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CTP (S3EJanSpecial9) Unlocking Dyslexia: From Struggle To Strategy

• Joseph M. Lenard | Christian Activist & Author in Politics • Season 3

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CTP (S3EJanSpecial9) Unlocking Dyslexia: From Struggle To Strategy
Exploring more of the fascinating intersection of Activism, Community Engagement, Faith / Religion, Human Nature, Politics, Social Issues, and beyond   
We dig into a practical, brain-based way to help dyslexic learners by shifting from the back of the brain to the front and using writing as the lever that unlocks reading. Russell shares a step-by-step approach parents can try at home and a case study that shows how fast progress can happen when we focus on motivation and structure.
• Why dyslexia is more about organization than reading
• How front-of-brain focus beats back-of-brain accommodations
• Using like/dislike and because to teach word analysis and articulation
• Anchoring practice in a child’s specialty to keep motivation high
• Specific-to-general questions that force the brain to organize
• Audiobooks plus print for accelerated comprehension
• Case studies showing 20-point jumps and mainstreaming success
• Building strong paragraphs with quotes, topic sentences, and warrants
• Practical tools parents can use with a laptop and repetition
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SPEAKER_01:

Hello, welcome to another episode of Prestitutionalist Podcast. I am your host, Joseph M. Warner, that's L-E-N-A-R-D at the French Knowledge Line without an O. Thank you for tuning in. As Bram Norton used to say on his show, let's get on with the show. Hello everybody. I just wanted to let you know this brief intro. I'm gonna double up two a week for the rest of January. Uh they get caught up on a few interviews I've recorded lately. They're kind of piling up. They're going a little too far in the future. I don't want to keep people waiting that long. So for the rest of January, I'll do two during the week rather than one midweek drop on Wednesday. So Tuesday and Thursday, the rest of January. Anyway, let's let's get some guests on, as Graham Norton currently says, and I'm borrowing. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Christitutionalist Podcast. Going to join me today is Russell Van Brocklin. It's Van, not Vaughn, right?

SPEAKER_02:

Correct. Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. I think to get that right to start with. And today is not officially a listener feedback show, but it kind of sorta is, because Russell heard September 3 episode, October Special 9 with JM Shaw, and we talked autism, and he reached out to me. So that's kind of where we'll start from, and then we'll go wherever things, you know, whatever you know me, whatever the rabbit holes open, that's the ones we dive down. So welcome to the show, Russell.

SPEAKER_02:

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and before we get into that, let's do the you know the usual nitty-gritty. Where were you born? Where were you raised? Where are you now? Any significant spots you've been to along the way in between, that sort of stuff.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I was born in Amsterdam, New York, but the more interesting thing about my story is I wasn't supposed to be doing this. I was supposed to be a bureaucrat for the New York State government. So just quickly how I got into this and what what my first project was. I it was the late 90s. I wanted to know how laws were made, not some class I wanted to know. Schoolhouse Rock didn't cut it for you, huh? Yeah. So I sign up for the New York State Assembly internship, and I show up and I say, here's my neuropsychological evaluation. I have a first grade reading and writing ability. And the director looked at that and said, This is not going to work. This can't work. So it went up to the speaker's office. They decided they had to accommodate me, whatever that was. So they said, they formed a committee, they made the decision, they're removing me from the legislative office building, and they're putting me in the Capitol, in the Majority Leaders Program and Council's office, and they held with bated breath what my what I was going to say because now I'm away from all of my peers. And I said, Cool, because now this is they they that's a graduate level internship, not an undergrad. So then I go in and I see why I was placed there. They had three administrative assistants that could take my horrendous writing and on a weekly basis put it in so I could turn it in. For the academic portion, I had to give a do a major research project. And the standard accommodation for me back then was instead of the 20-page research paper, I gave an hours-long QA presentation and a long question and answers afterwards. At the end, they recommended 3.67 for 15 credits. Then it goes back to the State University of New York Center of Buffalo political science department. They didn't like the 3.67 GPA. They didn't like my accommodations. So guess what they adjusted it to? Go ahead.

SPEAKER_01:

F. F.

SPEAKER_02:

Zero. Nothing. Okay, which just destroyed my transcript. And I was like, I'm done with the discrimination. I because I was in the majority leader's office, I could have gotten a lobbying job, I could have gotten any one of state positions because I could just pick up the phone and talk to the people running the place day to day. Well, instead, I asked my professors, where can I go to force myself to learn to read and write in grad school? And they looked at me and they're kind of laughing, law school. So I went. Yes. And they said they were kind of joking, but I went anyway. Second day of contracts, I'm called by Professor Warner, who was a dyslectic professor. What they do in law school is they crush you the first couple of days until you eventually adapt by asking you questions you don't know the answer to and embarrassing you. Didn't happen to you.

SPEAKER_01:

It kind of brings your mind legally blonde. The movie.

SPEAKER_02:

Exactly. But but that but that didn't happen to me because as I found with dyslexics, we owned grad school day one or soon thereafter. I responded back to Professor Warner. And after a couple of questions, he's looking a little perplexed because I'm responding at his level. Everything just focused and organized for the first time. Goes on five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. He's very confused. Thought I went to law school someplace else before. Nope, first time. And what he said is at the end of 15 minutes, Russell, you couldn't be any more correct. I have to move on for the interest of time. I learned to read within a month. I learned to write within a couple of years. Then I went back to the New York State Senate and I said, I want you to fund my dyslexia research project. They don't fund dyslexia research projects, but I got them to after a number of years. And what we did is we took a bunch of highly motivated, highly intelligent dyslexic juniors and seniors, and they had middle school reading and writing skills. One class period a day for the school year, they increased their writing to the average range of entering graduate school students. Bypass high school, bypass college. Cost New York State less than 900 bucks a kid. They all went on to college, they all graduated with GPAs of 2.5 to 3.6.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, you know what bothers me the most here is it's clear everybody's assumption, these are all write-off kids, right? They can't learn, they won't learn. Why bother? The bigotry of low expectation in discriminatory in any anyone is capable if given the right conditions. And indeed, rather than writing them off, indeed, some may need special attention or help, but we want them to do well in society, not become a somebody who's permanently gotta ride in the cart.

SPEAKER_02:

Right, but again, these were very unusual kids in that they were extraordinarily intelligent and massively motivated. So when I did that, I went down to New York City to present in 2006. I thought I did something amazing. I thought I did something that would change the world. I was wrong. Because the first thing the teachers asked were, okay, you did this for the superstar kids. They're very rare. And I said, Yep. What about the rest of the kids? And I said, No, this will absolutely not work. So they said, go ahead and fix that. I came back when I did that.

SPEAKER_01:

That's the key. Find out what will what can be portable from what you learned there to now motivate and help others, not in that upper echelon of that class, indeed, right?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Problem is it took me eight years to figure it out. Which I'm about to explain to you very quickly. Hey, things don't happen overnight.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, this is done at all if you don't try.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I'm gonna explain dyslexia. This is the book on dyslexia, the number one in the field. It's from Dr. Shewood, she's the medical doctor at Yale. All right.

SPEAKER_01:

And it's titled Overcoming Dyslexia for those not viewing on behind the scenes video.

SPEAKER_02:

Yes. All right. I'm gonna show you dyslexia. That's it. Do you see how the back part of my brain has next to no neural activity, but yours is going crazy? Okay. So just your readers can uh your listeners can understand the back part of your brain has massive neural activity. Mine has basically next to zero. But the front part of my brain, do you see how that's about two and a half times overactive? Okay, so what I had this really strange idea. If the front part of my brain is working like crazy, two and a half times more active than yours, and the back part has nothing going on. Why am I worrying about the back part? Let's look at the front part. So, according to Yale, that part of the brain does two things articulation followed by word analysis. So people think, were you insane by doing that original program? Why did you do that? I said, Because the front part of the brain is articulation. And the name of that test is the Graduate Records Exam Analytical Writing Section. Analytical articulation, about the same thing. That was the breakthrough. Okay. Now, when I'm looking at doing this with normal kids, I found out I had to flip that around. Word analysis followed by articulation. Now, this, what I'm about to tell you, are things that your listeners can do tonight to help your dyslectic kid really improve the reading and writing skills. Are you ready? Sure, go ahead. Okay. So I do you know any dyslectic elementary school kids ever? I myself personally no. Okay. So I'm going to give you an example. The one I use all the time, her name is Sarah. Why do I use her? Because she has a specialty, an area of extreme interest and ability that people can relate to. She loves swimming. She's on the swim team, she gets to the pool every chance she can get. So, what we do is we have you write out 10 things, type out 10 things the kid really, really likes, and then 10 things that they really, really hate. All right, so we were what we're gonna do is we're gonna have you go to a laptop with a real keyboard. Not an iPad, not an iPhone, and certainly not handwriting. A real laptop with a real keyboard. You're gonna type out hero plus sign. What are we talking about? And then the kid's gonna copy that. That's okay. Professor James Collins, Strategies for Struggling Writers, Default Writing Strategy of Copying. All right. Then we're going to swap out hero for the kid's name. So we're going to swap out hero plus sign, what are we talking about to Sarah plus sign, what are we talking about? Now we're going to go to the list of what she really likes. The top thing is swimming, and we're going to swap that out for what are we talking about. So now we got Sarah plus sign swimming. See how we got there? Okay. Now I'm going to try to fool you with the simplest questions ever. If you ask them exactly right, because remember, these will be the simplest questions you were ever asked in your life. If you answer them exactly exactly, this works. If it doesn't, it doesn't work. And people normally have an epiphany on what dyslexia is really like. Do you think I'm going to fool you? I'm going to be able to fool you.

SPEAKER_01:

Probably. Okay. So remember we got Sarah. Hey, I I have no hubris. I'm human. I'm frail. I'm flawed. I can be fooled like anybody else.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay. So what we have now is Sarah plus sign swimming. We need to swap out the plus sign for a word to complete the sentence. So here's my question. Remember, Sarah loves swimming beyond anything else. Sarah plus sign swimming. We got to swap out the plus sign. Here's my question. Does Sarah like or dislike swimming?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, loves, obviously. Okay.

SPEAKER_02:

But do you see? That is not what I asked. It doesn't work. Do you see what mistake you made?

SPEAKER_01:

I just immediately went beyond the the the question. Right. Yeah. So what was your mistake? Not taking it literal. Okay. So just so you know what you think. You gave a multiple choice, and I went off script.

SPEAKER_02:

Right. But so what you did is what educated people tend to do. Instead of like, you came up with a much better word and you added an S to make it a proper sentence. Sarah doesn't know how to add DS. So how do rich people do it? You know, those flying around in private jets, they would send their child to a Orton Gillingham multi-sensory structured language school with a four to one to five to one student-to-teacher ratio at$75,000 a year for four to five years. All right.

SPEAKER_01:

And they would use you can afford it.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and if you have house money, you don't need to listen anymore. If you can drop$500K on this, go ahead. And that's just tuition, not living expenses. So what do they do? They use seeing, hearing, touching, take everything they can imagine sense-wise to get the kid to read. Takes two years to become certified at$11,000. I'm going to teach you a much better way. Right now, real fast. Sarah would have said like, because that's what I asked her. It would have been Sarah likes swimming. I would have said, Sarah, does that sound read what you wrote out right loud? Sarah likes swimming. Sarah, does that sound generally correct? No. Sarah, fix it. Sarah likes swimming. We do 10 likes and 10 dislikes until it's all correct. Do you see how like and dislike is a simple form of word analysis? That is part of the front part of the brain. So I'm taking from the back part of the brain, which has nothing going on, and I'm moving it to the front part that's two and a half times overactive. Now that's the first part.

SPEAKER_01:

Then we do go because versus automatically assuming there needs to be a surgical or chemical fix to the issue.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. So so the next thing we do is we we go because reason one. Now, reason, do you see how reasons are a form of articulation? Okay. Okay. So like and dislike is a simple forward and word analysis. The reasons are a simple form of articulation. We're now moving from the back part of the brain to the front part of the brain that's two and a half times overactive. Give me a simple reason why a 10-year-old girl would like swimming.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm not fond of the water myself, so I'm would have a hard time actually answering because she's good at it.

SPEAKER_02:

Because Sarah likes swimming because she's good at it. Okay? Now, do you see now because she's dyslexic, we got a whole mess of misspelled words. Now, here's how you fix that. First thing you do is you tell Sarah to read what she wrote out loud. Sarah likes swimming because she's good at it. Sarah, does that sound generally correct? If no, retype it until it does. We're not trying to get rid of every grammatical error. We're trying to get rid of the nasty stuff. The teachers can do the simple and mid-level stuff. Okay, so we got that down. Now we got all these misspelled words. Now we say, Sarah, you have to keep retyping this until they're all spelled correctly. So she goes, okay. And then she sits there and she really tries, she says, I'm not gonna make that mistake. And she keeps making it between three and thirteen times. Every time she has to retype, she concentrates harder and harder to around a nine to thirteen times. Sometimes you can see sweat coming down her forehead. It's that intense. That's where the magic happens. She keeps making those mistakes until she doesn't. And then you repeat those until it's successful for each of the 10 likes and 10 dislikes. Then it's the same thing for reason one and reason two, ten likes and ten dislikes until they're all correct. Then reason one, reason two, and reason three. Once you get that done, you're now taking her writing from probably the kindergarten beginning first grade level to the end of second, beginning third grade level.

SPEAKER_01:

You know what else also comes to mind here is uh the book we no longer ask kids to read, Flowers for Algernon.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay. Yeah, and this is but the key thing, I'll get to that in a simple. The key thing here is the writing has improved that much. Now, here's a key thing. Parents ask me about reading, and I say, I don't teach reading, I teach writing because here's the big thing. If they can write it, they can read it.

SPEAKER_01:

You that makes perfect sense. If you can write it, you know how to write the words. You obviously should be able to visually understand if that's how I write it, that's how I understand it when I see it on the page.

SPEAKER_02:

Exactly. Now let's get to like the book you mentioned. Here's a big, I'm gonna give you this gonna be kind of a long story. I'm sorry, just what I just told you. For a for a 10-year-old, that'll take between two and six weeks. For a third grader, it'll take the entire semester. Because here's the difference with my process, with everything else. The older the child is, the quicker they will pick it up. Wharton Gillingham is the exact opposite because if they're in fifth grade, they got to learn everything they're supposed to learn K through fourth grade plus fifth grade. And the way it just gets horrible. Now, the older they are, the quicker they pick it up. It reverse, it flips that completely.

SPEAKER_01:

And the younger the mind, the less it's been indoctrinated to assume I can't do this or I can't do that, and or yeah, all that negativity built in.

SPEAKER_02:

Yep. Now, now you you mentioned a book, but the key thing with these kids is you have to focus until their intervention period is over, until they're reading and writing at grade level. Until that's through, you absolutely have to focus on their speciality, their area of extreme interest and ability. This is going to be a little bit of time, but just so you really understand it.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I want to ask a question here because when most people think dyslexia, you Think you see things in scramble or you put them in scramble, but you don't recognize that it is scrambled. What you are saying to me is they can recognize it's scrambled and having to learn how to correct from the brain to the hand the the scrambling or the unscrambling. Does that make any sense?

SPEAKER_02:

Yes, because the scrambling, which I'll get to a little later, okay, it's because the front part of the brain is massively overactive. There's little to no organization. So the people think that dyslexia is a reading problem. It's not. It's lack of organization. I can actually teach dyslectics to read better in high school than most reading teachers. Okay. And I'll get to that a little later, but the the key part, the next thing you need to understand, is what I'm about to tell you is uh I I never saw it before. I will never see this again. This was a one-off. Her name was Casey. I met her at the end of fifth grade. She was 10. She turned 11 over the summertime. Casey was reading at the second grade level. She was really interested in Theater Roosevelt. She said she wanted to do reading first. I said, Casey, I never do reading first. It doubles the workload. It makes no sense. And she said, I want to do reading first. I said, okay, here's how you do it.

SPEAKER_01:

If that's how she's motivated to do it, then it's a good thing.

SPEAKER_02:

I thought she was going to crash. I'd done this before. The kids crash within a week or two. I told her mom, pick out, you know, five, ten, twenty minutes a session. She does it at a couple times a week. It's up to her. I didn't know Casey. So I assigned her this little book called The Rise of Theatre Roosevelt.

SPEAKER_01:

All 900 pages of this sucker.

SPEAKER_02:

This thing won the Pulitzer.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's what I call a novel X, right? You got a short story, you got novella, you got novelette, you got novel. I created the term novel X, like an extended novel. It's uh you don't start a kid with war and peace normally, right? That's essentially what you did with her. Exactly. That's why I'm making the comparison.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. So so I gave that because that's the number one book on the it's part of the part of a trilogy. So she starts going through it two to three hours a night for six months, plus most of the day during the summertime. And then she's she's now six months later. She's in silent reading. Kids come over, pick up her book. They can't get through the first paragraph. Teacher calls mom. I thought your daughter had severe dyslexia. I thought that she had a reading problem. She's the best reader in her grade by grade level. What's going on? Her mom calls me. I said, What do you think she's been doing in her bedroom for two to three hours a night for six months? So then her mom said, Is it just that book? Or can it transfer over to something else? So I said, Oh, I I can test that.

SPEAKER_01:

Right, because she was highly motivated on a subject she wanted to be able to read. What about something she considers boring but kind of needs to read? Yes. So I assigned her this little thing.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, 1,000 pitches in a second.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh my. Yeah. Why do you mention silent reading? Because I would think the best way to overcome uh a reading issue would be sounding, trying to sound it out. Because just because you can't read doesn't mean you can't understand it if you hear the word. So if you can sound it out, you can understand it better. But you're saying cyber.

SPEAKER_02:

No, no, no, nope, nope. We use audiobooks while they follow along. The same thing. But okay. But here's the key thing. This is the most Walt Disney's biography is the most popular book I teach because the kids love going to Disney World. And the parents say, if you can learn to read, I'll take you to Disney World. So turn it into a make-a-wish thing, huh? Right. So so they go into Marceline, they go into Magic Kingdom. It's it's Main Street USA. That's based on Marceline, Missouri, where Walt was between five and ten. And that's 300, that's 3,600 words, that section. And they want to know what's the Disney magic? And I say it's two universal themes. And the kids go, What is it? I said, you have to find out. Okay, and that generally takes about two years. Casey did that in three months. And then I got her mom on the phone. I said, This let's have some fun with this. I said, Casey, what did you think of Walt Disney's biography? I hate it. And I said, Okay, we're done. And she found a very interesting way of destroying it. Here's why I'm spending all of this time on this. I said, Casey, the most motivated kid I ever worked with, when you moved to something that you hated, what happened to your motivation? She said it dropped by about 50%. A normal kid is down 75 to 80%. Wall. So I want you to think. Remember back in high school when you did book after book after book?

SPEAKER_01:

Like flowers for Algernon? Yeah. Yeah. Shakespeare. Love Shakespeare, but oh, some of it can be dry to get through.

SPEAKER_02:

These kids want us, I I'm on a book with them for six months to several years until they can read it. Now remember, I give this book on on Disney to 10-year-olds. This is for 17. It takes them to read this until they 12. They can read this at 12, they're way ahead of the game. So so you're down 75-80%. Next, you can't ask a dyslectic until the intervention period is over. You can't ask them a general to a specific question. So I want you to think back when you were in high school. Do you remember how they would teach this big question and then eventually got to the details much later on? Okay. You can't do that with dyslectics. So you can't ask them a question like this. What effect did Martin Luther King's famous I Have a Dream speech have on the American Civil Rights Movement? It's like grabbing fog. There's nothing there. You have to ask a specific to a general question. What personally compelled Martin Luther King to want to give his famous speech? We start off at a very specific point. We look up in his bio, we find out that that answer gets us another question, which gets us an answer, which gets us another question. This here's a key point forces the brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output because the front part of our brain is two and a half times overactive. Here's the key question. You ask a dyslexic, in your speciality, do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed? Key question, but with little to no organization. They're going to say yes.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I have OCD, so yeah, to a degree, I understand that concept. Yeah, the constant bouncing around of thoughts from everywhere, constantly intrusive and harder to then focus. So yeah, I personally grasp that.

SPEAKER_02:

So we have to force the dyslexic brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output. So what's the system? We focus during the intervention period on their speciality, their area of extreme interest and ability. We teach them from the specific to the general, and we focus on word analysis followed by articulation. How does this work? How effective is this? Everybody said, give me an example. So I finally said, fine. And then I met Kimberly, December 27, 2006.

SPEAKER_01:

Because there's a pattern here so far. All females, uh, is there a gender aspect of any of this?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, Reed, her son Reed is a boy, but I will admit when we're talking about K through uh high school, that it Google used to give us way too much information, and I found out it was 90% of moms who deal with it. Dad generally dealt with it in college when it's a failure to launch, and their kids are going to be at home with them when they're 30. They don't want that. So, but but back to Reed, he was reading and writing. I didn't realize Kimberly just spent 700 bucks to have the state of Ohio test her kids. So he was reading and writing at the beginning of third grade level, a year and a half behind. Now, if he were in public school for the rest of the school year, he would have exposed to increase by two to two and a half points. Didn't happen. He increased by 20 points. Kimberly took his reading level from the 11th percentile to the 65th, his writing from the fourth percentile to the 64th. Why is this important? Because last summer, Reed's friends came to him and said, Reed, we want you in public school to be with us socially. If that was January, he would have been in special ed away from his friends on Happy Kid. Now he's in sixth grade, mainstream, normal classes, everything, getting A's and B's. Because his mother did what every parent dreams of and solved this herself without the need of a$75,000 school that couldn't solve it in that amount of time. And people think, well, she must have been working him night and day. No, she spent less than half the time the school would have taught him in English. And she taught him seven times faster. That's how effective this is. And yes, he's in normal classes, taking he's not in his specialty anymore, even though he wants to be, but he's he's and he's doing just fine. And yes, he did complain, but his teachers like any well-raised kid, his parents and his teachers became a rock. And he's splashing up against a rock that isn't moving, so that he gave up and said, Okay, I'll do it. But you know, we did run into a little bit of that.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, that's a whole other show. Why parents have got to be parents? You can't let the kill kid run the roost and just do whatever he or she wants. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

But Kimberly, when he was two and three, spent the time with him in the terrible twos, put up boundaries. And yes, kids will try to test the boundaries, but as I said, a well-raised kid where the parents really put the time in, they run up against the rock and it's not moving, so he kind of, you know, he's he's not going to push it. Okay, so that that is essentially what dyslexia is, and it's not that hard to fix.

SPEAKER_01:

If people will put in the work, if again.

SPEAKER_02:

If you follow how the brain is actually notice what I did. Uh again, here's I'm gonna go back to the brain image for those that you are watching. The back part of the brain has essentially nothing going on. Yeah, the front part is massively overactive. Yeah, so here's what I try to do.

SPEAKER_01:

You've gotta care enough to say, I know you're capable of more.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. So what I tell parents is just so they can understand what's going on, I would say, do you remember back in you know middle high school, college, whatever, that if you're if you're not neurodiverse, if you're you know the normal brain, if you did two things, if you planned properly, and then you worked really hard, I'm not saying every class, but in general, you did well to really well if you did those two things. And if you didn't, if you didn't plan, if you didn't work hard, then you did bad. Okay, it's that simple. The schools are not trying to make a problem for neurodiverse kids. It's just that 80 plus percent of their students this works for if they plan and work hard. Now, with dyslectics, that same part that's used kindergarten through college, that part of the brain, we got nothing going on back there, essentially. But the front part, like how how powerful this is. Remember what I said in law school. I walked in second day of class and contracts, and I was the professor's equal for 15 minutes. He'd never seen that before in his 30 plus years. That is the power of dyslexia. When I had to get my original program approved, it was supposed to take years. I did it in less than two weeks.

SPEAKER_01:

Again, the benefit of being dyslexic. Yeah, you took a weakness and turned it into a strength in a way. Well, no, I just I just went to grad school where it was incredibly focused.

SPEAKER_02:

Remember what I said about the speciality, incredibly narrowly focused. Everything else, they want to make me well-rounded. I don't want to be well-rounded, I want to specialize.

SPEAKER_01:

And most people do. We all have a preference, a interest. My interest, even though I'm an author today, I I joke in my books. I hope my writing style doesn't throw you too much and demonstrates my love of math in school, right? I love math. I was gonna be an accountant, but that didn't happen. I went into computers, love that. But yeah, I we all have areas we would rather go, and yeah, a lot of that other stuff we want to put push aside. That's kind of part of a human nature thing, dyslexic or not.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, yeah, but here's what it comes down to. Uh, to just to really make to really just show you what's going on. I want you to imagine what sport are you horrible in? For me, it's basketball. What sport are you just you're the worst?

SPEAKER_01:

I'm not too good at basketball either, right? I played hockey. So hockey is my thing, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

But what but what sport are you horrible at?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, uh I I might even say soccer just because I'm bored the tears at it. Okay, so let's say so.

SPEAKER_02:

Here's the thing with soccer. If we were to give you the best soccer equipment money could buy, okay, get you the best soccer coach, and made your opponents who's really good at soccer, give them used Walmart equipment, you're still gonna lose all the time. Okay, because your body was not designed for soccer. That's what it's like to be accommodated. Oh, we'll give you all the best of all this stuff, and it doesn't work. It's kind of like if I were to go up against you in in hockey, I'll give you a little hint. I suck at hockey. All right, I could barely stand up on skates, right? Yeah, yeah, I could go and get the best skates in the world, the best hockey equipment, and get you Walmart equipment that was used in 30 years old and beat the heck, and you would still just annihilate me on the hockey rink, okay? Because your body was designed for hockey. Okay, it's what you're good at, and you practice. That's the thing. You can accommodate these kids all day long, but you're accommodating the back part of the brain that is essentially nothing going on there. That's why we have to focus on through the intervention period until we get them to grade level. Now, I've had parents ask me, what happens after you know you get them to grade level, you know, let's say they're older. I said, okay, the next thing I'm gonna show you how to do is how to take these dyslexic kids and to write body paragraphs, because if they can do multiple body paragraphs, the teachers can do the thesis and conclusion. And if you're doing a paper, it's just a whole bunch of body paragraphs. All right. And I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna tell you now the secret of how to get these dyslected kids to write structurally better informational paragraphs than AP English seniors, than advanced placement English kids. All right. So what we do is we sh first of all, we show them how to do how to find a quote based on a universal theme. Without that, they can't do the basic body paragraphs. Now with two quote, now we show them how to do two quotes. One at the beginning of the material, one near the end. And then from those two quotes, we show them how to construct a topic sentence. Now I'm gonna ask you something that almost nobody outside of a PhD knows about. Do you have any idea how to use a warrant in a body paragraph? No. That's because people don't learn that until a doctoral degree.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, when I hear warrant, I think somebody's being arrested. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02:

So people ask me, what's a warrant? And what it's designed to do is to connect your topic sentence with your data, which in this case is two quotes. And it's done so in an analytical conversational way. So all those paragraphs you write that are just a data dump, this makes it so much more. And then the last thing we do is we show you some ideas on how to what the New York State Regions Exam for High School English and the Craft of Research for Grad students, we use that to finish it off. But the application of taking two quotes from that creating a topic sentence and then connecting those with a warrant, you do that, and your your their paragraphs are not as flowerly or as well written as an AP English kid, never will be, but the structure and the anal the analytics are higher because they're using a warrant, which is for PhD kids. All right, and just that, oh, this gets to be so much fun. I'll typically teach like a dyslectic boy uh or girl in middle school, and then they have an older brother or sister who's fighting to be Velavictorian in high school. They're AP kids, AP English kids, and then they're like, my dyslectic sibling, my younger brother or sister is writing a informational paragraph better than I can. But I'm the academic superstar, I'm the AP English. It drives them crazy. And then they ask, can you show me how to do it? And I said, Some of you, most of you, not really, because that part of your brain has uh a fifth of what's going on, and it just shocks them and is beautiful.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, well, as we said before we hit record, I generally keep the shows around 30 minutes and we're a little over. I the more we get into weeds, the more people may trail off. I'd rather leave them wanting more. And if they want more, where do they find you? Do you have a Website.

SPEAKER_02:

Yes, the easiest thing to do is just go to dyslexiaclasses.com. That's plural with an S. DyslexiaClasses.com. There's going to be a button there that says download free guide. Just click on it, answer a few questions, get your free documents, the three reasons your child's having trouble in school due to dyslexia. Then the most important thing, you have to sign up to speak with me directly for half an hour so I can help find your kids' speciality and get them their book and their audio book so you know what to use to help teach them. It's a half an hour, there's no cost, but if you don't do that, this isn't going to be anywhere near as effective because it's really hard to find that speciality.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you. I normally I try to repeat a name three, five, seven times, right? Repetition gets it to sync in, but of course, in post. For those viewing behind the scenes video, the name will be written across the bottom. Thank you, Russell Van Brockland, for coming on. I appreciate your time. I'm I'm glad we were able to connect.

SPEAKER_02:

Thanks. Thanks for contacting and thanks for letting me on.

SPEAKER_01:

Take care, everyone. God bless. Love you all. Like and subscribe to Christitutionalist Politics Podcast and share episodes. We need your help. Thank you for having tuned in to another Christitutionalist podcast show. I really appreciate that you stop by. Again, please like, share, subscribe. We need you to help spread the Christitutionalist movement. Thank you again. Take care. God bless. Love you all.

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Joseph M Lenard

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