LD Expert Podcast with Jill Stowell
Smart Kid. Hates Reading. Why Both Can Be True
Jill Stowell and Lauren Ma
Jill Stowell: How is it possible to have a child who can explain complicated ideas, build amazing things, and come up with solutions to problems that no one else even thought of, and then struggle to read a paragraph? Or a child who's actually getting decent grades but absolutely hates reading? It doesn't seem to make sense. And when you're the parent watching this happen, it's hard to know what to believe. Is it dyslexia? Is it attention? Are they just avoiding something difficult? And most importantly, what can we do about it?
Welcome to the LD Expert Podcast, your place for answers and solutions for dyslexia, learning, and attention challenges.
I'm Jill Stowell, and today Lauren Ma and I are going to tackle some of the questions that we hear all the time from parents. Dyslexia doesn't always look the way people expect it to look, and just because a child is doing okay in school doesn't necessarily mean that reading is easy. Welcome, Lauren.
Lauren Ma: Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
Jill Stowell: It's fun to do this together again.
Lauren Ma: It's been a while. It's been a while.
Jill Stowell: Yes. So, Lauren wears many hats at Stowell Learning Centers. She is the director of our Chino and Pasadena centers, and she oversees clinical operations. She is the mom of two wonderful girls, and she has lots and lots of experience helping struggling learners and their families. So today, Lauren, we're talking about dyslexia and the questions that parents have, and I can't wait to have this conversation with you.
Lauren Ma: I'm excited as well. It's one of my favorite topics, and I can go down many rabbit holes, but I'll try to rein it in.
Jill Stowell: Well, I'm planning on it.
We are live today, so if you have questions or something that you're seeing with your own child, put it in the chat. We would love to hear from you and include your questions in our discussion.
So I want to start with a parent question, and it happens to be one that we hear pretty often. This mom says, "I see the resistance and the struggles around reading and homework every day, but the school says she's fine. What am I missing?" So, Lauren, I want to start with that disconnect. Kids can be remarkably good at hiding and compensating for their reading struggles. So what does that look like, and why can dyslexia be so easy to miss?
Lauren Ma: Well, I know that it can be easy to miss because part of what makes the dyslexic profile the dyslexic profile is that there are two sides of the coin. When we say the word dyslexia, a lot of times our brains go to the deficits: the reading struggles, the struggles with phonics, the struggles with learning. But there's another side to that coin that is part and parcel of this profile, and those are the amazing strengths that these individuals usually have. They tend to have strengths with comprehension, with the ability to make sense of their environment very quickly, read the room, and pick up on context clues. They're often really good at social awareness and perceiving what other people are feeling. I call those the strengths and gifts of dyslexia.
A lot of times those very strong strengths can mask or hide the deficits. Because if you think about it, especially in early learning, in kindergarten, first grade, second grade (those are grades I taught), all the kids are learning. They're all learning how to be students. They're all learning how to be regulated in a classroom. They're all learning phonics and fluency. And so a lot of times when these individuals are struggling with learning phonics, learning sound codes, learning sight words and spelling, we can chalk it up to development, because as educators in the classroom or as parents, we're seeing strengths. And our brains can't really understand both. How can this really smart student, who participates in classroom discussions and can get the answer right if I give them the questions orally, also be struggling?
The other piece of that gift is that they have such strong social skills and social perception. A lot of times they're charmers. They're charismatic. Teachers love them: "Yes, you're always adding to my class discussion. You're asking these big-picture questions. You're so smart." They get a lot from their environment that way, and they can kind of charm those around them. And then when they get home, all of those struggles that were piling on during the day ("I wasn't good at that, and I wasn't good at that, and I didn't pick that up, and this wasn't hard for the kid next to me, but it was hard for me"), all of that comes out. So a lot of times, as parents (and I have kids that absolutely fall into this category), at school they can turn it on. They can mask, they can use their charms and abilities, and they can kind of get by. And then at home, as parents, we get it, right? And that's a lot of times what's happening with our kiddos.
Jill Stowell: Yeah. And that's one of the things I think makes it so challenging. I mean, there are dyslexic students who are struggling with reading to such a degree that it's really, really evident. But the strengths that you were talking about, the ability to read the room and know what they're supposed to look like and how to operate, means they can often cover it up. That does sometimes keep kids from getting noticed or getting the help they need.
And the other thing about that is that they can find ways to compensate that maybe aren't as positive. We've had a lot of kids who are quite charming and charismatic, but they're really disruptive in the classroom, because if they can't do the work well, maybe they can entertain everybody, and then nobody knows. So we get some of that. And of course, when you are smart and you can look around and you know what you should be doing, and you know that you actually can't do it that well, that can also come out as belligerence or resistance or other negative ways that kids cover. I think that happens as the problem goes on longer and longer. You may see that with the older kids.
We had a comment from someone, and I want to share this. Susie commented on TikTok. She said, "Kids in school made fun of me when I read aloud. I learned to compensate for my dyslexia on my own, and I now have a doctorate." First of all, I want to say to Susie, thank you for sharing that, and congratulations on your doctorate. That's fabulous.
A lot of dyslexic students do get teased about their reading or writing. They feel bad about themselves, and they figure out ways to compensate because they are bright and creative, and sometimes that ends up covering the problem. But it takes incredible persistence, that's for sure. Many dyslexic adults attribute their own success to persistence, and that is a great trait. And I think as parents and educators, we also have to recognize the toll that takes on our kids in time and effort and energy and self-esteem.
Lauren Ma: Absolutely. I would say they have this gift of persistence a lot of times. Especially the adults that we interact with now. They'll say, "Well, I just put my nose to the grindstone, and I just worked really, really, really hard." And I think, but what if it didn't have to be that hard? You're at the finish line. You're on the other side of that. A lot of our dyslexic parents who now have dyslexic kids come into our centers, and I've cried with so many parents because, yes, you got through it. Yes, that's amazing. Yes, it gave you a sense of grit and determination. But they'll say, "But I don't want my kid to go through that," because it was painful. There's still an emotional toll that it took on you. You knew you had to work harder than all of your friends. Your friends got to go out and hang out and have a lot of free time, and it took hours and hours and hours for you to study to get the same results. So yes, absolutely, those accomplishments should be celebrated, because that's an amazing story, and you probably have a lot more empathy for those who struggle in the world. But what if it didn't have to be so hard?
Jill Stowell: Right, right.
And I think that is really the question that we have always operated with all these years. You know, one of the things about dyslexia is that, even with all the education and the internet (I feel like I've been in this for so long, and now there's a much, much bigger picture of dyslexia), people in general still tend to think that dyslexia is about confusing or reversing letters like b and d. Certainly that can be an issue for some students, but dyslexia is a much, much bigger picture. As Lauren was talking about, it's really a whole thinking style that has these wonderful strengths associated with it, as well as some challenges.
Lauren, we had a conversation not very long ago where you were talking about how, when you help parents understand some of the different kinds of dyslexia, it's like an "aha" moment for them. They're like, "Oh, okay, now I see what my child is dealing with." Could you share a little bit about that with us, the different types of dyslexia?
Lauren Ma: Yeah. Something that we do when we do our testing, our assessment, is that it's not necessarily just to get a diagnosis of dyslexia. That's a label, and it's a very broad term. Because our work is intervention, permanent intervention, really developing new neurological pathways in the brain, you have to know exactly what skills need to be remediated. So you have to dig deeper. One of the assessments we do is called the Dyslexia Determination Test, and it will give you the exact skills that are impacted in that individual's profile of dyslexia. There are seven different types of dyslexia, depending on the skills that are impacted.
Sometimes the assumption is, "Oh, it's just difficulty with phonics and sound codes." Okay, well, that's one channel. But if you think about reading, it's multisensory. There's an auditory component. That's how we use phonics and think about the sounds in words. There's a visual component, meaning that we can recognize letters and symbols, put them together, recognize words instantly, and associate meaning with them instantly. And then there's also a motor and kinesthetic part: the ability to write your letters and for muscle memory to be involved with that, so that every single time you go to write, you're not having to consciously think about the formation of the symbols that you're making.
We have this amazing graphic to break that down, with the seven different types of dyslexia. The three components are "nem-kine," which is that motor-kinesthetic piece: I can form my letters, there's muscle memory, and I don't make reversals because it's ingrained in me. I know the orientation of my letters. There's the "phone" part, and we know that piece better. That's the auditory part. I'm able to think about the sounds in words and manipulate them in order to spell. And then there's "eides," the part that's the whole form. I can recognize a symbol for what it is, and it doesn't get disoriented in my mind. I can also recognize sight words, which is a really essential part of understanding this profile, and I can recall whole words for spelling and spell them correctly. This is often a piece that gets overlooked: we can remediate the reading, but the spelling is still impacted with traditional interventions.
So there are all three components, and then combinations thereof. You can have dysnemkinesia, you can have dysphonesia, you can have dyseidesia, and then mix them all up. It is sometimes just one type, but humans are so diverse that it can be an entire assortment of combinations of these impacted skills. So you can have dysphoneidesia, you can have dysnemkineidesia, and we call the whole enchilada dysnemkinphoneidesia, which is all three areas impacted.
When we explain this to parents, they're like, "Yes! Oh my gosh, yes." Because a lot of times, traditional interventions are trying to treat one type of dyslexia, and a lot of times that's not even the type of dyslexia that this individual has. So the intervention has not necessarily been all that successful. Traditional methods of dyslexia intervention tend to focus on dysphonesia. So you have the traditional sound-symbol and sound-sequencing programs that work on decoding and encoding. But then, with those two other areas, the individual still has reversals when writing, or gets confused with symbols, or has a difficult time with spelling and with recognizing sight words that are not phonetic.
Jill Stowell: That makes sense.
Lauren Ma: So anyway, that's a whole bunch of terminology around that. But I think this is a really neat graphic, and we're going to put the link so that you can refer to it, because for parents it's been so eye-opening as far as understanding why their child is struggling and why traditional interventions have not been successful.
Jill Stowell: Right, right. You know, you were talking about how sometimes reading comes along, they start to be able to read, but spelling lags. I think that's worth talking about a little bit. We have a phonetic language, and once we start to understand the sounds in the language, it's easier to make sense of the words. But there are also strong visual pieces in our language as well. So a student may get to the point that they can start to understand the sounds that they're seeing on the page, blend them together, and start to read. You put that together with their typically strong comprehension, and now maybe they're becoming a reader. But man, they work and work and work to get those spelling words for a test, and then the next week they have forgotten them. Well, that's involved with that visual piece. Yes, you have to know the sounds. You also have to have a picture in your mind of what that word looks like, what order those letters are in. And you don't have the comprehension to help you along with spelling. So spelling does sometimes lag and take a little bit longer, because there are so many skills involved.
I was also thinking about the fact that reading is now considered primarily an auditory activity. There's a lot to reading that's auditory, because you've got to be able to think about the sounds. However, we also have to know what words look like, and we have to be able to track along the sentences and everything.
We had a comment on TikTok, a question. Someone said, "Why does everyone say that dyslexia is not a vision issue?" And that is a really great question, because there is a visual component to reading and to dyslexia. But when people say that dyslexia isn't a vision issue, what they mean is that it isn't a problem with the eyes. A person can have perfect 20/20 vision and still have dyslexia, and glasses don't help. Some dyslexic readers (we actually see this quite often) experience visual disorientation. That's not their vision. It's how they're perceiving the letters and words on the page, and they actually describe it as the words moving or blurring or running together on the page. Their vision is fine, but the difficulty is in how the brain processes the visual information that it's receiving, and it makes the page look unstable. We've even had kids who feel a little bit seasick when they're trying to read because of that. So that helps you really understand why they would resist it so much.
Because the difficulty is with visual processing, the solution is to strengthen the visual processing itself. At our learning centers, that's one of the things that we do: we help students build stable, consistent visual processing so that reading becomes more comfortable, and they can look at that page and not get woozy. Anything you want to add to that, Lauren?
So that leads me to the question of what is really getting in the way. If we think there are all these different components to dyslexia, different types, what is the real issue? We had a parent ask this question: "My child was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD, but nobody looked any deeper."
I think getting a diagnosis can be a relief. Finally, there's a name for what you've been seeing. There's a reason why your child is struggling. But so often, that's where the conversation stops. Your child has dyslexia. Your child has ADHD. It's something they have to live with, so let's figure out how to accommodate it and manage it. Accommodations are important, but I think we're missing a really big, important piece of the conversation, and that question is: Why is reading so difficult for this child? What is actually getting in the way, and are there skills that we can develop that would make reading easier? So, Lauren, you touched on this a little bit, but when we're evaluating a struggling reader, what are we really trying to understand beyond whether the child has dyslexia?
Lauren Ma: Yeah. I did touch on this. When we do our assessment, we're looking beyond just a diagnosis. We're really trying to see exactly which underlying skills are impacted for this child, diagnosis or not, multiple diagnoses or not. That is why we can really get to the heart of the matter, because we're looking beyond. A lot of times when you have comorbidity, like dyslexia and ADHD, or any two different diagnoses, the attention goes to the diagnosis that we associate with behavioral challenges.
We have a little guy right here in our center in Chino, and yes, he has the dual diagnosis of ADHD and dyslexia. He's absolutely brilliant, but he has also, unfortunately, been labeled by the school as a behavior problem. So guess where all of the attention in his IEP and all of his intervention work is going? It's going toward the behavior, and understandably so. His frustration in the classroom has caused some disruption. He gets easily frustrated. He has the inhibitory control issues of ADHD, so it causes him to be really impulsive, to shout out, and to get easily overwhelmed when frustrated. And he's dealing with a lot of frustration.
He came to us with all these diagnoses, including oppositional defiant disorder. We need to look beyond that. We need to ask exactly what skills are impacted. If emotional regulation is a challenge, why is that happening? What's happening with his nervous system when he experiences challenge? And he experiences challenge a lot, because reading is very confusing to him, and he's so smart. He has a brain that works a mile a minute. He has these big, profound thoughts. He thinks in pictures. And in the earlier grades, they're trying to teach "a says /a/," and it's going too slow for him, so of course he's going to get frustrated. So he's developed this profile.
As we started working with him on regulating his nervous system and strengthening his auditory system, so he's getting better input and is able to make more sense of the sounds in words, guess what? All the behaviors decreased. And now you can see the dyslexia. It's like, "Okay, now we can do our really good work as a team with his school." But everybody in those IEP meetings previously had always been so focused on behavior, and his goals were related to behavior and emotional regulation as opposed to reading. So a lot of times that can happen, too: the diagnosis that gets more attention, or that is associated with more behavioral challenges, will override the true intervention for dyslexia. And it's both. I'm not saying they're two separate houses. We're connected beings. But understanding that full, robust profile and all of the skills that are impacted is the starting point, more than just two separate diagnoses.
Jill Stowell: Right. Wow, I have so many colliding thoughts listening to you about that. If you think about what underlies reading difficulties, often there is an auditory processing issue, meaning that you may not be getting clear and accurate information when you're listening. When we learn to read, we have to be able to discriminate all of the sounds, and the order and the number of sounds. But also, when we're listening, we need to be getting a clear message. So if your auditory processing is not giving you a clear message, and/or your visual processing... You know, if you look at those letters and, doggone it, b's do look like p's and d's, and you're supposed to be able to figure it out but you can't, and things seem to be moving around on the page, well, that causes a real sense of insecurity in your environment. Things aren't as clear as they need to be. So either you're going to do something to avoid it, or you're going to withdraw, or something. A lot of the behaviors we're seeing are really, as Lauren said, going right back to those underlying issues that are causing the reading or the writing challenges. So we definitely have to look under the diagnoses and under the symptoms that we're seeing.
We had a listener, Jane, ask, "What is the recommended age to get tested for dyslexia?" I'll start, and then, Lauren, I'll let you tag on.
First of all, developmentally, five and a half years old is the peak age for reversals. So even kids who at five maybe knew some of their letters and the letters in their name may start to show some confusion, and developmentally, that is pretty appropriate. As we learn and our perceptions grow, sometimes we gain information before a perception has caught up. So we don't want to assume, just because a five or five-and-a-half-year-old is confusing some letters or writing some letters backwards, that they automatically have dyslexia. Typically, I want to see that a child is maybe six, so we're not getting developmental things confused in there. Even seven is a good age. But sometimes with our little ones (because we do test kids as young as five), it's just so profound, so much more than other kids their age, that we know there's going to be an issue here, especially if there's a family history. So let's go after it before their self-esteem is so impacted.
Lauren Ma: Yeah, absolutely. And we do have tests as young as kindergarten age, like a pre-screener for dyslexia. I would say to parents also: yes, if those markers are there, if there's a family history. If you see the strengths, if you have a very precocious child who is big-picture, who's very relational, who picks up on the emotions of others very easily, and you're seeing some delays and difficulty getting some of the skills being taught in school in place, I would say that would be a marker for further exploration and testing. I always go back to the two sides of the same coin. You will see the strengths. We tend to focus on the deficits, of course, because we want to eliminate that pain, but you'll see the strengths as well. A lot of times now I see these kids out in the world, and I'm like, "Hey, that kiddo has an amazing skill. I wonder if maybe there are also some challenges with reading or learning," because that profile fits. So that's what I would say to parents.
Jill Stowell: Yeah. And I would also say to parents, you need to trust your gut about this. I've talked to so many moms in particular who have second-guessed themselves because their child is doing okay, or they're young, or they're a boy, and they're like, "Am I really seeing something or not?" If you feel like there's something, check it out. It's worth checking out.
Lauren Ma: Yeah, absolutely. I can say that about mom gut as well. I never knew it existed until I became a mom.
Jill Stowell: Right? That's right. Mom gut.
So there's another part of Jane's question, and it is: "Does dyslexia impact executive functioning? And if so, what interventions can be used to support the individual?" That's a big question, and it varies a little bit based on age, but let's jump into that a little bit.
Lauren Ma: Absolutely. Dyslexia can absolutely impact executive functioning. With executive functioning, you have to really break it down again by skill, and one of the first areas I go to is working memory, one of the primary executive functions. Working memory is your ability to take in information, hold on to it, work with it, and use it in the moment. As you're watching or listening to this podcast, you're using your working memory. You're listening to what we say. We're giving a lot of information. You're holding on to it. You're relating it to something that perhaps you're experiencing or that you've seen, a way to conceptualize this information. If you have questions, you're putting them in the chat. You're working with that memory, you're going to learn something, and you're going to have a takeaway.
In individuals with dyslexia, working memory is often an impacted skill. It's the skill that makes it difficult when we hear, "Here's the sound, here's the sound." The e and the a together: okay, it says /ē/. The child has to hold that in working memory and remember that when he or she sees "ea," it says /ē/, and now that I see it in a word, I'm going to be able to use it. All of that is using a lot of working memory. And if that's an impacted skill, and we know that it can be, we're going to forget it quickly. A lot of times this is where that frustration piece comes from with parents when we're doing homework: "Okay, I just taught you this. I just taught you that this says this, and it's gone." There wasn't a way to hold on to it, because working memory is impacted.
It could be visual working memory. It can be auditory working memory. It can be both. So again, I stress this over and over again: the assessment process is really important for breaking it down. We have some dyslexic learners who have amazing visual memories for wholes, for the whole picture. You show them a picture and they remember every detail. They experience something, they went to a place, and they can tell you all about it. They're using their hands, gestures. You can see that those spatial relationships are there. Spatial memory is there. They have amazing visual working memories, but the auditory working memory is really impacted. They can't hold on to more than three digits of auditory information at a time.
So think about that. If you're given a spelling word or something to write down, and you can only hold on to three pieces of information at a time, you're going to constantly be losing it: "Oh, I forgot. Oh, I forgot." When you go to decode a word that's more than three letters long, you're saying the first sound, the second sound, the third sound, and by the time you get to the fourth sound, "I lost it. I forgot what I was saying." So it can impact progress, despite doing all of the best methods and having all these really great tools. Working memory absolutely can be impacted, and that's an executive function, and we see it getting in the way of learning.
Jill Stowell: And a lot of times, when people think about executive function, they think of self-management and following directions and follow-through and due dates and all of those things. You gave an example with reading and spelling, but that same skill of being able to hold the information and act on it impacts following directions, getting your assignments and materials together for homework, and remembering what's on your calendar. The skills are all connected.
Lauren Ma: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Jill Stowell: Thinking about executive function again, you and I were having a conversation about this just the other day. One of the trends that we're seeing right now is young adults who made it to college, and now they're back home taking a leave from college because it was just too overwhelming. They couldn't keep up with everything they were expected to manage on their own. Our kids can sometimes go a very long way managing and compensating for the reading challenges, but you were drawing a parallel with executive function there.
Lauren Ma: Absolutely. We have seen a trend of this recently, of young adult students in our centers, which is great. Seeking that help and really getting to the root of the problem can happen at any age. It goes back to really getting at the root of the problem when we're giving intervention. A lot of these kiddos fly under the radar. They can get into systems, or they can have supports in place, that mask the actual problem for a really long time. And then they get to college and it's a whole new ball game. They have to be independent. There's a different set of rules. There's a different set of systems. A lot of times the content isn't broken down as easily.
I was talking with an adult student. He's 19 and just finished his first year in college. He has this really strong dyslexic profile. He's so relational; he has such a strong skill there. He went to a private high school, he loved all of his teachers, he had a really good relationship with them, and he was comfortable asking for help. And then he gets to college, and he has professors who are completely different. He's going to a tech college. I won't say which one. These are technical science people who don't have a lot of relational skills. And he was like, "They didn't care. They didn't know who I was. They didn't care who I was, and it made it so much harder. A lot of times they spoke really fast or they had really thick accents, and it made it so hard for me to understand them, so I wasn't getting anything out of the classes." So not only was he not able to use his relational skills, like conversing with the professor afterward or asking for extra help, but auditorily, it was so much to manage. He was overloaded all the time.
Jill Stowell: So much denser, and more for the system to work through.
Lauren Ma: Yeah. So no wonder college was so much harder than high school, middle school, and elementary school. It required a whole different set of skills.
Jill Stowell: And it also requires that the individual has a much greater sense of their own learning needs and learning patterns, of when it's not working and what they should do, because a lot of the supports around them have naturally pulled away.
Lauren Ma: So yeah, that's the metacognition piece of executive functioning. When students are ready to graduate with us, when we feel like they're really remediated, we want that metacognition piece to also be part of their skill set. When dyslexia is really remediated, it's not out of control. The skills are strong enough to support the learner, so there's not a lot of extra effort and challenge.
Dyslexic thinkers think in 3D, a three-dimensional thinking style, all the time, especially when they're trying to solve problems. Again, this is what makes them creative and able to pick up on subtle nuances socially. It makes them great builders. A lot of times they go into engineering, like my student at this UC who's an engineering major, because they're able to see and think three-dimensionally. And so the linear becomes the hard piece, the piece that requires detail and organization and linear processing. That three-dimensional thinking style is great for solving problems, but not always great when you're having to do very linear, content-heavy tasks, which is what reading and spelling are.
Metacognition is thinking about my thinking: "Oh, I'm disoriented. Oh, I've read this page three times and I didn't get a word of it. I need to use my tools." A lot of our students use it organically, naturally, after they're done with us: "Oh, I recognize that. Oh, I'm disoriented. This is not my best self." We teach them to self-regulate or reorient. A technique that we use is "Get on Point," just recognizing that about themselves: "This isn't serving me. I'm going through the motions, but I'm not getting the information." That's an important piece, because it prevents a lot of wasted time, energy, and frustration.
Jill Stowell: Right, right. So we work with students of all ages with learning challenges and dyslexia, and I'm glad we've touched on both our little ones and our older students.
There's a piece of dyslexia that I just want to revisit, because I know it's come up throughout this conversation, and it's one of the things that really concerns me. That is: What happens to a child when they're smart and they're trying, and year after year, something that seems easy for everybody else is incredibly difficult for them? I've had a number of parents tell me that their child feels like the dumbest kid in the class, or that they actually say, "I'm so stupid." I think sometimes it's easy to get so focused on grades and reading levels and getting homework finished that we miss this other piece of what's happening to the child.
Roland commented on Facebook. He said, "I knew from a very young age that something was wrong, but I got marked as a troublemaker instead of anyone helping me, and I developed a hate for school in third grade." Roland, I really appreciate that you shared that. That is so heartbreaking, and way too common. Our kids are smart. They're perceptive. They know when something isn't working, and how kids are treated and perceived impacts their identity.
We had another comment come through on Facebook. Mark said, "I'm so tired of everyone talking about dyslexia. Unless you're dyslexic, don't talk to me about it anymore, because you can't understand it." Well, I appreciate Mark sharing that. He's right. We really can't understand unless we've been there. But as parents and educators, boy, we sure need to try, because there's a lot at stake here. So, Lauren, you talked a little bit about the behaviors that you see. Are there any other comments that you have in terms of how children respond emotionally or behaviorally when they've been struggling for a really long time?
Lauren Ma: Yeah. It's like how any of us would respond if we were struggling with something and everybody could see it, especially something that feels like it should be easy. Everybody can see it. Especially in elementary classrooms, you have to read aloud. We're doing tests together. We're trading papers and grading each other's tests. There's a lot of public awareness of dyslexic learners' deficits, and again, the deficits tend to get more of the attention. That takes a huge emotional toll. I've had parents come into my office crying because of stuff that happened 30 years ago in school. You can't ignore that pain.
And I would say to Mark: I'm not dyslexic, but I have empathy for the thousands of individuals I've worked with now, because I see similarities in their stories. The reason I do this work is that I would love to help ease that pain, because I have such great empathy for these individuals, and I see that they have amazing talents and gifts that they can give the world. I don't want them to be bombarded with the pain. If we can do anything to mitigate that, to reduce that, absolutely. I don't understand it on a personal level, but I do understand it on a human level. I see another individual in pain, and it doesn't have to be that way.
We have all these examples of amazing dyslexics in the world, actors and inventors, these brilliant minds, and we absolutely celebrate those successes. But I guarantee you, every single one, if you listen to some of their interviews and public comments about their dyslexia, there is pain behind it, and rightfully so. Because at the root of it is shame: shame in the sense that someone else can see that I'm not good at something, and that it's inherently part of my value and my worth. It's not. It absolutely is not. But the systems we have in place make it very public. So the way our dyslexic students respond, emotionally and behaviorally, is honestly the same way any of us would if we were put under that same microscope from an early age.
Jill Stowell: Right, right. You know, one of the most exciting things to me is watching what happens when students begin to realize that learning doesn't always have to be so hard.
I remember a middle school student. I think he was in sixth grade when he came, and he was very dyslexic. He truly couldn't read anything, and it felt like he had built literally a brick wall around himself. All he showed the world was silence and belligerence, everywhere. That was the persona he took on, and it created a wall around him that kept everybody away. He came to us at the end of sixth grade, he was with us through the summer, and his mom made sure he was there every single day. At the beginning, he just protected himself with that wall. But eventually, over the summer, by getting underneath the reading and writing skills and starting to open up his processing and his perception, he started to be able to read. He wasn't reading at grade level by the time school started, but he was reading.
I remember the closer we got to September, the more those walls started coming up again. Thankfully, he had a wonderful teacher who noticed that he actually had some leadership abilities, and she fostered that in him. So he hung in there. By the end of the year, when he was finished with us at the learning center, it was very interesting, because he was still a fairly reserved person, but this kid who had sat there like a brick wall at the beginning would ride his skateboard over to hang out with us, even though he was done working with us. I just love how developing those skills, and seeing that things don't have to be that hard, allowed the walls to come down. And I'm sure, Lauren, you have many, many kids that you think of like that.
Lauren Ma: Absolutely. But this is not a 20-hour show. But yeah, absolutely. I love that.
Jill Stowell: So today we have talked about recognizing dyslexia and understanding what's getting in the way, and we touched a little bit on the fact that we've got to get underneath the problem. That's what's really going to make a difference. And I think the real question that parents have, under all the questions, is: Is my child going to be okay?
The first time I truly understood how a child could be brilliant and hate reading was way back in my 20s, before people knew nearly as much about dyslexia as they do today. This nine-year-old kid walked into my office, and he was like the coolest kid I'd ever met. He was talented and emotionally intelligent and charismatic, and he hated reading. I remember when his mom called me, she was crying on the phone. She said, "You have to help us, please. You have to help him." And together, we did. He went on to graduate from high school in honors classes. He went to college, and no one meeting him then would have believed that in fourth grade he was a complete nonreader.
So I want to leave parents with a note of hope. The struggles that you're seeing are real. They are not laziness. They are not lack of motivation. And the worry that comes from watching your child struggle is real, too. When struggles with reading or learning are happening, it's almost always related to weak or lagging underlying skills, and those underlying skills that are the foundation for reading and writing and learning can be developed. Dyslexia does not define your child's intelligence or their potential. It also doesn't have to be a lifelong struggle. So what you want to do is address the root causes of the challenges, and make sure that we don't lose sight of the strengths.
So, Lauren, I really appreciate you sharing your insights and your passion for helping students and families. What would you like to leave parents with before we go?
Lauren Ma: If you're a parent of a dyslexic child, I would just like you to hear that the world needs them. We need those strengths. We need them in our world to help us find better ways of doing things, to be inventive, to be creative, and to be amazing social ambassadors to those who need that. And the term dyslexia does not have to be a sentence. It does not have to mean that your child is going to struggle forever. Those pieces can be remediated. The brain can be retrained, and they can retain those amazing gifts that we want them to have for our world. So I just want to leave you with a message of hope. It does not mean that your child is going to suffer, that there's going to be pain. Those struggles can be remediated by teaching the brain a different way, and then they're going to retain these amazing strengths. So let this be a message of hope, because as a parent myself, that's all I want. I want my kids to be happy, and I want them to make their mark in the world. And your kids can absolutely do that, too.
Jill Stowell: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for that, Lauren.
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