. I will literally spend three years on this one book, but when they're done, This kid, she was in seventh grade, end of seventh, beginning of eighth grade. She's reading everything in that book. She's now years ahead. Okay. I try to get these kids to the top of the mountain so they can walk down. A lot easier to learn going down than trying to clog. And then we get on to, so what we have is speciality first. Word analysis is followed by the articulation third. The second one, let me ask you this question. This will, this will probably be very illuminating for you. In your speciality, for you, what is that? What are you really good at? What do you excel at? Well, I really like to write, that's one of the things. Okay, for writing. When you're thinking about writing, do you ever have ideas flying around your head at light speed? Key question, but with little to no organization. Okay. Now, when you're trying to fingers, keyboard, fingers, keyboard, you want to create a real lesson plan about writing. The ideas in your head, you take your fingers, you put them on the keyboard. Does the idea fly out of your head, leaving you with an empty brain? No. Okay, so what that tells me is you probably have ADD, ADHD, or some form of dyslexia, or a mild form of dyslexia. Maybe, more ADD probably. Yes, that's so that it so that those two questions we said yes to the second one, which is a lot rare, that severe dyslexia. So those two questions can help save you $5,000 on a neuropsych exam. All right, so now understanding that, so what we have to do is we have to force the brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable outlet. Let me say that again. We need to force the brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output. That's why if we ask uh a dyslexic or ADD or ADHD kid a question like, what effect did Martin Luther King's famous, I have a dream speech have in the 1960s civil rights movement? It's like trying to grab fog. have nothing to latch onto. But if we ask, if we go from the specific to the general, what personally compelled Martin Luther King to want to give his famous speech. We go to his biography, we find out, and that provides a natural second question, which then has another question, which then forces us to write in a linear manner. Once our brain organizes itself, reading, writing, spelling, a lot of itself corrects. Yeah, that sounds really good. What I need to back up because we kind of skipped over your education. You talked about it a little bit. So we know, you you ended up doing very well in high school. Can you tell us about like your undergraduate or other studies you've done? I ended up wanting to be an engineer. My uncle graduated, taught this class from Clarkson, did all the cool stuff from 65 to 95 for NASA as a subcontractor. And I failed Calc one and two seven times. I didn't have the brains for it. So I studied everything from political science, communications, business, history, law. I just kept going to try to figure out how to learn to read to write. And it was a completely futile effort. Me and undergraduate were not friends. ah I finished up with neurological communications and then I went on to graduate school. studied law. I studied, I completed most of the masters in business administration. um I took professors, not colleges. So I would go from one academic institution to the next, taking the very best. And that's where I learned. And then I came back and said, okay, let's Then I went out to the state funding to, uh, it six years to get the funding and to run through the experiments before we presented in New York City in 06. So who did you study with or how did you get the funding? it your specific organization or was it a group of people? Oh, to get New York State? No, it's all sort of fun trying to get the state funding. They sent me to the New York State Education Department and they wanted a SUNY distinguished professor in psychology to review it. There were two that I could have went to, one happened to give me an evaluation before. And she said, my reading and writing can go from nothing, know, first grade level to grad level back down again. Then I had to connect it to current research, which was, here's the book I worked from. His name was Professor James Collins. had a million and a half dollars grant from the U.S. Education Department. And yes. sure I read it because we have our audience our audio Listeners and we have our video listener. Yeah for struggling writers. The three default strategies were copying, visualization, and narrative. And how long do you think it took me to get Professor Collins to approve my research? Maybe very quickly. Well, this is something that's supposed to take years. I did in less than two weeks because that's all the time I had. I got $15,000 from the University of Buffalo from the university wide competition. And then after we worked with students for a couple of years, we took them from the zero percentile on the GRE to average range of average and above average. this then. So go ahead. where'd you get the students from? Or like, how did that happen? to my old high school and I said, this is what we want to do. We have support from the University of Buffalo. We have support from the major researchers. And they said, okay, you're going to work with kids outside of class. So we did that for a couple of years. In the most extreme case, his name was Adam. He failed the English Regents exam with a 47 and a 52. That's our high school writing and reading assessment. Halfway through the program, he scored a 72 and then he finished up in the 70th percentile of ENRI grad students. so outside of school is after school, before school. nothing to do with school. We did that for a number of years with a number of kids. And then finally... They weren't somewhere in the school or you took them to a different facility? They met. met them. I drove to their house and worked with them. That's what the 15 grand was for. And after the kids went back and when they saw how they did in college, like literally they went into college and they were B students. And their pre-test indicated that they have no chance of going anywhere in college. I mean, the writing was horrific. So the school then, after a number of years said, we're interested. So then they went. the Senate through my senator and they said, we're interested. The education departments represented by the top professors were interested. And then we got a hold of the Research Foundation at the State University of New York. And then we worked with them extensively. They commercialized all of SUNY's research and managed the research. And then they funded us for a number of years. And then we presented the results in New York City in uh the New York City branch of the International Disclosure Association in 2006. Wow. Okay. So your school is, your former high school is the one that said they were interested. Yes? Okay. make it very clear. We took their best students and we worked with them outside of school completely. And then they listened to them. Did this work? What do you think? Is there anything here? And they said it was completely transformative. The best students are the worst students. No, the very best. I wanted to show, because remember, we're doing the GRE. They're throwing all these different subjects at them all over the place. And remember, the number one rule we eventually came up with, you have to be in the speciality to work with typical students. I wanted to take the very best to show what we could do with the very best. What are the very best? Highly motivated, highly intelligent, college-bound, excellent family support. And who selected this? their chair of special education, who personally knew the families would say, we're going to go with this one. And then when we picked them, they picked the students, they controlled everything. So they were the best students that had a special need or just. were dyslectic and what we just happened to be, they're juniors and seniors, their writing skills were at the seventh or eighth grade level, all of them. And then we just jumped it up to the grad level and it was a rocket ship. But then to work with other students, we had to make those three changes. We had to work in the speciality. Mm-hmm. teach from the specific to the general, which we did anyway. And then we switched articulation followed by word analysis to word analysis followed by articulation. And yes, if we step outside the speciality for typical students, they wouldn't do the work. Yeah. And speciality again, just for the listeners and the viewers is something that they're really interested in, something they're passionate in, which of course we talk a lot about at the Falling, with the Falling for Learning podcast, like how to get kids to fall in love with learning. It has to do with really them having choice uh and preferences, right? Choosing what they like and writing about what they like, reading about, know, whatever it is, they're studying things that they like, some aspect of it. Yeah. Yeah, and just so you can understand the most extreme case, I never saw it before. I'll never see it again. This was Casey's book, all 900 pages of it. Roosevelt by Edmund Morris, okay? The rise of Theodore Roosevelt. This book won the Pulitzer. Casey was 10 years old, end of fifth grade. She turned 11 over the summer. Six months later, she knew every word in that book. No, literally she knew the dictionary definition of every word in that book. said, we do reading first. I'm sorry, writing first. And then we do a little reading at the end. says, no, I want to do the reading first. So I said, okay. I'd modified part of my program. said, you're not doing this. And what did the kid do? She was so into Teddy Roosevelt. She was in her room two to three hours a night, every night, six, seven nights out of the week, like eight hours a day during the summer. But why did she, did you know, do you know what it was about him that she liked or you don't know what sparked her interest? extraordinarily interested in him, but six months later, she knew every word in that book. So she's in her private, her silent reading class. The students come over, pick up her book. What's this? They couldn't get past the first paragraph. So the teacher, the teacher calls mom. I thought your daughter had a reading problem. She's the best reader in the class by grade levels. What's going on? And I said, her mom's confused, because I'm working with her 15 minutes a week. And I said, your daughter, what do think she's been doing up in her room every night, hours a night? Wait a minute, wait, wait, wait. You said you're working 15 minutes a week with them? Yeah, I work through her 15 minutes a week. When you said you were working with them, I was thinking, you know, at least an hour. What? No, wow. 15 minutes a week. And there were occasional one or two minute phone calls when she was stuck. And then she literally knew every word, every dictionary, any word in that book, she literally knew the dictionary definition of. Okay, well this is amazing. So yeah, we are definitely gonna make sure we get all of your contact information. People wanna reach out and find out about what you have going on. Well, the easiest way to contact me is just go to Dyslexia Classes. Again, that's with an S, dyslexiaclasses.com. There's a contact me form. Just fill it out. I get right back to you. All right. Okay, and you are known as the dyslexic professor, right? Okay, and you have a book you're working on coming out soon. we're working on is where we're going to show parents how to take their kids from wherever they are writing through context and problem based on the craft of research, which is designed for PhD students. And at the end of that, that should give them the writing skills to get past middle and high school. And we're showing parents of highly motivated, highly intelligent kids with excellent family support, regardless if they're dyslexic ADD or gen-ed kids. We're looking for 100 parents to go through that. The price tag is you have to write handwritten letters to New York state elected officials. We meet once a week for a webinar until you're finished. Why am I doing this? Because my state found out they can't afford how to solve kids using traditional methods. So we're showing them how to do it this way. Wow. So New York is not uh have the money for it. Well, just so you know that, you know, I'm based in California and we have a new law that all kindergarten through second grade students have to be pre-screened for dyslexia. And that is done primarily by the classroom teacher. And they identify students that are, you know, at risk for dyslexia and they get, um they need to have you know, special intervention. So that's one of the things that I do during my day job is do intervention, reading intervention. State was supposed to do this year. And then we got two reasons why not. We can't afford it and it's too much to put on the educators because they just dumped all this other stuff on the educators. I see. So, you know, that's it's good. even if people, know, listeners and our viewers, even if you don't need these services, right, you don't have a child that's dyslexic, but it may be important for you to write to your state senator to let them know that you want some type of support for kids that are dyslexic, because we know when students are not successful in school, you know, it is, you know, very easy for them to fall into a life of crime and all kinds of things when they're not really able to overcome illiteracy. Yeah. and what I'm showing them with a craft of research, context, problem, solution, we're showing context and problem. uh Professors want students to have these skills before they come to college. Rarely do they have them even in graduate school. And when we do solution, just to give you an example, imagine you have 20 students who are writing on Romeo and Juliet. The teacher's been teaching for 20 years. They follow my process, which is a version designed for dyslexic schools of the craft of research. The teacher would find something substantially original with each essay. Which is very difficult. I could tell you from my experience, most of the kids write, what I'm saying, when you see the way that a lot of writing instruction goes now, a lot of the students are writing very, very similar. But it really is about something we talk about on the podcast is making sure that writing prompts are more em specific for, and then also like we're talking about based on a special reality or something that they really like. So not just writing about Romeo and Juliet, but maybe a specific aspect of it that they can identify in their life or something like that. um Yeah, so, but that's great, because we know that with AI and all the things that are going on, that writing remains to be a weak skill for students in addition to reading, right? But writing is even more difficult than reading. And so, yeah, a lot of kids suffer in that. big secret. If you can write it, you can read it. And we integrate artificial intelligence, but only really after they've learned to write really at the advanced middle school level. But essentially what we did is we took the craft of research, which again was designed for PhD students doing advanced research, and we dropped context to elementary school, problem to middle school, and solution to high school. And when students have those skills and they go into college, I can tell you I've had a lot of students who the professors call me, what is a college freshman doing with a craft of research? I'm actually learning some small points that are completely original from a college freshman. And then they want to work with that kid. And I said, well, they've been working on it for a couple of years and they now know how to do it reasonably well. It is literally that important when they get out into the real world and everything's going AI now, they don't need to know about how to prompt engineer. Learning the craft of research, I show you how to prompt engineer your brain. And just by following it, you can produce really good answers, even if you know nothing about it. Because dyslectics will go back and forth until they figure out context and problem and solution. They produce five paragraph essays and their boss goes, I can actually use this. from a new hire who's an undergrad. And they just, you know, they love it. Well, we thank you so much for joining us today on the Filing for Learning podcast. You've given us so many uh nuggets of valuable information, uh lots of information about the research behind dyslexia and some strategies to engage children in getting on track for learning and staying on track for success. So we really appreciate you. Cool, thanks for having me on. Are there any last kind of messages you want to give for parents out there that are maybe struggling with students that have dyslexia? Just again, follow the basic model. Focus on a book with an audio book that they're really interested in their speciality. Teach them from the specific to the general and do word analysis followed by articulation. You do that, you'll be fine. Wonderful. And thank you again for joining us audience. Please give us a follow, a like, um and we want to make sure that you do something today that gives your child the competitive advantage. Thank you and see you next time. Thanks for having me on.