Episode 98: Dyslexia: Bright Minds, Hidden Roadblocks – Jill Stowell

LD Expert Podcast with Jill Stowell
Dyslexia Bright Minds - Hidden Roadblocks
Jill Stowell

 

Jill Stowell: Dyslexic thinking is finally starting to get recognition - to become a “thing” that people are talking about.

At Stowell Learning Center, we have been immersed in working with dyslexia for over 40 years and it has been such a gift to work with these kids and adults.   

When the conversation moves away from reading and writing, they have so much to share—interesting ideas, unique perspectives, connections that other people don’t see.

They are also so excited and grateful when reading starts to make sense to them.  I remember a man whose wife was a first grade teacher.  He was practically throwing a party when he was able to read a simple book that his wife brought home from her classroom.  He said that reading gave him a freedom that he had never felt before.

Because dyslexic students are typically smart and capable in many ways, their difficulties with school often get misinterpreted. People may think they’re lazy, unmotivated, or they just don’t care. Maybe they’re labeled as the class clown or the disruptive kid.

And the real heartbreak there is that over time, they can start to believe that about themselves. They begin to see themselves as not capable… as the bad kid… the kid who never pays attention. And that becomes a part of their identity. 

Welcome to the LD Expert Podcast, your place for answers and solutions for dyslexia, learning and attention challenges.

 

I’m your host, Jill Stowell, founder of Stowell Learning Centers.  

 

Today, I want to tell you about some of our dyslexic students.  The difficulty that some children and adults experience around reading and writing is very real, but it can be confusing and discouraging.  

 

I’m hoping that these stories will help you understand what you’re really seeing and give you hope.  Because these kinds of challenges can change.

One of my very first students was a young man in his 20s—a stuntman in Hollywood. He was profoundly dyslexic to the point that he couldn’t read or write his middle name.

He was incredibly strategic, though.  He found ways to manage, but he spent his life hiding. He told me that if people at work knew that he couldn’t read, he'd be kicked off the set - that he’d be considered a danger if he couldn’t read something like a caution sign.

He would go to auditions with his arm in a sling so that he could take paperwork home for his mom to fill out. If he wanted to take someone out to dinner, he would get the menu ahead of time, study it at home, and memorize what to order.

That’s creative. That’s intelligent. But it was also limiting his life.

When he started his cognitive learning therapy, he told me that his goals were to read, to act versus beating up his body doing stunts, and to get married, which he didn’t feel like he could do if he couldn’t read.  

And, a year and a half later, he didn’t need me anymore - he was reading real books, he was auditioning for speaking roles in movies, and he got married.  

As awareness around dyslexia is increasing, the brilliance and the talents associated with dyslexia and that dyslexic thinking style are starting to be celebrated.  That is a great thing.  

But having been in this field for so long, I also know that if the difficulties aren’t properly addressed, dyslexia can be devastating.   

And that’s what I want to talk about today.  I’ve worked with so many incredible kids and young adults over the years with all kinds of potential that was locked away behind their reading problem and their embarrassment, and their shame.  Once the roadblocks to reading were removed, they just blossom and become the students and adults they already had the innate potential to be.

We have a student who started with us when he was in the third grade - he’s in fourth now and getting ready to graduate from our center... but on his first day, I thought he was the coolest kid. He was so brilliant. He was curious.  He made all kinds of fascinating observations.

Reading, of course, was really hard, and he didn’t want to engage with it—but because we had connected, he did.

So after his session I went out and said to his mom, “You have such a great kid. I really enjoyed working with him. ”  And she looked at me and said, “Really?”

She went on to explain that at school, he was in trouble all the time. Teachers didn’t like him and didn’t want him in their class.

Because if you’re smart, and creative, and you can’t access reading and writing, what do you do? You talk. You joke. You disrupt. You get everyone off track.

And suddenly, that becomes the problem.

I also remember a seven-year-old girl who was extremely disruptive in class.  Her parents brought her to us for help with reading, but this little girl was all over the place.

Before we could even begin to address reading, we had to help her develop body control—just knowing where her body was in space and being able to sit in a chair.

And what was fascinating is that as her body became more regulated, everything else started to change.

She became less sensitive. She could wear different clothes instead of just one pair of loose pants. She started eating a wider variety of foods. It’s like her whole system became more settled.

And then we were able to build the auditory and visual skills that she needed to make sense of reading.

By the end of second grade, she was at the top of her class—not just academically, but behaviorally. She acted like a kid at the top of her class!  She was attentive, engaged, and reading and writing at grade level.

This little girl was like a different kid. 

It looked like a miracle to her family. But what it really was, was addressing the root of the problem through targeted, consistent development of the lagging processing and learning skills.  Once she could control her movement and her brain could accurately perceive the letters on the page and hear the sounds in words, she was able to show us who she really could be.

Dyslexia usually involves an auditory and a visual component and sometimes a kinesthetic or writing component as well.  So we’re going to take a look at each of those so that you can more easily recognize what’s happening for your struggling reader.

Let’s start with the visual aspect of dyslexia.

Students have described what reading actually looks like for them—and it’s very different than what we assume.

If you’re a good reader, you look at the page and you see individual words separated by white spaces and punctuation marks, and arranged in orderly sentences and paragraphs.

But I’ve had students tell me the letters move. Words flip around or squish together or pull apart. The page looks like it’s pulsating or shifting.  Words might be running off the page.

One adult student described punctuation marks like gnats flying all over the page.

Others say that the words blend together into a solid line.

Imagine trying to read like that.

Visual disorientation on the page is often, not always, but often a characteristic of dyslexia and it’s extremely uncomfortable.

 

I remember a teenage girl who literally looked seasick when she tried to read a page of print.  She was a very quiet, compliant student who would just plow through and keep trying, but many times, our students who experience significant disorientation on the page like that get really angry when asked to read.  Even students who aren’t typically angry kids.

 

I think part of it is the frustration of knowing they should be able to do it and they can't. But the other part of it is that they're expected to do something that feels physically bad to them. 

So part of addressing dyslexia is helping students recognize and stop the disorientation—helping the brain process visual information more clearly and consistently.

Dr. Terri Lawton, founder of Perception Dynamics Institute has identified this as a timing issue between two very specific visual pathways in the brain - the magnocellular pathway and the parvocellular pathway.  

 

Dr. Lawton is a neuroscientist and I am not, so I’m going to share with you what she told me in simple layman’s language. And that is, that when the timing between these two visual pathways is not quite in sync as it should be, it's as though the eye doesn't know where to look in the word, which can cause letters and words to be confusing to look at on the page. 

Ron Davis, of the Reading Research council, approached disorientation as a perceptual shift that can occur when dyslexic individuals lose a stable point of reference, causing letters or words to appear distorted or unstable.   His work focuses on helping individuals consciously recognize and control that disorientation to stabilize print and improve reading.

Dr. Deborah Sunbeck, author of The Infinity Walk uses coordinated movement and visual tracking patterns to help integrate the visual, motor, and attention systems, to support more stable visual perception and improved focus on the page.

 

We have found the strategies of all three of these innovators, as well as tracking and perception exercises from the field of developmental optometry, have been very effective in reducing or eliminating disorientation on the page so that our students can read more comfortably, read more accurately, and for longer periods of time.

 

The auditory aspect of dyslexia has to do with how the brain processes the sounds inside of words—what the sounds are, how many there are, and the order they’re in.

Our language is a phonetic language. If the brain isn’t clearly perceiving and organizing the sounds, reading will be difficult.

Words like “spot,” “stop,” and “pots” all contain the same sounds, the same letters—but in a different order. If the brain isn’t processing that sequence clearly, those words could all seem the same.

If you’re not discriminating fine differences in sounds, like in the word pin and pen, those could be the same word.

If your brain is not noticing every sound in words, you might see the word brook and say “book,” or you might say the word lunch and write “luch” - l-u-c-h.  A good reader will quickly catch errors like those, but a student who isn’t accurately processing the sounds in words will not.

Darren was a brilliant, charismatic nine-year-old boy. He could talk about anything.  He was the kind of person that others just naturally wanted to be around.  

But he couldn’t read at all.

In spite of being so brilliant, he wasn’t able to be in a regular classroom, and no one really expected that to change. His IEP said that over the course of a full year, he would learn just ten survival words—words like men, women, caution, and stop.

The challenge was that Darren couldn’t make sense of the sounds in words.

You might hear that and think, Well, how is that possible with a child who is so verbal and articulate?  Sometimes the poor phonemic awareness, or processing of sounds in words, can affect a person’s speech – and sometimes it doesn’t.  

In Darren’s case, it didn’t. He was a good talker. He could use words easily. But when he looked at print, he couldn’t break words apart into sounds or attach those sounds to letters. He processed words as a whole—he could say them—but the individual sounds inside the words didn’t make sense to him. So the letters themselves had no meaning either.

We worked together for about two and a half years, very closely with his mom, who supported him every day.

But once his brain was able to process the sounds in words clearly, everything changed.

He took off. He became a reader and a writer. He went on to graduate from high school in honors classes with no outside help.

And that’s what I want parents to understand—these kids have so much potential. It’s just locked behind the inefficient way their brain is processing information.

And while reading practice absolutely has its place, in the case of dyslexia, more practice alone isn’t the answer. In fact, the more you push reading without putting those foundational skills in place, the more frustrated the child is going to become.

So now, let’s talk about that third aspect, the kinesthetic aspect of dyslexia.  This is the difficulty that some dyslexic students have remembering and writing letter symbols accurately and without reversals.  

In his book, The Four Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss tells the story of how he nearly failed kindergarten because he refused to learn the alphabet.  He went on to say that his teacher didn’t give him a reason why he needed to learn the alphabet and when he pushed back, he was labeled as a bad kid and put at the “bad table.”

There is no evidence that Tim Ferriss is dyslexic, but his story brings to mind a number of things about dyslexia.

Dyslexic students often have trouble learning the alphabet and even as teens or adults, they may need to sing the alphabet in order to write it.

Many people think that dyslexia is when people reverse or invert numbers of letters (flip them or turn them upside down when reading or writing).  That can be a characteristic of dyslexia, but as we’ve talked about, dyslexia is much broader and more complex than that.

One of the things that stood out to me in Tim Ferriss’ story was that his teacher didn’t give him a reason to learn the alphabet.

Individuals with dyslexia often have strong comprehension and reasoning skills.  If you can connect meaning to something, it becomes much easier for them to learn.  Without meaning, letters are just a whole bunch of random symbols that are very difficult to hold onto.

Dyslexic students often have difficulty writing - not because they don’t have great ideas - they do!  But remembering how letters are formed can be very effortful and time consuming.  When combined with the spelling challenges and disorientation on the page, a sentence or a page written by a dyslexic student can be really difficult to read.  Words may be written in a long stream with no spaces, letters may float above and below the line.  You may see capital Bs and Ds in the middle of words because the student can’t tell the difference between the lowercase letters and uses capitals to compensate.

A written product from a dyslexic student could easily be so indecipherable that it lands them at the “bad table” for not trying, when the reality is that whatever they got onto the page was extremely effortful.

Accurate handwriting depends on:

• Seeing letters clearly (visual skills)
• Knowing what they look like (which is called orthographic memory)
• Planning - motor planning - how to form the letters
• Controlling the hand  which requires motor and kinesthetic feedback
• Organizing them in space (spatial skills), and
• Doing it automatically, which requires attention and efficiency

When these underlying systems are strong, handwriting becomes smooth and accurate and effortless. When they’re weak, handwriting becomes slow and inconsistent and mentally exhausting.

These underlying skills can be developed, but demanding a student write more neatly or landing them at the bad table because of lack of effort will not work.

They’re not refusing to write or handing in messy papers on purpose.  In my experience, kids want to do well, and they will if they can.

 A few years ago, we had an 11-year-old dyslexic student who could not recognize a single letter.  I will never forget the day that letters started to make sense to him. It was almost magical.  He was so excited and so proud of himself he went to every clinician and every other student in the center to demonstrate that he could recognize the letters of the alphabet.  

That moment changed everything. For the first time, he could begin to see himself as a student.

This student, who up to that point had been an absolute  master at finding ways to resist and get out of any kind of schoolwork, poured all of his energy into trying to read.  A year later, he was named the most improved student in reading in the entire school district!

No matter what it looks like, our dyslexic students, our struggling learners, want to succeed.  And it is possible.

Before we wrap up, I want to touch on something that many parents are wondering about today.

With AI, and dictation tools, and technology, how important are reading and writing, really?

And it’s a fair question.

But we still live in a world of words and numbers.

AI is a powerful tool - but to use that tool well, there is a great deal of understanding that we need to bring to the table.

If we can’t read, we lose access to knowledge.
If we can’t write, we struggle to organize and express our thoughts.
And if we don’t understand numbers, we lose a lot of ability to reason through the world.

These skills aren’t just academic—they shape how we think.

And when the foundational skills are in place, everything becomes more accessible, and more meaningful, and more possible.

At Stowell Learning Centers, we help children and adults move beyond learning and attention challenges -including dyslexia- by strengthening the underlying skills that make learning easier.

When those skills get stronger, everything changes — reading, writing, focus, confidence, even the stress around school and homework.

If you’re listening and thinking, wow, this sounds like my child, you can learn more, explore free resources, or connect with one of our learning specialists at stowellcenter.com.

You can also follow us on social media. We’re StowellCenter on all platforms.

Heading into summer is a really good time to begin this kind of work. With fewer academic demands, students have the space to focus on building these underlying skills in a more relaxed, less stressful way—and that can make a real difference in the next school year.

If what we talked about today is sounding familiar, this is exactly where you can take the next step. You can learn more about our summer programs at stowellcenter.com/summer.

 

And if this episode encouraged you, please share it with another parent or educator who needs to know that real change is possible.