Navigating Dyslexia: Insights for Parents with Russel VanBrocklin

In this episode of ABC's of Parenting Adult Children, host James Moffitt speaks with Russell VanBrocklin, an expert in helping parents navigate the challenges of raising dyslexic children. Russell shares his personal journey with dyslexia and how it shaped his approach to education. He discusses the importance of focusing on a child's specialty, the craft of research, and innovative strategies to foster confidence and engagement in dyslexic learners. The conversation emphasizes the need for a tailored approach to education that prioritizes individual strengths and interests, ultimately leading to success in both academic and professional settings.

Keywords

dyslexia, parenting, education, adult children, learning strategies, confidence, specialization, structured literacy, craft of research, engagement

Takeaways

Russell's personal experience with dyslexia informs his approach to education.

Dyslexic students often excel when focusing on their areas of interest.

The craft of research is crucial for academic success.

Engagement in a child's specialty can lead to significant improvements in learning.

Structured literacy methods may not be as effective as tailored approaches.

Parents can play a vital role in their child's educational journey.

Dyslexic students need to be taught from specific to general concepts.

Confidence in dyslexic children can be fostered through targeted strategies.

The importance of passion in learning cannot be overstated.

Older dyslexic students often learn faster than younger ones. 

https://dyslexiaclasses.com/ABCsofParenting

Richard Jones. I am an RN with over 34 years of Nursing Experience, much of that experience working with young adults in the corrections system. 

Hello, James here !

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

I asked them, in your specialty, do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed, but with little to no organization? And they answer yes, or if they say no, yes at some point in the past. So then I asked them, that's ADD, ADHD, or mild dyslexia. And then, and this is especially important for parents who don't want to spend$5,000 on a neural psych evaluation. So next thing I ask, fingers, keyboard, fingers, keyboard. The idea is in your head. You take your fingers, you put it on the keyboard. Does the idea fly out of your head, leaving you with an empty brain? And for dislike for severe dyslexia, they answer yes. So then I tell them, based on those two questions, what we're going to do is we're going to force your brain to organize itself, and we're going to use writing as a measurable output. So again, we're going to force the brain to organize itself using writing as a measurable output. Is that how you'd like to overcome your concerns? And they say yes. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Yes, sir. Russell's a man whose wisdom is rooted in both life experience and a deep commitment to truth, liberty, and family. Hey Russell, do me a favor and introduce yourself to the listening audience.

SPEAKER_02 1:46

My name's Russell Van Brockland. I'm also known as the dyslexic professor. And when I'm working with parents, especially in this age group, it's normally for two reasons. Parents come to me because their child's in college close to failing out or has failed out, or they tend to have issues with getting employment failure to launch after graduation. And I tend to help parents with both those things.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

Awesome.

SPEAKER_02 2:10

Well, tell me, uh tell us how you got into this. Well, I kind of had my own college problems and failure to launch as well. It uh started when I in the late 90s when I did the New York State Assembly internship program. Because of my severe dyslexia, I had a first-grade reading and writing issue, so they put me in the pro the majority leaders program and counsel's office with three administrative assistants. At the end of it, I gave my research as an oral presentation instead of a written report, which was a typical accommodation for me at the time. And they gave me a recommendation of 3.67 for a GPA, A minus for 15 credits. Well, SUNY Center at Buffalo said, we don't like those accommodations. So here's your 15 credits of F. Only time in the history of the program. And I said, enough dyslectics aren't going to be going through this discrimination anymore. And then I decided to solve it. Okay. Awesome. Well, the next step was I decided to audit law school classes after graduation. So I went to law school with a first grade reading and writing ability. And people thought I was crazy. My second day in contracts, Professor Warner, the dyslexic professor I went to see, he asked me a question, and what they do in law school is they use the Socratic method. And they keep asking you questions, even if you don't know the answer, to embarrass you. The idea is to train you as quickly as possible to argue any point of law at any time at any of any side. Well, I didn't blink like all my classmates. I responded exactly everything just slowed down. It was the first time in my life this happened. And I could see where he was going three, four, five, six steps ahead. He knew what I couldn't beat him, he couldn't beat me. At the end of 15 minutes of us going back and forth like crazy, he said, Russell, you couldn't be any more correct. In the interest of time, I have to move on to the next case. All my classmates looked at me with kind of all intrepidation. The ones that continued to graduation told me they couldn't do half of what I did that first class and contracts, even after they graduated. Then I went on to property where they were giving us quizzes. You're supposed to read the question for about three to five minutes and then answer it. And I didn't wait three to five seconds. I just answered it instantaneously. I was the first one done with the highest score. I got perfect scores like almost every time. That solved the reading. Took me another couple of years to solve the writing. And then I decided I want to take what I've learned and solve everything. And I went to the New York State Senate. And after a lot of going back and forth, they decided to fund my research. And this is important for parents whose kids are struggling in college. Did is we ended up going to a bunch of highly dyslectic, highly intelligent, highly motivated high school juniors and seniors with excellent family support, you know, the ideal the ideal kids. And they were writing at the middle school grade level, seventh, eighth grade. And I gave them the writing test of entering graduate school students. That's the graduate records exam analytical writing assessment. How do you think they did on that? Probably pretty well. Well, they're they have seventh, eighth grade writing skills. I gave them a test for entering graduate students and they're in high school. Oh, okay. How do you think they did? Maybe not so well. I don't know. I don't know. Zero percentile. Most of them. A few scored in the sixth because of analytical skills. Spelling and grammar was horrendous. The senior professor, her name was Dr. Lechka, she was a SUNY distinguished professor in psychology. He said these kids will not make it through the first semester of college. The writing is just absolutely horrendous. So then we took them through one class period a day for the school year. Susan Ford was their best special ed teacher. And at the end of that, all the students scored in the 30th to 70th percentile of entering graduate school students. Their spelling and grammar was clean at the graduate level. Susan spent almost no time on spelling and grammar autocorrected. They all went to college, they all graduated, no accommodations, and they all got they're all employed immediately on graduation. Cost to the state less than$900 a student.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

So that was let me tell you a story. So my wife is a special ed teacher, and she's got her bachelor's degree in psychology, and she's got her master's degree in teaching or whatever it is, special education, I guess. And uh I remember when she was going to she was taking a lot of online courses, and so she's taking graduate courses. And uh she was part of a group of people. They had a they had a essay or they had some kind of project they they were they were all supposed to work on. And I remember her telling me that that it was scary that these people that already had their bachelor's degrees, they couldn't string a sentence together. They couldn't write hardly at all. And so she wound up doing the group essay herself. She w wound up just doing it herself because because they couldn't they couldn't they couldn't put a simple sentence together. And and I've seen that, you know. I graduated high school in 1980, and uh I had a very I had a uh when I was in what third, fourth grade, fifth grade maybe, I had an excellent reading teacher. And uh so I would like to think that my reading and uh reading comprehension skill levels way up there. And uh I write well as well. I do, I like to write, and uh I've run across a lot of people that they talk fine, they have a grasp on the English language, but when it comes to writing a simple sentence or putting a uh a story together or something like that, they don't have a clue. They don't know how to do it. And so that's that's just indicative of the lack of education that we have here in America, especially here in South Carolina. I can speak to that.

SPEAKER_02 8:06

Well, what I just told you that, of course, like for your wife to learn that process took less than four hours. All right, and at the end, I'm not talking about SATs where they can't write. I'm talking about the GRE. And I can tell you that, you know, not being able to string a sentence together, this was graded by one of the top living psychologists in New York State very harshly. And all those grammar concerns and couldn't write the basics of writing, all that was clean at the entry entering graduate school level. Fixed the whole seven, eight grade level increases in one year. And I'm about to show you things that's gonna completely change how your wife views dyslexia. First thing is in my field, if you're going to claim you're gonna have something radically new that is completely different than an Orton Gillingham multi-century approach, you have to be very cautious. Where is this coming from? My research is coming from this book. Let me see if I can get it in there. Okay. It's overcoming dyslexia from Yale. Are you familiar with it? No, uh-uh. Okay. This is the book in my field. And here's dyslexia. See if I can Okay. That's it. Now, I'm not gonna use non-impaired because I find that kind of insulting. I'm gonna call that the gen ed brain. Look at the back part of the dyslexic brain. Do you see how there's almost no neuroactivity? Right? Okay. Now look at the gen ed brain. Do you see how it's going crazy? Okay. Now look at the front end of the dyslexic brain. See how it's about two and a half times overactive? Okay. That is what my research is based on. This book came out in 03. So what I Yale says is this part of the book deals with two things. It deals with articulation followed by word analysis. So that first program I said we focused on articulation, very little word analysis. But when I presented this in New York City, I thought I was done. I said we solved dyslexia for this, the ideal students. The college professors came to me and said, Some of your students scored above average on the GRE writing assessment. We don't care. We want something called the craft of research. Are you familiar with that at all? No, I'm not. Okay. Came out in 1995 at the University of Chicago. It was based on uh it was teaching their grad students who didn't know how to write advanced research papers. And it came out with a concept called context, get everybody on the same page, problem, state the problem, and then come up with a solution where the reader learns something substantive. If you can't come up with something substantive, if there's not something at least moderately original, this is what they want as well. Even if they're not familiar with the book, they look over, they said, Yeah, that's what I want. It's like, okay, so the GRE is not enough. I got to show them how to deal, how to deal with this. And the university professors exceedingly want this. And just to show you how important this was, two examples. One in university, one in employment. One of my uh one of my she specifically wanted to go to a specific university to work with a specific professor. Not as a graduate student, but as an undergrad, which is kind of weird, but I said, okay, that that makes we can do that. She walks into her class, into his class the first day. And after class, she says, we have this major research paper. I do I've learned the craft of research not the best. I'm a lot more efficient now. And she said, Can you help me go through this so I can apply the craft of research to your paper? He calls me up and says, Is a high college freshman doing with the craft of research? I have a hard time getting my PhD students doing this. I said, Well, we started working on this when she was in seventh grade. Now he's completely shocked. I said, We're a lot more efficient now. I said, Here's her issues with it. She's good at this, not good at this. He started getting papers from her where she actually, where he actually started learning things from her. He's like, I'm learning some minor points from a college freshman. So he wanted to work with her because of her reading and writing skills, and not want to work with her because of it, which he said is very rare for an undergrad student. Second point on that fact, I had a former client call me last year after he graduated from high from he got a job, and the manager was huge into artificial intelligence. He said, I overhired. What I'm looking for is ideas from you that we can implement. So he calls me up kind of in a panic. I said, You've been trained in the craft of research. I don't care if you don't know much about AI. Talk to it, work with it, do the context, problem solution. He does the context, comes back after he did the problem. I hate this. I said, Well, welcome to the adult world. He finishes up with the solution and he turns it into a five-paragraph essay. The boss is literally going over one after the other. I can't use this, I can't use this, I can't use this. Comes to his, that's a good idea. We can use that. Guess who got to keep his job?

SPEAKER_01 13:13

He did.

SPEAKER_02 13:14

Yeah. So what is the craft of research and how to connect it to this? So again, I'm just going to keep coming back to the science. So that overactive front part of the brain, what I did is that's articulation and word analysis. I switched it over to word analysis followed by articulation. And then when it comes time to the context, that is your basic uh five questions. So your basic who, what, when, where, how, why. I'm sorry, six. Who, what, when, where, how, why. I purposely put why at the end, because normally that's the most complicated one. When we're dealing in the academic setting, I make sure that each time we're in a paragraph for a paper, and your your wife's a special ed teacher, so she she can verify this. If you have a quote per paragraph, at least one sentence, and then you discuss that quote. Can you see how that makes a paper what's a lot of students call it a non-BS paper? It's not where you just write anything that you think sounds good, but each paragraph having a quote makes it a real paper.

SPEAKER_01 14:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 14:23

Okay. When they get out of college, I drop the quote and I say, focus on what you're trying to get everybody on the same page. Go and research this and find quotes or studies that back up whatever you're trying to work on. Really do your research and put that all into find out what the major points are and then answer the who, what, when, were, how, why. And you that might go on for pages. That's the context it's giving everybody on the same page. Then what we do to try to come up with solutions, there's two levels. The obvious solution that they expect you to come up with, you know, for everyday business problems, or if you're answering an email, and what we do is we I have them work with the artificial intelligence to reduce that to a single medium to long sentence. Then we we reduce that to a problem statement that's a short to medium-length sentence, and then we reduce that to a universal theme. And then what I have them do for obvious questions that need to be answered is I have them take the context sentence and look through the universal theme as a lens, and then we come up with some rather obvious answers that are very specific. This is these are solutions you would expect a well-read student to come up with in the academia, or if you're out in the workforce, you know, you have a problem, you come up with a context, you go through that process, and you look at the universal theme and you run it through that as a lens. And the solutions that come out are obvious ones that you can apply immediately. And once you get used to using artificial intelligence, you can do these in emails in less than a minute or two. And they're concrete solutions. If you're looking for something innovative, that takes a bit longer to explain, but typically when they're starting out their careers, they just want basic, well-thought-out solutions. And that that takes care of it. And when parents approach me, they say, well, this sounds okay, that kind of makes sense, but how do I get my child to buy in? So have you ever found that when you're dealing with um a kid 18 through their 20s, when there's a problem, getting them to actually buy into a solution tends to be a bit of a problem? Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 16:47

How do you normally deal with that? Well, that's a good question. You obviously you have to communicate and you have to try to find out where the resistance is coming from. Sometimes, you know, fear is fear of the unknown, you know, or where they don't feel adequate enough to come to a solution.

SPEAKER_02 17:06

When you're dealing with dyslectic students, it's uh it's a bit more complicated. What that model that I was telling you about, um it's going from word analysis followed by articulation, that's step three of the model. The first thing that you have to realize, especially when you're dealing with academic issues in college, is for an intervention period to help them learn how to do context and at least problem, is you need to focus on their speciality, their area of extreme interest and ability. So this also works for gen ed kids, but it's it's absolutely critical for dyslexic. So let's just run through this with a child that you know well. And let's just call him John Doe or her Jane Doe to protect their privacy. Can you think of a specific case where the child was having a lot of trouble in college? No, not really. You're you're you're kind of going over my head here. Okay. All right. So um can you imagine any child that your wife worked with worked with that you knew who was having trouble in school? No, I'm sorry.

unknown 18:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 18:08

All right, so uh just to give you an example of what we do here is you go to your child and you say, It's a Saturday morning. You can do whatever you want. What is it? That's their specialty, that's their area of extreme interest and ability. By far the most popular one when I do this is this guy. This is Disney's biography. And reason being is have have you ever been to Disney World? Yes. Do you do you find it's uh they say it's the most magical place in the world. Do you find that you under you see that at all?

SPEAKER_01 18:43

Or we we had a child that um uh uh had cancer, and uh Make a Wish Foundation uh sent her to sent the whole family to Disney World down in Orlando, Florida. And uh to me, of course, our the our our situation was really unique. And um uh so as a parent of a child with cancer, I was not I wasn't that impressed with Disney World, honestly. But but I know children probably don't have the same bias as I have, and and were they they look at that environment through a different set of eyes, right? And uh it I can see where to them, especially my daughter Jessica, where that it was magical and it was, you know, huge blessing for her to experience that. I'm sorry to hear about it about uh what happened to her. Yeah, to me as an adult, uh I mean that that whole theme park is designed for families, right? And it's it's designed to separate you from your money, you know.

SPEAKER_02 22:47

They're very good at that, but from what allowed that to happen. Okay, again, I'm coming back to this massive biography. There are two universal themes that deal with that. One is obvious and about 10% of the value. The second one is very hard to find. I've never had a parent finding that book. But I've had, for this one example, that 12-year-old daughter who went and said, Mom, dad, here it is. And they said I couldn't believe they missed it. And then I asked, Did I do my job for reading? Your child found something you couldn't, and she's 12. Yeah, she's been she was working on it for about two years. So what I'm saying with that is if you focus on their speciality, because she really loved Disney World, she wanted to understand the magic. What was and going through his biography, she figured out what it was. And the work I had her do, she said, if I had to do anything else outside of this, she wouldn't have done it. So another example of why the speciality is so important. Did you ever watch the original Fast and Furious? Probably. Okay. Do you remember the scene when Paul Walker's there he got a car that looked like it came from the junkyard, they're remodeling it, and he's dealing with this computer technical genius, and he asked them, he asked, Well, how are you not at MIT? And the the the smart kid said, Well, I got that ADD you know, kind of like dyslexia thing. He said, I can do this, but I can't do other things. So, especially if your child is having trouble in college, the huge solution to break that down is number one, have them take a semester or two where they're just focusing on their speciality. Things they want to take. That's a big help. Next thing, the way that they're learning, this is what I learned from a senior dyslectic professors. Most of them, I did, I I asked a lot of them, did a survey, and I found a lot of them were STEM science, technology, engineering, math. And they were taking like philosophy classes, art history. I said, good for you. And they said, No, we didn't like those classes. I didn't like those classes. I said, well, why did you take them? You didn't have to. Because they taught not from the general to the specific, but from the specific to the general. And from that, I came up with two questions that gets the dyslectic student on board. I asked them, in your specialty, do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed, but with little to no organization? And they answer yes, or if they say no, yes at some point in the past. So then I asked them, that's ADD, ADHD, or mild dyslexia. And then, and this is especially important for parents who don't want to spend$5,000 on a neuropsych evaluation. So next thing I ask, fingers, keyboard, fingers, keyboard. The idea is in your head. You take your fingers, you put it on the keyboard. Does the idea fly out of your head, leaving you with an empty brain? And for dislike for severe dyslexia, they answer yes. So then I tell them, based on those two questions, what we're going to do is we're going to force your brain to organize itself, and we're going to use writing as a measurable output. So again, we're going to force the brain to organize itself using writing as a measurable output. Is that how you'd like to overcome your concerns? And they say yes. And I have them select an audio book, and then we get a printed book. And then just for example, this is my biggest one that people are interested in. And parents will say, But my child won't do the work. We're in their speciality. And here's just to show you how motivated these kids can get. This is Casey's book. Oh, 900 pages won the Pulitzer. Took her six months to learn every word in that book. Every definite You could ask her page 362. Here's the word, what's the dictionary definition? She would tell you. It took her six months. I never saw it before, I'll never see it again that fast. How old do you think Casey was? Twelve. Ten. Ten. Wow. Yeah. I worked with her 15 minutes a week. She was in her room. Two, three, four hours a night, six, seven nights a week, all day during the summer. Going through a simple process that I gave her because she wanted to do reading first. I do writing first. I tell my students, if you can write it, you can read it. And she knew every word. So she knew every word of the book. She got a call from the school when her mother got a call in the fall of the school when she, you know, we were nearing the end of that. She was in a silent reading class. Her classmates came over, picked up her book, asked what it was, and they couldn't get past the first paragraph. She told them what every word they asked questionable. What's the definition of this? She told them. Teacher calls her mom. I thought your daughter had a severe reading problem. She's the best reader in the class by grade levels. What's going on? She asked me, I said, What do you think she's been doing in her room all night? Night in, night out. And she was we worked with her for another couple of years and she was ready for college at the end of eighth grade. So when people say they can't they can't this can't be done, it absolutely can be done. If a 10-year-old and 10-year-old or 11-year-old can do it, your kids in college can do it as well. I know some adults that can't do that. Yeah, I've run into quite a few. I have run into adults who have master's degrees. As I said, I love using this as an example. What's the second, what's the second and most important universal theme for Disney Magic? And none of the parents could ever have done it. I had doctors, lawyers. I mean, they're you they're listening to the audiobook as they're going to work and back. I have their kids pointed out. Pretty much answers the question. I said, reading words is one thing. Comprehending what you're they're saying in an involved book is quite another. And your middle school child just outdid you. Did I do my job? And they they a lot of times the parents just laugh and say, I can't believe my kid out outdid me. I said, Well, wait until she's in grad school. Then you'll see really what it's like for her to outdo her. That original program I told you about, uh, I had to get it approved by Professor James Collins at SUNY Center of Buffalo. He had a million and a half dollar grant from the federal government, wrote a book called Strategies for Struggling Writers. Guess how long it took me to get the approval since I first approached him?

SPEAKER_01 29:19

I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 29:20

Good weeks. A little under. Wow. I was told it was going to take years. Graduate school dyslexics excel. Because we're in our specialty, in our area of extreme interest and ability, and all they care about is the generation of ideas. All right. That's all they care about. It's the currency of the realm. And we excel at that. And that's the first time when we can really, really specialize. That's what it comes down to. And when you're when the parents ask, well, how can we deal with this? Because going to the top dyslectic college in America, it's called Landmark College. It's up in Vermont. And they are a fantastic college. You send your child there, they do solve the problems. It's also one of the most expensive private schools in the United States. It's house money. And what I tell parents is they can teach their parents teach their kids at home. And that's what we show them how to do. We start off with context, problem solution. And here's the difference thing with the approach that I'm working with. The best approach traditionally is called Orton Gillingham, multi-sensory. The older the child is, the longer it takes. So once you haven't fixed dyslexia by fourth grade or fifth grade, it's you're in a private dyslectic school for four to five years, and they generally run around$60,000,$80,000 a year. Wow. Yeah. That's and the longer you wait, the longer it takes. With my approach, the older the child is, the quicker they learn. I go to where they need to end up. I don't start off at the beginning. I show I bring them immediately to where they need to be. So the older the kids will go through the process so much faster. So if you're in college, I've done this numerous times. If you're looking to be enter a community college, it's what I like to call head and hands. These are not our grandfather's manufacturing jobs. You really do need an associate's degree to work to work with the machines who do the manufacturing, or you're an electrician, a plumber going into nursing. You do auto mechanics, you need to be able to work with your head and your hands. So we go through context and problem, and that'll get you through a community college. If you're going into a four-year school, we have to do context, problem, and solution so you can come up with something original. Here's the problem with a big part of failure to launch nowadays. And it really hit just this year. I'm sure you're familiar with the artificial intelligence. They have the guy who's the CEO of Anthropics believes in five years, we're going to have a 10 to 20% unemployment rate with half the kids graduating from college not getting jobs. And I can tell you that a lot I've met so many kids who graduate this year, not dyslectic, top universities with degrees in engineering, you know, real solid degrees, they can't get a job. So if you can't show up and provide instantaneous solutions, which is what the craft of brain research shows you how to do, you're not going to do very well. If you can, you don't know anything about artificial intelligence. What I try to tell parents is every time they come out with a new AI model, they want you to relearn prompt engineering. Now they just came out with Agent from OpenAI, ChatGPT, and now that goes and does things for you. You have to manage it. Don't need to keep doing that. If you know the craft of research, all three parts, we show you how to prompt engineer your child's brain. So they, even if they know nothing about artificial intelligence, they can just sit down and immediately communicate with it, speak to it, type to it, and immediately start managing it, guiding it, and getting results within hours. I've seen that happen every time. The child's not happy about it, but they know how to do it. They can do that, they can provide, they can guide it, they're gonna be on one side, they're gonna be so much more valuable, so much more productive, and they'll be compensated at a much higher rate. They can't, they're gonna be on the other side, and that's looking more and more ugly.

SPEAKER_01 33:30

Right.

SPEAKER_02 33:30

So the the simple solution for parents, now that you understand this, is what we do is we have parents, we meet with them at a weekly webinar, and we just walk you through the process. It's not difficult to teach. I've had AP English young ladies who are as young as 14 learn this process and take elementary school kids and get them up to reading and writing skills, not as quickly as parents can, but usually about 30 to 40 percent more time. And just dissolve, it's not that complicated to do. And that's simply how you how you get past it.

SPEAKER_01 34:03

Okay. So we if we have parents that are listening that have a child that is dyslexic, and again, I have to say that you're the expert at this. I'm you know, I know I know, you know, everything I know about dyslexia, you can fit on the top of my finger here, right? So I don't I don't really I guess I don't really under I don't know how to ask an intelligent question here other than I know who my listening audience is, and let's say I have par a parent that would that has a child that's dyslexic. Where where do they start?

SPEAKER_02 34:34

I mean the first thing is um I'm assuming that they're in some sort of college. So what I would recommend is your child is probably spiraling to fail out of college or getting close to it. I would say the next semester, find out what the speciality is, set them up for 12 credits in that area, and then just give them a semester of them doing whatever they like. So for example, I had one kid who was really he's really interested in American history. He was majoring in something else, but he loved American history. He just knew he wanted to get a job afterwards, and American history wasn't going to do it. So I we gave him a semester, 12 credits of just doing that. And then I started, I showed the mom, it's I hate to say this, but it's like 90% moms most of the time. I should I showed her how to do context and problems, and she worked with him through Zoom and walked him through the process, and he picked that up within a semester to say, college kids pick this up so much faster than high school kids. And he had his semester, he got a chance to work with it. Next semester, he went back into his major, he was getting a 3.0. It's a complete turnaround. He ended up graduating, got a good job, and success story. So I've seen that happen so many times. Or another time, it's a failure to launch because they got their degree, maybe even a master's degree, but when they go out into the workforce, they now expect students to be able to be productive like the day you walk in, like the minute you walk in. Here's something, go do it. And they just couldn't keep up with the reading and writing issues. So I said, okay, we're going to go and take three to six months. We're going to go through the context problem issue. Sometimes we would spend another six months and go through the solution and show the parents how to do this. They work with they work with a child, they go back, they walk in. Here's the folder, give me an immediate response, and then they can. So it's simply taking the skills required in the craft of research and teaching it to your dyslectic child in a way that maximizes their understanding, focusing on their speciality, teaching from the specific to the general, and then word analysis followed by articulation, and then you're you're golden.

SPEAKER_01 36:53

That's how our brain is being works. How do you differentiate between structured literacy and generic methods? Structured literacy is another way of Orton Gillingham.

SPEAKER_02 37:04

It's a multi-sensory structur. That's where it comes from. So let me ask you a question. When you were when you were working, what was your for your career, what did you do predominantly? IT. Okay. Did things change that much since when you uh since when you were a kid until you retired from that? Absolutely. Okay. And the structured literacy, it hasn't changed much. Okay. So again, would I go back to Can you define what structured literacy is? Is that. Structured literacy is another way of saying Orton Gillingham multisensory. So what Dr. Orton found, remember, he passed away in 48, is that to overcome dyslexia you use multi-senses, seeing, touching, hearing. All right. Let me give you an example of how uh going past that. So let's say, could you imagine a student who's writing essentially randomly placed misspelled words. They can't even write a basic three-word sentence. Sure. I know adults who can't do that. Okay. Well, I'm going to show you how to fix that in about five minutes. All right. Orton Gillingham would take you about, it's two years to learn, structured literacy,$11,000 in a non-for-profit. It would take you weeks to learn this. So I'm going to show you how to do it in five minutes. So let's call, I'm just going to use an example I use all the time. Her name is Sarah. She's 10 years old. Her favorite thing in the world is swimming. Swimming swims, she's on the swim team, swims every chance you get. So what we have you do is we have you type out, not handwrite, type out on a keyboard, not an iPad, not an iPhone, a real keyboard, usually a laptop. Hero plus sign, what are we talking about? Replace hero with Sarah. Sarah plus sign, what are we talking about? We replace what are we talking about with swimming? Sarah plus sign swimming. See how we got there? Okay. Now here's my question. 90% of special ed teachers, when I do this at major conferences, get it wrong. Because they don't follow exactly what I'm saying. Here's my question. You have to follow it exactly. Does Sarah like or dislike swimming? She likes. Okay. Replace that word with a plus sign. What's the three-word sentence? Sarah likes swimming. Yes, but that's not what I asked. I asked, does Sarah like or disliked swimming? You automatically added the yes and you replaced it, and we got Sarah likes swimming. But Sarah would say like because that's what I asked her. She doesn't know how to add the S. Sarah likes swimming. Right. Yeah, you automatically add that because you you know how to do it. You're educated. She can't. Right. Okay. So structured literacy is literally a multi-sensory approach on how to use seeing, touching, hearing, all the senses and all these other ideas on how to get Sarah to add the letter S. And it's complicated as all heck. We need a much more simplified approach. And my one caveat is I expect the child to be able to speak proper English. If the parents speak proper English, generally you find the children do as well. So with that caveat, I'll ask Sarah, do you like or dislike swimming? Like, okay, replace the plus sign. Sarah likes swimming. But how do we get her to add the yes? I would ask Sarah to read it out loud. Then I would ask her, does it sound generally correct? She will say, no. And I'll say, fix it. So she fixes it. Sarah likes swimming. That's one part. The second part is I want you to imagine we do that, you know, with 10 likes and 10 dislikes. Then we go on to reason, and we start off with reason one. Sarah likes swimming because it's fun. But she's starting to probably make a lot of spelling mistakes or grammar mistakes. So what we do is we tell the child before you put down the period, you can ask any question. Once you drop the period, if you make a mistake, you gotta retype the entire sentence. That's a spelling mistake or a major, and I mean major grammatical mistake. Or before the period, you can just ask, did I spell swimming correctly? And we'll tell you, and you then you just have to retype that word. What do the kids do? They drop the period. So then they say, Oh, I gotta rewrite the entire sentence. I say one of two things. You made a silly mistake or a silly error. One of those two. They're the least offensive. So as she's going through this, she's like, I'm not gonna make that mistake, like misspelling swimming. Seven times down, she's still misspelling the word. I'm not gonna make that mistake. And she hyper concentrates more and more to where it's the concentration you'd see like chess masters at the World Championship. And she's hyper concentrating, and that's where the magic happens. So sometime between number three or number 12, she finally gets it right, and you can move on. And you're gonna find her keep making that mistake, hyper concentrating to avoid to, because she has to retype the whole thing. She keeps dropping the period until it eventually corrects itself. And as you do that through reason one, we do that 20 times, reason one and reason two 20 times, reason one, reason two, and reason three twenty times. By the time you get done with 86 sentences correctly, we have now taken that child from writing at the kindergarten level to end of second grade, beginning third grade.

SPEAKER_01 42:20

I really wish I wish my wife was on this on this interview because she probably would understand a lot of what you're saying. Well, do you see how simple what I just told you was?

SPEAKER_02 42:30

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Now, for your wife as a special ed teacher, the way that she was trained, yeah, she can take a kid from kindergarten or beginning first grade to the end of second, beginning third grade. Of course she can. It's going to take a lot longer using the other methods. So, structured literacy, this is the exact opposite. Because what I'm doing is, again, I am focusing on the front part of the brain, and I'm not trying to focus on what's going on in the back. That's really oversimplifying neuroactivity. But there we just brought it, we just had a multiple grade level improvement. And for a young kid, that might take a couple of weeks. I had I had some students take two months to go through that. Because, you know, they're seven. All right. But if I have a kid in college age who can't do that, they'll go through that drastically faster. I had one kid who had just horrendous writing. He was through that in three days. The older you are, the quicker you go through it. So it's that we just continue with that type of process through the solution. It's all very for me to teach your wife how to take a kid from I can't write a basic sentence all the way through, let's say, eighth grade level writing, I can do that within six hours. It's that simple. Not weeks, not months, a day. Parents take a little longer, and that's why we have a weekly webinar for them. Parents can do this. You can do this. This is not that complicated. And you try it, things aren't working out. We meet every, you know, we meet every week and you ask me what's going on. Okay, here's the problem you're having, here's how you here's how you fix it. And then you just keep going. And it's it's again, it's it's not that hard to do. If you know what you're doing, it's not that hard to do. As I said, I just went through it really fast. If you went back and replayed that a couple of times, ask a few questions, you could start doing it as well. It's it's really I've had 14-year-old AP English girls do this very successfully.

SPEAKER_01 44:28

So can you share the key steps to fostering confidence in dyslexic children?

SPEAKER_02 44:32

Well, first thing that you need to do is to two primary things. Get them within their specialty for at least a semester, okay, or if they've already graduated, find out what their specialty is and work with them to overcome their concerns in that area, and stop trying to teach these kids from the general to the specific. You have to teach them from the specific to the general. So, for example, if you were to ask very standard civil rights question in history, what effect did Martin Luther King's famous I Have a Dream Speech have the 1960 civil rights movement? The dyslectic has no idea what to do. I mean, where do we, because we're thinking so fast, so chaotically, there's nothing to latch on to. But if we ask the dyslectic student, what personally compelled Martin Luther King to want to give his famous I Have a Dream speech? Well, that's something we can bite into. It's a very specific point, and we can go through his biography, you know, appropriate journal articles, find out what that is, and then ask questions, what's the next question? What's the next question? It forces us to think in a linear, step-by-step manner. And all I do is I show students how to practice that so many times that it becomes part of them. We organize the chaos, and then the spelling, grammar, and all those issues tend to self-correct in a huge way. Awesome. So how do you view the role of passion in dyslexic learning? When if a dyslectic is outside their speciality, even with the most motivated kid in the world, you're you're you're down 50%. Most students, you're down 75, 80%. You're literally shooting yourself in the foot. So if they're not in their specialty, in their area of extreme interest and ability, it's pretty much a lost cause. Even with a most motivated kid, they're still going to underperform hugely. Find out a combination of what they're interested in. Maybe it's not the what they're most interested in, but what they're they at least have some interest in and help them find a college major in future employment based on that. So if for example, you were in IT, why did you go into it? Why not somet something else?

SPEAKER_01 46:47

Well, I actually uh tr transitioned from law enforcement to uh IT, and I did that because my wife and I got married in May of 1990, and she wasn't real thick. thrilled with me working at night and wondering if I was gonna come home in one piece in the morning, right? And so I I uh it's a long story, but I I got into IT uh and um I I just like fixing things. I like I like fixing solving problems so that so that people can do their jobs, right? You know, and we're talking about you were very good at it.

SPEAKER_02 47:21

Now what is something that is um you would expect for intellectual work that you're just horrible at? Me personally? Yes something that you're just absolutely just horrible at Well I suck at math. Does that count? Okay so imagine that your future employment you know let's go back to when you're married and you're you were told well congratulations you're gonna become a math professor if you can't do that you're unemployed.

SPEAKER_01 47:50

How do you think that would make you feel I I would have been like oh shit I guess I'm unemployed.

SPEAKER_02 47:56

That's dyslexia okay that it it's that's essentially what our system requires students to become well rounded educationally before they can specialize. So let let me ask this let's go back to your wife she went into special education now she was able to become well rounded she she learned what she was supposed to as an undergrad but if she was dyslectic she would have just wanted to become a special ed teacher. She wouldn't have wanted to do done all the other stuff and she somehow would have gotten through it all right but once she was in grad school do you think her professors cared at all if she could do a calculus problem they could care less. We are a society of specialists you were in law enforcement very specialized you were in IT very specialized. Nobody cared about your ability if you could read Shakespeare in IT they just don't care. Okay? So what we need to do with the dyslectic is it's like telling you you're gonna be a math professor and you're just like well I'm gonna be unemployed. That's exactly what it feels like to be a dyslectic. So how do we break this cycle that just hasn't stopped since the kid was in first grade what you have to do is focus on their speciality for a semester or if they're out of college find something they're really interested in maybe take some additional training courses in it. You can go to there's a there's a place called Udemy U D E M Y trains you in just about anything out there. Maybe take some of those classes at home. All right focus on their speciality learn from the specific to the general and let me show you how to do context through problem and they'll be fine it really comes down to being that simple.

SPEAKER_01 49:43

Hey let me share this website that you said you wanted me to share while we were talking it's uh getting there. There we go.

SPEAKER_02 49:48

Yeah we gave you a customized link to that so what happens is if parents have a concern kind of discusses what we discussed in the podcast today the three reasons your child's dyslexia education isn't working and how to fix it. And you just answer though fill out the form we set up a 15 minute conversation and all I do is ask those two questions to your dyslectic child and ask is this how they'd like to overcome their concerns. And the vast majority of the time it's yes and then it's simply a matter of arranging for me to invite the parents into the process and the key thing is to make things affordable we show the parents how to do this themselves. You're not spending$150 to$300 an hour for an Orton Gillingham certified tutor who by the way I'm not joking Upper Eastside family I saw this so many times they would start working with a child in when they're in sixth grade and then when they're in their master's program they're still working with them.

SPEAKER_01 50:49

Stuff hasn't changed a lot since the 1950s I got you so if I show that so if I show that link that you sent me an email in my show notes they can get to it.

SPEAKER_02 50:59

Yeah they just click on that and fill the form out and we're here and we're here to help you get right back to you you set up a convenient time and we go through we just show you how to do all this in 15 minutes.

SPEAKER_01 51:11

That's awesome. Well Russell I appreciate you being on the podcast episode today shared a lot of good information. Some of it went right over my head but hopefully the listening audience uh will pick up on a lot of that or at least contact you and go from there. So well thanks for having me. Yeah so that's gonna that's going to wrap up this episode of ABC's parenting adult children. I hope today's conversation gave you some encouragement and practical steps you can try in your own family. If you found this helpful would you do me a favor, hit that subscribe button share this episode with a friend who's also navigating the parenting journey and leave a quick review. It really helps others find this podcast. I'd also love to hear your stories how are you working through these challenges with your adult children send me an email at talkpac at proton.me that's talkpac at proton dot me or connect with me on social media links are in the show notes. Next week we're going to talk with Rick and Clancy Denton with the loud quiet empty nest podcast it's going to be a good one. Thanks for listening and remember parenting doesn't stop when they turn 18. It just changes shape. And thanks for the privilege of your time and Russell again thank you again for being here. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 52:23

Please tune in next week for another episode of our podcast on parenting adult children