Coach's Corner: When "They'll Catch Up" Never Happens (Pt 1) Episode 3

 This episode is packed with emotional stories, powerful parent insights, and several "I wish I had known this sooner" moments that will resonate with both homeschooling and public-school families.

Many parents are told, "Don't worry-they'll catch up."

But what happens when they don't?

In this episode of Raising Confident Readers, we dive into one of the biggest challenges families face: knowing when a child is simply developing at their own pace and when there may be a deeper issue affecting their ability to read and learn.

We share real stories from students in our program, including a 19-year-old recent graduate who made it all the way through school on an IEP without anyone identifying the underlying reason reading was so difficult. We also discuss the frustration many parents experience when grades, test scores, and classroom accommodations don't tell the whole story.

Topics we cover include:

• Why good grades don't always mean strong reading skills
• The danger of the "wait and see" approach
• How ocular motor challenges can impact reading and learning
• The difference between accommodations and addressing the root cause
• Why summer can be the perfect time to help struggling readers
• Real student success stories and breakthroughs
• The role of parent intuition and why it matters

If you've ever felt like something wasn't adding up with your child's reading, attention, confidence, or school performance, this episode is for you.

To learn more about Vision Reading Academy or schedule a free assessment, visit www.visionreadingacademy.com.

Because every child deserves the chance to become a confident reader.

Looking to learn more? Head to VisionReadingAcademy.com to learn more, sign up for a free assessment, or get your questions answered. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:55

Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Raising Confident Readers. This episode is a little different than our usual format. You won't hear our normal intro because this conversation actually started in the middle of one of our weekly coaches meetings. We were having such a meaningful discussion that I simply hit record and let the conversation unfold naturally. So while it may start a little differently, I think you'll find the conversation itself is worth it. We dive into some deep topics, share some emotional moments, and cover a lot of valuable information along the way. In fact, the discussion was so good that we decided to split it into two separate episodes to keep them short, engaging, and easy to listen to. I hope you enjoy it. If you find value in our content and want to follow along as we continue releasing new episodes, be sure to subscribe and share the podcast with someone who may benefit from what we're doing here. Now, let's jump into the conversation.

SPEAKER_03 1:51

So what one of the things that's currently happening right now, most schools have ended. One of the biggest pain points right now, or at least what I've been seeing on social media, I think several of you have seen it as well, is a lot of the parents now have seen the test scores. They see where their kiddos at, and now they're aware that my kid needs help. And maybe a lot of them want to address that over the summer so that they're better prepared and the kiddos better ready for starting in the fall.

SPEAKER_01 2:19

I want to add to that. I think that's a great idea. We also got to make sure that we cover the public school kids that are coming home from school and their grades or whatever, and they're getting these reports from the teachers saying, look, your kid can barely read, and you didn't even know because they're skimming through and the school's just putting them through.

SPEAKER_02 2:36

I love this idea. And just to solidify the fact that schools are just pushing through kiddos. I have a 19-year-old right now. He had graduation on Friday. I've had him for about two and a half months, and I couldn't do an informational passage with him. The first time I saw him, he could read through six lines of a speech phrase before his eyes fatigued out, and he stopped and was like rubbing his eyes and stuff. So we just did an informational passage with him, and he read at 26 words per minute. And he just graduated from high school. He was just pushed through the program. He was on an IEP. They read his tests to him, and he graduated. He's on a struggle bus now that is totally different because he's ready to join the workforce and can't, he's not going to be able to read the instructions for things. And it's not necessarily the public school's job to teach them how to read. It's just to get them graduated. A lot of parents don't know what the schoolwork is that they're doing in public school, and they may not even know how far behind they are until they get those test scores because their grades are good. The schools are showing, they make everything look like things are going well until they're not. And then they're like, crap, now what do I do?

SPEAKER_04 3:51

Christina, I love yours with talking about your 19-old 19-year-old student.

SPEAKER_03 3:56

I think that's a really great thing, especially because graduation did just happen for a lot of people. Or like today, I think our local high school's graduation is today. So that's going on all over the country, or it's already happened. And we already know some of the statistics of where American public school kids are. The beauty of homeschool is that oftentimes they're unless the state requires testing, some states still require that of their homeschoolers. But oftentimes the homeschoolers work at their own pace. They're not on grade level because they don't necessarily subscribe to what grade they're in. They just work it skilled and they work at their own pace. So it's a very different concept. But some of them don't even really start until around the age of eight. As far as really diving into map and reading and things like that, that's a different ball of wax. I think that's a whole different topic, Christine. When we talk about grades, aren't always a measure of their skills because they can get straight A's because they're able to regurgitate information or they test really well. But then when you actually go into their skills, they're not good readers. They can test well. So how do we help them have the skills that are going to help them be proficient adults? And if they wanted to go to college or if they wanted to have an amazing job, they need to have these skills that they may not be mastering because the grade doesn't measure the skill or necessarily determine that.

SPEAKER_04 5:25

I want to add to that as far as homeschoolers go. I see this all the time in homeschool groups where I'm in, where they're saying my six-year-old or my seven-year-old is struggling learning to read, and it seems like that they have ADHD symptoms, and it seems like that they're guessing too much or they get frustrated way too easily. And 99% of the time, half of the comments will be they'll catch up. They'll catch up, they will get there, they will learn how to read. My child didn't do it until they were 12 years old, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. So there's going to be those comments. However, I kept getting those comments for almost five years. Me too. And nothing was changing. It didn't matter what I was doing with her. She wasn't catching up. She wasn't catching on to how to read. And that's because there was something more that was happening. And so these parents we need to stop saying she'll get there. She'll get there. She you know that she's smart. And so it's almost like we're gaslighting the parents and saying there's nothing wrong with your child, even though in your heart of hearts, your intuition as a mother is saying, I feel like there is something wrong here. And if we could get more parents that they are following their intuition and they're saying there's something wrong here, we offer free assessments all of the time. So for them to just come in and say, Hey, can you at least just look at my fluid and see if this is something that's happening? Because then it gives me a little bit more information to know, okay, we need to work with them with getting that tension released. We need to work with their eyes, making sure that they're working together. Or it's them that is saying, nope, they're just late bloomers. They'll catch up, they'll get there. But at least you're not playing that waiting game until they're 10, 11, 12 years old, going, okay, you're supposed to be catching up now. Okay, you're supposed to be catching up now. But they're not. Oh, wait, oh now they're 12 years old and they're still not caught up panic setting. And they go, now what? So I think that's very important for parents to understand that yes, they can, but when you keep seeing those comments over and over again, don't disregard your intuition. If there's something else that's going on and you feel it, there are options that you can go and look to see if it is that before just letting them try and catch up and then playing Russian roulette to see if that's truly it.

SPEAKER_01 8:53

Yeah, and I feel like that is a big thing that was my thing is I didn't know till I knew. And I had no idea this existed until I did. And then once I did, I was like, oh my gosh, I can't believe we finally have the answer. And I felt all the failures. I felt all the failures parent, failure as a homeschool parent, all the things. And then we found the program and excelled.

SPEAKER_02 9:20

So Cammie was just on with the evaluation that's brothers, and me and Crystal had the same initial evaluation with the brothers two years ago. And she got the information. She wasn't in a time in her life where she could do it, but she came back and she's like, I've been wanting to do this for a long time and I'm in a place now where I can do it. She was given that information and now she has the ability to use it when it is workable in her life. And both the boys are a little bit older. So even if they don't do it right away, they still have the information. She did some tutoring on the side. There were some improvements, but then there's still that missing piece. And she's like, I just keep coming back to you guys. I think we need to do this instead because they're reading better, but they're not reading proficiently and they're not confident about it, and they don't like it. And it's a stress point and frustration. Like Crystal said so many times, like, we're not going anywhere. Like we can give them the information and they can come and drink the water when they're ready.

SPEAKER_00 10:14

But getting that out there for them to know that it's an option. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 10:23

So as their kids are getting out of school, public school kids, they got end-of-year testing done, and now the parents are going, okay, I didn't realize that this was this bad. I don't know what to do next. That's where hopefully we can help give them that information to go just get the free assessment, just see if this is something that your child is possibly struggling with. They may or may not be, but it will at least give you an answer to go, okay. This is why testing was this level for them this year. And the best time to start to be able to get into a good routine, to be able to get a good foundation on your exercises and releasing that tension and getting your brain on board and doing everything that we do in the program is in the summertime because you're not getting interacted every single day with school. You're not you're not having to wait until the very end of the day in order to get exercises in because they're gone to school all day. You you have more of an ability to be able to be hands-on and step in with your child during the summertime. And so this is a fantastic time to be able to see if this is exactly what your child needs.

SPEAKER_01 11:51

I have a student, he is 14, number 242, and he has been struggling for years with his reading. He was held back in school because of his reading level. They said he was just too below reading level. So he started the program, they started homeschooling because of it, and then he started the program, and he's already shown a lot of progress in just the three months he's been in the program. So you just don't know. And this could be the answer.

SPEAKER_00 12:22

Yeah, absolutely. Christine, can you talk more about more students?

SPEAKER_02 12:28

Yeah. So meeting him and having him and his grandmother found the program, and they wanted to jump on board before even really understanding what the program was, just because she knew that he needed help. So he just graduated last Friday, 19 years old, has been in an IEP his entire school career, and doing some testing with them at a high school graduate level, he's reading at 26 words per minute. And that was after working with him for three months, because before that we couldn't even get through a sentence. His eyes would get so tired he couldn't even focus on a sentence. And so I showed him a graphic of like how words can look when our eyes aren't working together. And the shock on his face when I pulled that graphic up of clear words and then double vision of how each eye is seeing words individually, and his mouth dropped open and looked at his grandma, like that's exactly what I see almost immediately when I start reading. And I was like, that's why it's so hard. You don't see words like everybody else because you're seeing twice of everything. It's not that it's not normal, it's just your eyes, it's a muscle. We can strengthen it and we can make this easier. And so now we're on the piece of he's been working so hard for so long to try to even see the words clearly that phonograms did not connect at all with him. And then on top of that, when he learned to read, he learned with sight words. So he has certain words memorized and has no idea how to connect the phonograms to actually chunk the words out. And so as we're going through, we're starting to go through the logic of English phonograms app just to help him see them and hear them and visually connect them into words. We did a speed phrase yesterday, and the confidence is so low that he would read one. He's like, Is that right? I'm like, Yeah, keep going, dude. You're doing fantastic, keep up. And he was like, I was right. I'm like, yeah, go to the next one, keep going. Even he is surprising himself that he's able to chunk some of these words out of words that he's never read before. And he's only three months in, and we still have a long way to go, just confidence-wise, because he's 19, he's been told his entire life he can't read. And even his grandmother has made comments that they're not really teaching him anymore. They're just waiting for him to graduate. They just want it to be done. He's just always been in this bubble of people telling him he can't do it, or he's not good enough to spend time on it to help him understand it. And he's got some amazing goals for himself. He wants to go to trade school and become a diesel mechanic, but he knows that he needs to be able to understand the textbooks and read the things to be able to get to the point where he can do that. And so he's got a self-goal that is super motivating. He has gone beyond our expectations for exercises and drills. I was like, all right, we need five exercises a day, eye exercises, and I need you to work on these reading drills 20 minutes a day. Well, he is doing five exercises or more a day. And then every single time he does his eye exercises, he's pulling out those reading drills and doing them every single time. So he's doing those reading drills like five plus times a day. And his endurance is going up, his ability to see the words clearly has just shot through the roof. And his surprise on his face when he's like, I did, I got it right. I'm like, Yeah, keep going. It's almost like he doesn't believe it. He's like, wait, do I have to read again? I'm like, no, keep going. I just have that window and understand that there's people in these kids' lives. Dad's not on board, but grandma is. So grandma is the main support system for him. And they work together and all the things. And he graduated on Friday. He's working full-time with grandma. Him and grandma are doing exercises in between clients at their work. They're just on board to just help him as much as he can. And just the few improvements that he's seen, he's just like, okay, we're doing this. He's older than most of the students that I've worked with in the past, and he's got very precise goals for himself, and he is determined to reach those goals, which makes a huge difference with some of the littlers that they don't really see the point. They're like, uh, reading's hard. I don't want to do this. But he's like, I know it's hard. And how can I make my life easier in the future by making this easier? He's an awesome kid. It's fantastic.

SPEAKER_04 17:15

Love that. I wanted to touch on a little bit about the IEP stuff. This isn't to knock schools, this isn't to knock public schools and say that public schools are less of a program than homeschooling. It's not about that. But what I want to point out is a lot of times, and we have many, many of our students that have IEPs or 504s that they are working with within their school system. But what we had noticed is that rather than that being a helpmate for them to get better with their reading and to come out on the other side of this, it's more for a crutch along the way. So, Christine, you were talking about your student and how they were just basically waiting for him to graduate. They would read him all of his tests. So rather than trying to figure out and go, why are you not reading? What is the problem behind that? And I will say this very lightly, but this also happens with when students get diagnosed with dyslexia. And there is not a vision test that goes along with that dyslexia test. There's not that eye tracking test that goes along with it. So the student will get diagnosed with dyslexia. So then they'll go through all of the dyslexia programs, the Orton Gillingham programs, those gold standard programs for dyslexia, and they'll come out from doing those programs with still being told that they are dyslexic or they didn't get better at all, and they're told that they're severe dyslexic. And so there's nothing else that they can do for it. Where I know that dyslexia, a true cognitive disability that's happening. But because it is, at least with the students that come into our program, the eye tracking is missed. It's missed every single time. They'll get diagnosed with dyslexia, the eye tracking will be there. Then we will work with them in our program, and they no longer have dyslexia tendencies when they leave our program. And that's because they weren't doing a full round, a full battery of testing that needed to be done in order to give the full, well-rounded answer to that student as far as what is going on. And so then that student goes through school with an IEP all the way up until they graduate. And they then go into the workforce, kind of like your student is going, I can't. I still can't. And it's because there was that crutch for them all along the way, rather than there being, okay, let's figure this out. Let's find out why this is happening to you. And if it is true cognitive, okay, then that's great. That's true cognitive. However, I had ran into dyslexia specialists in a marketing event that she talked about how every single one of her students that were diagnosed with dyslexia that have come to her, she has gotten them to be able to read. So I do know that cognitive dyslexia, the dyslexia specialist can help them to be able to read, but they work with more of the cognitive stuff. We work with more of the ocular motor stuff that's happening. So if people don't know that there are other things out there, and they just slap an IEP on the student and then hope for the best. That's not what is going to be helping the student the best in Christine's case. And Leah has a student that has been on an IEP, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:01

Yeah, it's a private school, so it's a little different, but yeah, generally, yeah, that's the program he's on. Yeah. Yes. So it's an IEP, and I'll let you talk about it. So he has been in the program a while. Number 168. I'm gonna go over to his notes really quick so that I can give valid information real quick. But he has gone from barely being able to read to uh benchmarking almost at grade level. So he's going into fifth grade. Yeah, fifth grade next year. So he's benchmarked at fourth grade, which is really amazing. And he was on a IEP, he was on like heavy IEP. He was going to reading specialists during his classes, he'd be pulled from his classes and things like that this year. He wasn't being pulled from classes to do the reading. And he went from being heavily assisted during testing and things like that to barely being watched at all. He's just on watch when they're like, okay, we're just gonna keep an eye on it. But he's improved so much, and it's been his eyes and his confidence.

SPEAKER_04 22:18

And I'd heard several times from teaching professionals, educators, that say that it's unheard of to hear of a kid that gets an IEP or 504 and they ever get off of it. And we have had that happen several times to our students in the program. Several times. I have two students that I can think of off the top of my head that have had the same thing or that have had a teacher that says that they have never seen their testing scores jump this much in their entire career, and they've been teaching for 40 plus years.

SPEAKER_01 22:59

Yeah, that's exactly what happened to him. His reading points on his reading test, like most kids average an increase of four points every year. He his reading test went up 14 points at the end of this year. So it's been huge for him. Last year in school, fourth grade, he got an award for most improved in his fourth grade class, like his whole class. So he's been really putting in the work and he's amazing. I love that.

SPEAKER_04 23:28

Let's talk about pain points. We all have our personal story of pain points, right? I could talk about my daughter's story of why this program even started and the pain point of working with her, getting her diagnosed with dyslexia, working with her for four and a half years, doing all of the gold standard or Gillingham programs, spending thousands of dollars just trying to see where I could get her working with her 365 days a year, going, okay, well, if I just work with her more, then I can get her caught up. I will work with them more. Lots and lots of tears, lots of frustration, lots of being very stern and maybe some yelling might have happened because I'm going, okay, why is she? She's okay, she's lazy. She's just not wanting to read. That's gotta be what it is. Like, why does she hate reading so much when I can sit there and read to her the Fable Haven books and she will just eat it up? But then the minute that I'm like, okay, let's have you read something now, she's like, now, and she freaks out. All of those things were pain points for me to the point that I was like, okay, so I have played good cop, I have played bad cop, I have played mom, I have played drill sergeant, I have played all of these roles. None of them are working to get her to want to read. So I'm at the point that either I go and just make a list of trades for her that don't have to do with reading, writing, spelling, or math because she doesn't want to do those things. Or I can see if there's something else out there. That's when I saw that there was something else out there. That's where I started working with her, and that's where this program was created. That was my pain point. Everybody has a different pain point that brought them to this point. We have many students that have different pain points that have brought them here, whether it's daily headaches that our students were having, that the parents were like, there's got to be something more that's going on with this. Yeah, they read okay, they can still read, but their eyeglasses that the doctors put them in isn't working, or the doctor wants to put them in glasses. I don't think that's the answer because they can say that they have 2020 vision, but then to help with the headaches, it doesn't make sense. So then they come to us and they go from being able to read okay to now they're reading above level, they are testing above everything in their class, they are at the top of their class with everything that they're doing and zero headaches, and they don't have to have their glasses anymore. Or the they go back to the eye doctor, and the eye doctor's like, no, we're not putting you in glasses. All of those things are happening to people around us, and those pain points are happening, and people don't realize that it could be related to the myofascial tension that they're having, that is then affecting the movement of their eyes and what's happening with their eyes.