I asked you, do you like or dislike swimming?
You said like.
Now we got Sarah plus sign swimming.
I need you to replace the word you just said with the plus sign.
What's the three-word sentence?
Sarah likes swimming.
But that's not what I asked.
All right, everybody.
Welcome back to another episode of the Space Tomatoes podcast.
One of your hosts, Havoc, and our other host.
I'm Alex. Hello. Welcome.
And with us today, we have a special guest, Russell Van Brocklin, who is a New York State Senate funded dyslexia researcher.
Welcome to the show, Russell. Thanks for coming.
Hi, thanks for having me.
Awesome. So what got you started in this work?
What was the impetus behind, hey, I would like to do something with this?
well it all started back in the late 1990s when i was finishing up college
it was uh i just wanted to know how laws work not some class i wanted to know
so i decided to apply for the new york state assembly internship program
and i was accepted so then i showed up and i said here's my new year here's my
neuropsychological evaluation i have a first grade reading and writing level and the director
goes what um he said this this just can't work because honestly what the internship was all about
is the typical uh member had you had the elected official the chief of staff who was an intern
probably the year or two before and then the intern they're actually answering phone calls
taking down messages writing reports filing things and i would just screw that all up seven ways to
Sunday. So they're freaking out. So they go up to the New York State speaker's office, which tells
them, listen, you're not going to get rid of this kid because he's dyslexic. We've accepted him.
So what they did is they took me, they got a committee together of senior people to figure
out. And what the solution they came up with was rather extreme. A big part of the internship was
your camaraderie with the other interns. You went to lunch together. You saw each other all the time.
I got none of that. They physically took me from the legislative office building and moved me way
across into the New York State Capitol itself and put me in the majority leader's program and
council's office, which literally ran the assembly day to day. And when I went there, I could see why
they did it. There were three administrative assistants that could help me with my pathetic
writing. But the big thing was they had no concept of what to do with an undergrad. They
have been dealing with graduate students for at least the last 30 years at that point. I mean,
we're going back to the 60s before they had an undergrad. And what they decided to do was to
treat me like a graduate student, which is a real staff position. So my issue at that point was
gambling and anything to deal with the assembly and trying to change the amendment to the New
York State Constitution kind of went through me. So it was a fantastic internship. For the academic
portion, I gave a very standard accommodation for me instead of doing a 30-page paper.
What happened is I did an hours-long presentation and then a very long Q&A session. At the end of all
that, they recommended 15 credits of A-. So remember, this was the New York State government
that did all this, not some private company. So then it goes back to the flagship campus of the
State University of New York system, the State University of New York University Center of
Buffalo into their political science department, who then review this extensive accommodation
that I got, all these accommodations, and they said,
we don't like these, so we're going to lower your grade.
Guess how much they lowered it.
A couple grade levels?
I wouldn't know.
No, come on.
If you're going to lower it, you've got to lower it.
They lowered it from an A- to an F.
Wow.
Yeah.
All 15 credits of F.
And what was the reasoning for that?
Because the accommodations that they gave me were absolutely extraordinary.
Okay.
And they didn't like them.
And remember who came up with these?
Their bosses.
The people that write their checks.
Right.
It's called the State University of New York Center at Buffalo.
Okay?
the State University of New York Center at Buffalo,
Political Science Department.
And the assembly itself came up with these accommodations.
At that point, I think you have to understand,
I was rather annoyed.
Now, because I was in the majority leader's program
and counsel's office, I was offered all these,
I could have become a lobbyist,
I had all these state positions offered me,
and I turned them all down.
Because remember, I stayed weekends with these people,
I did nights.
I didn't just go home at five.
I could have.
I didn't because I wasn't that stupid.
These internships are essentially extended job interviews.
So I decided I had to solve dyslexia for everybody.
So I went to some of my favorite professors and I said, where do I force myself to learn to read and write in graduate school?
And they said, well, if you like politics, it's obvious.
Law school.
So the problem with that is law school, you learn to read and write more than anybody in any graduate program.
And you get a bonus alternative language as well.
Exactly.
So I go up and I audit two law school classes.
I went to see Professor Warner, who was a dyslectic professor for over 30 years, longer than I was alive by quite a bit at that point.
And I go and it's my second day of contracts.
And what they decide to do is they ask you the Socratic method, the Socratic method.
And what they do in the Socratic method is they tell you, they basically go ahead and ask you these really tough questions.
and if you can't answer them, which nobody usually can the first couple of days of law school,
is they ask you questions you can't answer until they embarrass you,
and then they move on to the next victim.
They keep doing that until you eventually adopt.
But when he called on me the second day of contracts,
my peers, my classmates just get out of sight saying,
oh, I can't believe they felt pity towards me.
Glad it wasn't them.
But as a dyslectic, I didn't respond as another victim.
I responded as the professor's equal.
All right.
Now, I need you to understand that.
I didn't respond as a student.
I responded as his equal.
Everything organized in my head for the first time.
I could see everything clearly.
So we're going back and forth together.
Five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes.
He throws up his arms after 15 minutes and says, Russell, you couldn't be any more correct.
In the interest of time, I have to move on to the next case.
My classmates are shocked.
They've never heard of anything.
Professor Warner's never even heard of anything like this.
I learned to read within a month.
I learned to write within a couple of years.
So then I go back to the New York State Senate and I say, I want you to fund my dyslexia research project, which they don't do.
So what they decided to do is they said, okay, go over to the New York State Education Department.
Let's see what they have to say.
Now, this was back when it was run by traditional Republicans, which was quite simple.
Make the school districts want it, the public schools, and we want better, faster, cheaper.
Okay?
So I show up to the Education Department.
They're trying, because I'm showing up from the majority leader's office in the state Senate.
And they're saying, oh, how can we get rid of this kid?
Okay, let's say we want a SUNY distinguished professor in psychology.
They're top ranked.
They said, where's this out of?
I said, Buffalo.
So I said, go back to Buffalo, get a SUNY distinguished professor in psychology to say there's something here, and we can move forward.
Without that, you're done.
So let me go out.
We got the university center and the biggest college.
And the psychology is the biggest department in both.
This is huge.
No problem.
Then I found out how rare these distinguished professors are.
There were two.
And just so happens the one who gave me that previous evaluation was one.
Her name was Dr. Hulitska.
So I show up.
The state pays for it 20 hours over three days.
And she essentially says, I've reviewed this kid before.
Here's what's going on.
The back part of my brain just doesn't work.
The front part is massively overactive.
All right.
And what she said was we're going from dysfunctional to functional.
I could go writing-wise from first grade level up to above average of undergrad level on the graduate records exam analytical writing assessment.
There is absolutely something here.
So I go back to the education department.
I plop it on their desk, and they go, okay, we got a huge endorsement from one of our arguably top-living psychologists.
We have to take this seriously.
Then they said, you now have to go and connect this to current research.
I said, okay.
There was one person available for this in the entire Western New York.
His name was Professor James Collins.
He wrote a book called Strategies for Struggling Writers, $1.5 million from the U.S. Education Department as a grant.
And I went to see him.
People said, this is going to take you years.
I didn't have years.
There was a university-wide competition.
I got it approved by him in under two weeks.
Put A plus, which excellent.
So then I applied for the university-wide competition, got $15,000, tested on a couple of kids at my old high school,
Averill Park Central School District, right outside of Albany, New York, our state capital.
Then I went and I asked for the state funding, and I got it for multiple years.
And what we were trying to do was to make a point.
So we would go, we limited it to the most motivated, the most intelligent, dyslectic juniors and seniors.
why I wanted to help kids like me to show what can we do with the elite.
And honestly, most of those kids were lower middle class.
I always found my best kids, best results came from that income group.
So we do that one class period a day for the school year
and took just a couple of hours to train the teacher,
not two years like my competition.
And the kids started off with middle school reading and writing ability.
Well, at the end, they scored in the 30th to 70th percentile of entering graduate students.
They all went on to college.
They all graduated.
GPA is a 2.5 to 3.6.
Cost to New York State taxpayers under $900.
My best competition, let me just finish.
The best competition that I had at the time was Landmark College.
They were a transfer college.
We were 25 times more effective.
We were cost, our end results, I'm sorry, we were 25 times more efficient, three times more effective for less than 1% of the cost.
And that's how I got started.
So that $900, is that for the entirety of the program?
Yes, that was everything.
Oh, wow.
No, that was everything.
And what that essentially covered is the teacher's time.
So what we did is we bought the teacher's name was Susan Ford.
She's an absolute genius.
And I want everybody to understand she's the best special ed teacher they had.
All right.
So that covered her time for class period day for the school years and a few other incidentals.
how does that $900
correlate
to Landmark College
with other programs
do other programs spend more than that
with less results
yeah so if you want to go
because I'm applying it to getting kids
to transfer to a real school
because most of our kids started off at a community college
alright
and the school most of them went to was the State University
New York Center at Albany which is ranked
around 125 out of like
2,300 four-year colleges. And why then at the time, according to the New York Times in 2011
article, their success rate was 25 to 33%. It was over 50,000 a year for two to three years.
So it was 150,000 just in tuition. And they had a 25, 33% success rate. We were literally 100%.
percent. Wow. Now, if you're talking about high schools, that's completely different.
I'll give you an example of the Windward School in Manhattan. They've had these statistics going
back decades. They are 98 percent successful. They will take kids. I'm just going to say fourth
grade and above is the one that I usually tell because kindergarten through third grade, you use
Yale's resources. It all comes down to the third grade reading and writing test. If you fail it,
you're in trouble. You have to go to one of these private schools. If you succeed,
you're okay. And that's because K through three, we learn to read, fourth and above,
we read to learn. They take four to five years. Back then, they were around 50 grand a year. Now
they're at 75. And they'll take you for four to five years. And then they'll send you back to
wherever you came from as educated as any of the best private schools in the country.
If you got a, you know, that's just tuition.
So then you have living expenses.
Do you ever have an extra half million sitting around you get up to select a kid with?
Yeah, just let me go get under the couch cushions real quick.
Yeah, just go and grab a baggie.
Yeah, so literally what I do is I design this.
So what got interesting is at that point, I went down and I presented in New York City.
in 2006 at the New York City branch of the International Dyslexia Association.
And at that point, I thought I did something amazing.
I thought I was finished.
I was wrong.
I had two competing people telling me I'm not even close to being done.
I told the professors a couple of the kids scored in the 70th percentile of entering grad students.
And they're in high school.
And the professor says, we don't care.
we want the craft of research.
I was like, the craft of what?
And they said, the craft of research.
It's a book that came out in 1995 from the University of Chicago
that was designed to teach PhD students how to write their doctoral dissertations.
And it's based on context, getting everybody on the same page,
a problem statement that is you can actually do it and people actually care.
So you're actually going to actually solve something that matters and then the actual
solution that's original, which is beyond virtually every paper written in the undergrad
or graduate schools in the United States I like you want me to teach this to grade school kids And they said yes I said okay And then I spoke to the teachers and they said does this work for normal kids
And I said, absolutely not.
And they said, make it work for normal kids and then we'll talk.
And I was like, okay.
Took eight years off before I could come back with a solution.
Wow.
That was fun.
Yeah.
So, do you have something, Alex?
I was just going to say, if we could just take a step back just for a minute.
I don't know that much about dyslexia.
Can we just have a short little introduction as to what it actually is?
Because it doesn't seem to be an intelligence issue or a lack of motivation or a laziness issue.
And on a more personal level, how did you find out that you had that?
I was diagnosed in second grade and I went into this hell called special education in third.
Forced my way out in history.
I had a school board member whose son and I were a year apart.
We got our Eagle Scouts about the same time.
And I said, I need out of this place for history.
So they put me into normal history for eighth grade.
I was told I was going to flunk.
I got perfect hundreds on every test.
I couldn't take notes, so I didn't remember everything the teacher said.
And I got the history award for the best history student.
And then I went all college mainstream in high school.
So what is dyslexia?
It's really simple.
Let's look at science.
This is the best book on dyslexia.
It's called Overcoming Dyslexia.
This happens to be the second edition.
It's by Dr. Sally Shaywitz from Yale.
She's a medical doctor from Yale.
Okay.
This is dyslexia.
Now, do you see how the back part of your brain has this massive neural activity?
Okay.
Now, do you see how the back part of my brain has next to zero?
Mm-hmm.
But the front part of my brain is about two and a half times overactive?
I see that.
Okay.
Okay. So everything that you're really good at, I stick at. Things that you're not the best at,
I excel at. So what's essentially happening is it's not that schools are trying to be hard on
the neurodiverse. I'm going to call dyslectic 5% to 10% of the population. I'm going to call ADD,
ADHD is similar. Neurodiverse populations maxed out at most 20. So 80 plus percent of the school
population, it's not neurodiverse. So they designed it for the back part of the brain.
So if you can imagine when you're teaching, let's say, an English class, everything you do in five,
ten books a semester, and that's the exact opposite of how dyslectics learn. So it's literally
designed for us to fail, not intended to be. So just to give you the best idea of how to actually
do this. So something that your audience can take home tonight and actually have a real effect.
Do any of you know any dyslectic kids now or in the past who were elementary school kids writing
apparently randomly placed misspelled words? Any, either of you two?
Nope, not myself.
Okay. All right. So I'm going to give you the example I typically use. Her name is Sarah.
And when we get done with this, I'm going to describe the front part of the brain and how
to use this because the biggest issue your audience has probably is the kids in elementary
school, they're way behind in the reading, and they're writing randomly placed misspelled words.
This is one of the most important things I can tell you. If you can write it, you can read it.
If you can write it, you can read it. All right, so if we work on writing, the reading will improve.
So the front part of the brain that's two and a half times overactive deals with two things,
word analysis followed by articulation so what we need to do is to pull things from the back part
of the brain the writing where it's supposed to happen and we need to pull it forward because
nothing's going on back here we got to work on where we have two and a half times the neural
activity and the best way i'd like to give an example of this all right you guys are grown men
if you were to have a tug of war with a 13 year old boy average size 13 year old boy
who's gonna win you know i would hope i would win that's awesome okay let's make it younger let's
make we will make a 10 sure you're literally two kids big these days no a kid where you're literally
two and a half times their size right two and a half times there'd be no chance yeah there's just
You could line up 20 of them and you would just go yank, yank, and they're on the floor crying and you're just standing there not even tired because you're two and a half times.
I'm just giving that rather extreme example because we've got to pull it back here where we got nothing going on up here because the realistic example from back here, how much more neural activity you have, it's not like a 10-year-old kid.
It's like a three-year-old because you got way more than two and a half times.
You've got like six, seven times.
Okay.
I mean, they're weighing, you know, if you're 150 pounds, they're weighing like 20.
Okay.
It's more like almost a baby.
I mean, that's the difference that we're looking at.
So we've got to pull that forward through word analysis followed by articulation.
How do we know that?
Because that's what this book tells us.
It's the number one book in the field, Overcoming Dyslexia.
So what we do is I'm going to show you how the student I like to use her example is Sarah.
She's 10 years old at the time.
Her favorite thing in the world is swimming.
That's her speciality, what she loves doing.
She's on the swim team, jumps in the pool every chance she can.
All right.
So what we're going to have you do to teach her, remember, you're doing the teaching.
We're going to have you open up a real laptop with a real keyboard, not an iPad, not an iPhone, and certainly not handwriting.
You're going to type out hero plus sign.
What are we talking about?
And she's going to copy that.
A lot of people freak out.
Kids aren't allowed to copy.
Actually, they are.
Professor James Collins, strategies for struggling writers, default writing strategy of copying.
So she copies that.
And she's going to do that for 10 likes and 10 dislikes.
But let's just go back to the first one.
Hero plus sign.
What are we talking about?
We're going to swap out hero for Sarah.
We got Sarah plus sign.
What are we talking about?
Then we're going to go to a list of 10 things she really likes and 10 things she really hates.
First thing she likes is swimming.
So we got Sarah plus sign.
What are we talking about?
We're going to swap out.
What are we talking about for swimming?
We got Sarah plus sign swimming.
Now, here's my question.
I'm going to try to fool you with two of the simplest questions you will ever be asked.
Do you think I'll be able to do it?
Everything's possible.
Well, if you answer them correctly, this will work.
If not, it won't work and you'll have an epiphany on what dyslexia really is.
And by simplest questions, I mean the simplest ones you'll ever be asked.
So remember, we got Sarah plus sign swimming.
What we need to do is replace the plus sign with a word.
Here's my question.
Does Sarah like or dislike swimming?
Like.
Exactly.
You got it right.
You're better than 70% of people so far.
Now, are you ready for the really hard one?
Absolutely.
Okay.
This trips everybody up.
I asked you, does Sarah like or dislike swimming?
You said like.
Now, we got Sarah plus sign swimming.
I need you to replace the word you just said with the plus sign.
what's the three word sentence
Sarah likes swimming
but that's not what I asked
you said what's the three word sentence
yes
so let's go back
I asked does Sarah like or dislike swimming
you said like which is correct
now you need to go ahead
and replace the plus sign Sarah
plus sign swimming with that word
what's the three word sentence
Sarah words
I don't know
do I have you nice and confused
you do because absolutely one case
I can sit there and if I dissect it
enough you can say replace that
word
replace that with the word
right so you could
theoretically say if you were trying to trick someone
but at the end you know for
for me at least you're
the
the direction I'm hearing and the direction that I'm inclined to give is, you know,
replace the plus sign with likes.
So the three word sentence is Sarah, plus sign is likes, swimming.
Yes, but you still don't see the air.
No, I do not.
Okay.
Are you ready for your epiphany?
Absolutely.
Yes.
Okay.
I asked, does Sarah like or dislike swimming?
You said like, but when you put it into the sentence, you automatically did what virtually every educated person does.
You added an S to make it a proper sentence.
Sarah's dyslectic.
That happens in the back part of her brain, which doesn't work.
So she would say Sarah like swimming.
She doesn't know how to add the S.
Okay.
Now, I want you to think about it.
You sit this down with your typical eight-year-old and you show them this like three times, four times max.
They got it forever.
But Sarah has no clue how to add the S.
Now, how do we do that?
Do you remember that, you know, $75,000 school I told you about called the Windward School?
Here's what they do.
They use an Orton-Gillingham multi-structured language approach, which takes two years and $11,000 for people with bachelor's degrees.
Well, what is that?
They're going to use seeing, touching, hearing, the multiple senses to get her to understand how to add yes.
It's complicated as all heck.
It takes forever.
But this is what the millionaires have been using since the 1950s.
It hasn't changed much since then.
All right.
Now, I'm going to show you how to do this really fast.
So we're going to ask Sarah to read what she wrote out loud.
Sarah likes swimming.
I'm going to say, Sarah, does that sound generally correct?
And she's going to say, no.
And I'm going to say, Sarah, fix it.
Sarah likes swimming.
All right.
So we then have her practice that with 10 likes and 10 dislikes.
So you're essentially connecting that gap right there.
And you're boiling it down to the most simple mechanism.
And you're having them identify the problem, which triggers, I would think, some neurodevelopment to occur that says, okay, I can connect this.
as I practice it, it becomes easier that I start to realize the context of this word.
Am I close on that?
Yes, you're getting.
But do you see how like and dislike and what we just did there is a simple form of word analysis?
Absolutely.
Okay.
That's the front part of the brain.
So we're pulling it from back here, nothing going on to the front part.
We got two and a half times the neuroactivity.
Then we're going to go because reason one.
Give me a simple reason why a 10-year-old girl would like swimming.
It's fun.
That's what everybody says.
Now, can you see how the reasons after because are a simple form of articulation?
Absolutely.
So what we're doing is we're pulling the stuff from the back part here where nothing's going on to where we have two and a half times the neural activity up here.
So now that we have Sarah go, Sarah likes swimming.
Can you see how we probably got a whole bunch of misspelled words?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Here's how we fix that.
It's really easy.
What we do is we tell Sarah to read what she wrote out loud, and she's going to – and I'm going to say, Sarah, does that sound generally correct?
I don't care about spelling.
She's going to keep going until it's correct.
Why is that important?
Teachers have a really hard time with horrifically bad grammar.
They're experts at the simple stuff and the medium stuff.
We just took the really bad grammar, the horrible stuff.
It's out the window and fixed.
All right?
Making their job so much easier.
Then here's the big secret, how we correct spelling.
We tell Sarah every time she makes it, she types a misspelled word, she has to retype the entire sentence.
So she says, I'm not going to make that mistake.
I'm not going to make that mistake.
And she keeps doing it for three to 13 times typically.
The more she makes those mistakes, the harder she concentrates.
And that's where the magic happens.
So how do you, okay, so sorry, something just popped into my little brain here.
Just going through this, I can understand, let me say that differently, because I don't understand.
But I can picture myself and kind of empathize, right, in that there's going to be a ton of frustration.
So how do you combat that part of it, right?
I know, you know, if I keep getting something wrong, it starts to really just, you know, it dampens my mood.
Let's put it that way.
But they're not frustrated because what the kids understand now is I explain to them, here's your brain.
We're going from back here to up here.
And the only way for us to get this corrected is brutal, brutal repetition.
But remember what we're doing.
We're talking about things that they really like and things they really dislike.
Okay.
So personal.
Oh, heavy personalization.
It's heavy personal stuff.
So it's related to them.
So they're willing to do the work.
I'll have that cleared up momentarily when we move on to the next step.
Okay?
But what you see here is we have them practice with 10 likes and 10 dislikes until everything is spelled correct.
If it's not, we redo it until everything is spelled correct.
Then reason one and reason two until everything is spelled correct.
Reason one, reason two, and reason three.
What we have now done is we have taken a kid who's writing a bunch of apparently randomly placed misspelled words
and bringing their writing up to the end of second, beginning, third grade level with decent grammar and correct spelling.
So in other words, the teachers can now work with this kid at that level.
And parents can do this at home, not needing a $75,000 school.
because there you have teachers who have two years of additional training
after a bachelor's degree, and it's four to one or five to one.
This is typical 20 to 35 to one.
All right?
So that's step three.
But as you noticed, I can't get these kids to do anything,
and I'm talking nothing.
I can't get them to do any work whatsoever.
And then I had to look back, back into a time when I'm dealing with, when I was in law school,
all right?
And what happened when I was in law school, I remember when I was taking those, the time
with Professor Warner and I just got everything And what I realized was the kid speciality That was the breakthrough That why this is number one in the model So I going to tell
you about my most successful student. Her name is Casey. I never saw anything like this before.
I will never see this again. This is a complete one-off. All right. Casey wanted to start off
with reading. And I tried to say, Casey, I do writing because with those sentences,
If the kid can write it, they can type it, they can read it.
All right?
It's so much easier.
But she's like, no, I want to do reading.
I was like, okay, Casey.
She's 10 years old at the end of fifth grade, reading at the second grade level, writing at the second grade level.
She turned 11 over the summertime.
She was interested in Theodore Roosevelt, so I signed her this little book.
The Rise of Theater Roosevelt by Edmund Morris won the Pulitzer all 900 pages of it.
This is at the 10th grade, first year college level, depending on who you ask.
So I said, OK, Casey, here's how you do the reading.
And it sucks and you're not going to do it.
She said, I'll do it.
I said, yeah, right.
Go work with your mom, you know, 10, 20 minute sessions, a couple of times a week.
It's up to your mom.
I didn't know Casey.
She literally took this ridiculous idea that I gave her, went to her room, and essentially locked herself away for three hours a night for six months.
Most of the days during the summer.
At the end of six months, you could literally turn to that random page and point to this random word.
Okay, let me point to a random word.
There we go.
that random word and she would tell you the dictionary definition verbatim wow wow she jumped
yeah eight grade levels in six months now how much time did i work with her 15 minutes a week
well this was all casey now but that's that's atypical that's i'll never see this again okay
So now, yeah, but the reason why I'm spending all this time is remember we're talking about motivation and can't getting kids to do anything.
So her mom comes back to me and says, is this just for stuff she likes?
And I said, okay, let's try something she hates.
My most popular book, Walt Disney, the triumph of the American imagination, all thousand pages.
Why this book?
This is my most popular.
Have any of you ever been to Disneyland or Disney World?
Yes.
I live in Florida, so I've been here.
You walk into the Magic Kingdom, Main Street, USA.
Do you feel the Disney magic?
No.
When I was younger, not so much these days.
Yeah, but when you were younger, okay?
Sure.
It's based on two universal themes.
One is really easy to find.
The other one is really hard.
Main Street, USA is associated essentially with Marceline, Missouri,
where Walt was between age 5 and age 10,
and he tries to spend the rest of his life trying to get that experience.
That's the most popular book because once kids can learn to read,
they're essentially reading like 17-year-olds,
and their parents take them to Disney World,
where they used to when it used to be affordable.
Some still do.
It gets the kids motivated.
So anyway, it takes normally one to three years for the kids to figure out that second universal thing.
Then the reading.
Casey did it in three months.
Why am I spending all this time on this?
Because it's critical.
The most motivated kid I ever worked with, she dropped in motivation when I asked her from something she loved to something she hated.
Her motivation dropped 50%.
Now, normal kids would drop 75% to 90%.
So I want you to think about this.
You step outside of that speciality.
They're down 75% to 90% of typically what they're giving in school, which is 5 or 10 books a year or whatever the number is, outside their motivation.
And you wonder why you can't get them to do anything.
That's the reason.
Sure, sure.
I would make an argument that that reason applies almost universally.
Now, again, that's kind of what you're saying.
But you're saying the application of that is limited for people with dyslexia.
What I'm saying is if you got a normal kid, okay,
If you look back at your education, if you did two things, if you planned your study habits properly, gave yourself enough time, everything, and then you worked really freaking hard, you were either successful or really successful.
You stopped doing those two things, your success went down the drain.
Make sense?
Yeah, absolutely.
With dyslectics, it's so much worse.
you gen ed kids they have a class they don't like a lot of times the better serious students are
going on to four-year colleges they'll just push through maybe they'll get an a minus or a b plus
but they still get a good grade instead of an a dyslexics forget it so what i found is during the
intervention period until we get them to grade level know what i said until we get them to reading
or writing a grade level, if you step outside their speciality, they're down 75 to 90 percent,
and they're just not going to do anything, especially with kids with ADHD, attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder. They won't do anything outside the speciality. ADD, ADHD, and dyslexic,
the treatment is the same thing. It's just different levels of severity. So what I found is,
again, during the intervention period, we have to focus on their speciality. That's rule number one.
rule number two if I ask a dyslectic this student that if I ask a dyslectic this question
in their speciality do they have ideas flying around their head at light speed but with little
to no organization they're going to say yes so what we have to do is we have to force their brain
to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output let me say that again
So you ask a dyslexic inside the speciality.
Do they have ideas flying around their head at light speed?
They're going to say yes.
So we have to force the brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output.
How do we do that?
I want you to think and give me an example of Martin Luther King.
If Bill Gates came to you and said, I'm going to pay you 100 grand, write this research paper.
What effect did Martin Luther King's famous I Have a Dream speech have on the American civil rights movement in the 1960s?
You can just go and start writing it, right?
Probably.
Yeah.
We don't need a good paper.
Just go write something, okay?
Dyslectic, it's like grabbing fog.
There's nothing there.
We have to – because part of our brain is so massively overactive, there's no organization.
It's light speed.
So we have to ask a specific to a general question. What personally compelled Martin Luther King to want to give his famous speech? So what you do is you literally go and find that information in his biography.
that answers the question. That answer gives you another question which you answer, which gives you
a question which you answer. That forces the brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable
output. So what we do is during the intervention period, we have the kid's speciality from the
specific to the general word analysis followed by articulation. And parents would ask me,
how successful is this? And I could never tell them because none of my hundreds and hundreds of
clients wanted to let the people know. Until December 27th of 2024 when I met Kimberly online
and she said you can use my story. Kimberly is a very religious homeschooling mom and she had her
10-year-old son Reed. She just so happened a few weeks before I started working with her
have paid the state of Ohio $700 to have her kids tested. And just, you know, with her success,
she successfully taught Reed's three brothers and sisters how to read properly, exceptionally well
with traditional methods. But she failed with Reed and she felt horrible about it. She felt
shamed about it. So where was Reed at the start? He was in fifth grade at 10, reading at the 11th
percentile, writing at the fourth percentile. So I gave her a simple curriculum. She worked with
Reed for three 30-minute sessions a week, so about 90 minutes on average. I worked with her for half
an hour a week. Most parents will do two to three 10 to 15-minute sessions a week.
Kimberly did that for five and a half, six months to the end of the school year.
Then we had the post-test, which showed an improvement, which I'm not telling you.
Because over the summer, Reed's friends came to him.
They said, Reed, we want you in public school for social reasons, to be with us in class, at lunch, whatever.
So he went back to public school in the beginning of August.
We're talking eight, eight and a half months later, and he was tested inside a public school.
Much better data.
If he had the same scores he had in December, he would have been placed in special ed away from his friends on happy kid because that's why he's going to public school.
He had a bit of an increase.
His reading went from the 11th percentile to the 64th percentile.
His writing went from the 4th percentile to the 65th.
His grammar jumped to the 97th percentile.
All right. Now, remember what I told you. The Windward School takes four to five years to fix
things. Kimberly did this. Even if you want to go over the summer, call it eight and a half months.
And she did what every parent dreams of. She solved it. What has happened to Reed this last
semester? He's in public school getting primarily A's and B's in normal classes with his friends.
that's how effective this is she literally taught him over seven times faster of what a public school
could in less than half the time and she does not have a college degree in education
so the breakthrough from this really came from kind of almost you know being forced into writing
in that category. So have there been any major breakthroughs that were just completely
unexpected? I mean, that kind of seems like it would be a bit unexpected, but are there any
others that have come along that just like out of the blue? Well, remember, I have to do the
craft of research. Right. The craft of research is how to get these kids ready for their doctoral
level essay. I mean, dissertation. So I've had parents come to me and say, will this work with,
you know, normal kids, really bright, normal kids who want to go on and be successful? And I was
like, well, yes, but I never really ran it through until relatively recently a podcast I was on.
He has his son, his name is Grayson. My permission to tell a story. Grayson is not dyslectic in any way,
shape or form. He's your typical super intelligent kid. He scored in the top one percentile in math
in the top one percentile in science when he's 10 years old in fifth grade.
As you notice, I tend to start working with kids in fifth grade when they're 10.
Grayson has a bit of an ambition.
He wants to work at NASA, okay, as a PhD, and he wants to terraform Mars.
So I said, okay, Grayson, I got to figure out where you're comfortable.
So I use really advanced AI now.
and I said, and it took me a while to build this report, but I said, what I need you to do
is to tell me the history of how Mars was created, but you're only going to use peer-reviewed PhD
level material. So I wrote this big report. And I said, I need you to, eventually you had to lower
the reading level to ninth grade, but the context to 12th grade. Remember, this kid's 10 in fifth
grade. And he said, yeah, that's about comfortable. And what he's interested in is the tallest mountain
on Mars has a base the size of, I think, Arizona, and it's three times higher than Everest. And it
literally breaks the atmosphere. And he's wondering, does that break lead and radiation?
Okay, so that's where we're focusing. What I'm going to do with Grayson is I'm not going to show
them how to do something that's publishable. I'm going to show them how to do things at the
college senior thesis level, which is writing a big paper of like 100, 150 pages and is used to
see if you're ready for a doctorate program. You probably have that done sometime in middle school
and then I'll turn them over to a PhD professor. So the next issue that we have to work on with him
is we have to get him to write advanced body paragraphs.
All right?
So I'm about to show you guys how to do a big part of that right now,
which is really important for advanced stuff.
So how far did you guys go in your education?
I'm just high school.
A couple of colleges, but never completed.
Okay.
So I want you to think about, have you ever noticed that when you were writing in high school, you'd have your topic sentence and then you'd have your data?
The data could be quotes.
It could be actual statistics.
Have you ever noticed between your topic sentence and your data, it didn't flow very well?
Not necessarily.
I actually was fairly good at that particular thing.
I ran into trouble more around – so we had a project one time to write a paper on George Washington.
And so I went to the University of California Irvine Library and started piling through writings on George Washington.
I got sent to the principal's office, even though I did well on the paper, because what I put out was not George Washington, the great man, etc.
It was a story of a womanizing drug addict that had some serious problems, right?
And that's the reality of it, right?
Right, and you had good resources from the university library.
everything, everything. But the focus was apparently, you know, we weren't supposed to be
like negatively writing about these people. We were supposed to be doubting their accomplishments.
And so, yeah, they were, that tended to be what got me in areas of concern more than
my ability to put things together and make them clear and concise.
Well, forget about their ridiculous concerns because they did it the right way.
So I want you to think when you were writing you would have quotes or statistics or something How did you connect the topic sentence to your data where it actually flowed I go backwards Give me the data then let me tell the story around the data rather than let me try and fit this into something
So obviously you're starting out with an idea, you want to reach a conclusion, but I found for me, it's better to allow the conclusion to happen organically because of the fact that the data will support that flow.
Okay.
So essentially what you did is you did a version of adding a warrant to a body paragraph.
Yep.
And just so you know what that is, it's something people outside of a master's degree,
but will have no idea what it is.
It's for PhD students from the craft of research.
And it essentially says you have your topic sentence, you have your data,
you connected it with a how and why question, which is essentially what you did.
You added a story, but they're specifically saying how you do it,
is you answer how and why statement, you try to make it more of a narrative.
Yeah.
Okay?
So you are inadvertently doing what PhDs do.
All right?
So, what I'm trying to say, how do we teach this to kids?
Now, remember, I get the kids to write basic body paragraphs at the end of fifth grade,
like we did with, you know, what we did with the initial student read.
But now, how do we get them to do the really advanced stuff?
So, first thing I'd like to try to use is a universal thing.
So, I always have to go back to a movie review so people understand what I'm trying to say,
because it's kind of complex.
I want one of you to volunteer a movie that you saw in the past that you think is one of the best ever.
You know it intimately and everybody's seen it.
What's the name of that movie?
The Big Lebowski.
You're the movie guy, Havoc.
I'm sorry.
The Big Lebowski.
Okay.
Now, I want you – this is going to require you to really think.
I want you to reduce The Big Lebowski to one universal theme that best represents the entire movie.
One word.
What is that?
No pressure.
Yeah, I don't know that I could.
I think it's a pretty diverse movie.
Right, but you got to pick one word, one universal theme that you think best represents.
if not the entire movie, a big chunk of it.
Yeah, I'm at a loss.
I don't see how I can boil that particular movie down into a single word.
Pick a chunk of the movie and then give me that in one word.
so i'm gonna go with taoism how's that taoism okay now let's just so everybody knows you
clearly described doing university level research on george washington sure all right i asked you
for one word that represents a chunk of the movie and you had to think for a while absolutely
Okay.
Well, the reason for that is you're asking for an extreme oversimplification of an idea that is far broader than a word could possibly give substance to.
Exactly.
But now I want everybody to understand that when we're talking about word analysis, this sort of thing, the front part of the dyslectic brain, we're two and a half times the neuroactivity.
Now you're playing in my sandbox.
This is where dyslectics excel.
All right.
So why am I doing this?
because if you look back at the Big Lebowski
and you look at these Harvard-educated writers
from journalist school or Yale or Princeton or wherever,
they work for the New York Times and the Washington Post,
what they generally do is they would tell you,
this happened, then this happened, then this happened.
So when you get done reading the review,
you know what happened in the freaking movie.
Okay?
I could have a seventh grader write that.
Right.
All right.
This is pathetic.
And you don't want to see the movie because now they've ruined it.
So here's what you do.
You would go and take that universal theme that you told me and you would say, here's how the actors did with this universal thing.
Here's how the director did.
Here's how the screenwriter did.
And then you review that way.
So people can see what you're trying to say, see if the movie interests them, and if they want to see it, you haven't ruined it.
Does that make sense?
Sure.
but here's why i'm spending all this time on this have you noticed that when you gave that
big universal theme okay that it's really broad and it's horrible trying to focus
with how the actors directors and screenwriter did because it's just so broad and it's hard
does that make sense yeah so what we need to do is get something much more specific
So here's what we do. I'm going to go back to English class. Every story ever written that's
any good, you have a hero. The hero wants to do something. What they want to do is represented by
at least one universal fame. And then you have the ultimate villain, a person or a concept that's
best equipped to try to prevent them from accomplishing their goal. And when you finally
have the resolution, normally in a three-act Shakespearean script or book, it's in the third
that and it builds up the tension through that. Make sense? Sure. Okay. So we have the hero. Hero
wants to do something. We write that out. Maybe you write out a sentence. Maybe you write out a
paragraph, a couple of pages, who knows? For every sentence you write, you pick the most important
word. Then you look at all the most important words that you've had and you pick the best one.
That's your baseline universal thing.
Just like the universal thing you gave me for your movie, it's really broad, and we can't focus it well because it's so broad.
We need to find a word that best matches what's in our head.
So here's how we do that.
We have you go to Merriam-Webster's online dictionary.
This is what we do with the kids, not adults, but the kids.
We find out their definition that they pick.
They type out the word.
They type out the definition.
They type it.
They don't copy and paste.
They don't handwrite it.
It's typed on a real keyboard.
So here's my question for you.
How many times do you have to type out a word and a definition until you know it permanently?
That's going to depend.
For me, that will depend on how important that knowledge is to me.
I have a really good capacity to hold information but purge things that are not, that I don't feel are pertinent or important to me.
Okay, good.
But it's five, ten times some number.
So what I tell the dyslectic kids who can't read, you're going to retype this, that word and that definition, some amount of time, and then you're going to remember it permanently.
Because remember the front part of the brain that deals with word analysis.
How can you deal with word analysis if you don't know exactly what the word means?
You can't.
I do this with sixth graders, and I will literally have them doing this for months until they develop a vocabulary of hundreds of evolved words.
This is important because when they're in high school and they're taking the SATs or ACTs to go to college at 16, the vocabulary section, the verbal section is essentially a vocabulary test.
My kids don't need to remember hundreds of evolved words.
They did it at 11.
They remember 70 to 80 percent of the definition.
That's important.
So then what we do is we typically say we go to the thesaurus, usually thesaurus.com, and you pick five words, ten words, the entire level, multiple levels.
It's up to the teacher and the student.
And for let's say we're doing five, you would type out the word, the synonym.
If you don't know exactly what it means, because remember, you have to do this a certain number of times.
You're going to go over to Merriam-Webster's online dictionary, pick your definition, type it out.
not copy and paste type it out all right and i hear parents saying my kids won't do this
well if you're in their speciality they will if you're outside of it they won't it's that simple
so the kid does that and then they pick a word that has that a definition that much better
reflects what's inside their head does that make sense so now it focuses much sharper
And then we use that sharp focus to pick our ultimate villain, a person or a concept.
So now we've got our hero, our universal thing, and our villain.
And we just kind of separate those by plus signs, drop the plus signs, and ask the student, does it sound generally correct?
No, fix it.
Well, we've got a base sentence.
Do you see how that's a rather evolved form of word analysis?
Sure.
We're using the front part of the brain.
so next we have to do an involved form of articulation so then we go because three really
good reasons why three okay because most things we write are a five paragraph essay three body
paragraphs thesis statement conclusion each reason we reduce to a simple universal theme
then we would take that universal theme we would go to the script of the big lebowski
and we would look for one sentence that deals with that universal theme at the beginning of
the script and one at the end. Then we would take those two quotes, put them together,
and then from there come up with our topic sentence. And then we're going to do in a
formal sense of what you just automatically knew what to do. We have to tell a story.
We connect those with one warrant because it's one universal theme that's for both quotes.
We answer a how and why question.
We connect the topic sentence with that.
Now, that's a baseline for our body paragraph.
In the course we teach, we add a lot of stuff in the craft of research, but this is the basics.
Here's the important point.
I have kids doing this in seventh grade when they're 12.
A university professor looking at these paragraphs will go, wow, that kid's using a warrant.
This must be at the college level.
That's generally what happens.
And what's beautiful is these kids typically have older brothers and sisters who are fighting to be valedictorians who aren't dyslectic at all.
So in one example, a 12-year-old boy did this.
University professor was Senate.
and then his senior brother, who's an AP English, fighting to be valedictorian,
who writes much flows better, better word choice.
But his 12-year-old dyslectic kid brother is writing technically more evolved paragraphs.
Because what you did, you actually connected, when you did the story,
your research with your topic sentence in a way that flowed.
So then he's like, my kid brother who's dyslectic is writing technically more evolved paragraphs than me?
I'm the AP English student.
I'm a senior.
And they get real frustrated, and it's beautiful.
Interesting.
All right.
Well, I think it's probably a great place to start wrapping up a little bit here.
And we talked a little bit about this before,
but we like to give all of our guests an opportunity to give a shout-out
to someone that had a major impact in their life
or maybe in other people's lives.
Someone that really, you know, was important to you at some point in your life.
It can be someone, you know, closely personal to you.
It could be a historical figure, anyone you want.
Well, that's Professor James Holmes from SUNY Center at Buffalo.
And I just think he exemplifies what it's like to be dyslectic.
So he didn't start learning to read and to write until fifth grade.
Then he was just doing horrible in high school.
He said there's no way in heck he's going on to college.
He just wouldn't be allowed because he couldn't read or write worth a darn.
So then he entered a science competition as a junior in high school.
This is the 50s when these things mattered.
He won the state of Indiana, and then he got third place in the country.
So now he was allowed to go to college.
Started off with seven majors, ended up with three.
His university president had him interviewed by the second leading economist of the 20th century, which got him the top scholarship at the University of Chicago, which is the best law PhD program in the world for decades.
He stopped counting his rewriting his dissertation at 100.
So he became one of the top 1% of lecturing macroeconomics professors in the world.
And he taught me how to think.
So what he taught me was causality.
You have explained variables you want to explain on top,
and you look at all the different things that can affect them at the bottom,
and you graph them out one by one.
So when I went to law school and I told you how well I did,
I simply applied the explained variables at one level to be the causal at another one,
and I just stacked them.
And all this happened really fast, individual versus the state,
and that's how I could keep up with a professor at his level.
If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be here today.
And he's still living out, retired out in Buffalo, New York.
He gave up teaching in 2019.
So he's the one that made all this possible for me.
Wonderful.
Awesome shout out there.
Now, where can people find you?
Where can they contribute?
Where can they get involved if they feel so inclined?
Best thing to do is just go to dyslexiaclasses.com.
That's plural with an S, dyslexiaclasses with an S, dot com.
dyslexiaclasses.com. There's a little button there that says download free guide.
Just click on that, answer three questions, get your guide on dyslexia, kind of
what we went over today, but in more detail. Most important thing, set up
a time to speak with me directly. For half an hour, it doesn't cost anything.
I speak to you and your child, find out their speciality, we pick out their book and their
audio book, and we show you how to get started. Awesome. That was great.
Awesome. All right. Well, hey, thank you again for your time.
We really appreciate it.
It's been a great conversation.
Hopefully this will bring some awareness to folks on their parents especially and potentially children.
And who knows, maybe even adults that are struggling with dyslexia.
That would be an awesome thing.
Thank you again for giving us some of your time.
And hey, you know where you can find us.
We're on all the platforms.
YouTube, Spotify, Apple, iHeartRadio, you name it.
If you can find it, you can find it.
We're also now on fountain.fm.
You can find us on Noster.
Look at the last episode.
It was a really good one.
And remember, wherever you are, whenever you're watching this,
have an amazing day.
See you, everybody.
Thanks for stopping by, Russell.
See you. Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Music
The Style Eaters