Dr. Steve Dykstra, Lois Letchford & Lisa McCarty 'When Learning is Trauma'

Hello, I'm Lois Letchford. Welcome to my livestream. We're doing a 10-week series, When Learning Is Trauma. Our first guest is Dr. Steve Dykstra. We're live now. I am Lois Letchford, author of the book Rebirth: A Memoir and Literacy Problem Solver. And before I begin, I've got to acknowledge and thank my son Isaac for getting the technology up and running. Otherwise, none of this would have happened. Over to you, Lisa.

And I'm Lisa McCarty. I'm a parent and a wife of dyslexic learners. I'm also a registered nurse, and I've had over 13 years of experience, mostly in the mental health and the ER, and I'm an advocate for dyslexia, and that's what's bringing me here.

And today we welcome our guest, Dr. Steve Dykstra, who's Bio I love. He's a clinical psychologist and troublemaker in the reading world. He says in his biography, our children pay the highest price for our failures and mistakes. Welcome, Dr. Dunningstrom. To begin, could you start with a working definition of when learning is trauma for us?

So The thing to keep in mind about when learning is trauma, it's stressful when it doesn't go well. Anything doesn't go well, that's stressful. It crosses the line into trauma when it begins— we have to remember what the word trauma means. Trauma refers to injury. And so when the difficulty with learning becomes so substantial and sustained and the child doesn't see improvement and they start to lose hope persistently enough that it starts to undermine their opinion of themselves, it does trauma to their self-image, it does trauma to their relationships, it changes their mood and their behaviour so that, like ripples on the pond, it causes other problems in the rest of their life, now it's becoming trauma. It's causing injury that's going to take some special attention and special time to heal.

That's a fantastic definition to me.

Yeah, and, you know, one of the things to keep in mind is that stress and trauma, multiple stresses and multiple traumas, have this phenomenon where they add up, they sort of layer up on top of each other. And very quickly, even the lives of children, they can exceed your coping ability. They can exceed the limits of your own resilience. And so the kids I'm always most worried about— I mean, I want every kid to learn to read. I think any child who doesn't learn to read, who experiences that stress, who suffers that trauma, is in some danger. But the kids I'm really worried about are the kids who've already accumulated a lot of stress and trauma, who have suffered other losses, other failures, other difficulties. And we don't always know who those kids are. You know, they come to school and they're already near the edge. They're already near the breaking point. And then reading doesn't go well for them. Those are kids who can be very deeply traumatized, sometimes very quickly. They already are, and we're just going to potentially add to it.

Can you tell us some of the stories that you— that have impacted you?

Well, yeah. So, you know, one of the stories I tell, and there may be people watching who have heard me talk about this, was a girl. She was 16 years old. And I'm coming to you from a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin right now. And so she had been flown down by helicopter from some small town in Wisconsin the night before and was delivered to our children's hospital, a really good hospital. And I went over the next day to deal with some legal paperwork that was— that had followed her down here. She was flown down here because she had tried to kill herself. She had tried to kill herself in a quite serious way, had almost been successful. That's why they had to put her in the helicopter. When I got to her the next day, her mother was there with her. That isn't always the case. An older sister had come from college overnight and was there with her. That's unusual for me to see that much family support. And I talked to her about what had gone on in her life up until this point and learned that she was largely— while they were there now, she was largely estranged from her family. She hadn't lived with them for some time. She was staying with a series of friends for a week or two and then would go to another friend, sleep in a spare room or on a piece of furniture, and then eventually move out and go to somebody else. 'Cause she had had a falling out with her family. And she had been doing that long enough and been vulnerable long enough that she had been raped twice while that was going on. And the second one was by a boy at her high school who was very popular and a successful, popular athlete, star of the school. And when he got in trouble for what he did, and there was considerable evidence, He was lost to the school and lost to his friends and lost all his teams. The teams wouldn't be successful, so she was targeted by the rest of the school community and by the community she lived in for taking their hero away. So her life was quite difficult. What's remarkable about that is she and her mother and her sister talked about all of that in a very matter-of-fact way. Then I asked the question. That I've learned to ask, and I encourage people when they're talking to older kids to ask this question. As long as you give me— you don't have to give me credit when you ask the question, you just have to give me credit in your own head while you do it. This is that really clever Dijkstra question. I say, when you first started school, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and I typically wave my hand as I say it, was there anything that was more challenging or difficult, anything that made more trouble for you than everything else? Like Behavior, math, reading. I always offer reading as the third one, but it's always the one I'm the most interested in. When I asked her that question about reading, her head— she tipped her head down. Her mother looked at the wall and then started to cry. Her sister pulled out a tissue and started dabbing her eyes and was weeping. And she said— the girl said, reading. And I noticed the reaction from everybody, and I asked her, you know, tell me about that. And they all started to tell me about when she was a child and reading was so difficult for her, in spite of the fact that everybody else in the family read easily and well. She couldn't read, and the only advice they got from school was to read to her more, read to her more, read to her more. So they were reading to her just like virtually every waking moment, and her older siblings would take turns. They talked about the experience of Seeing a word on a page and working hard to figure it out, and then seeing the same word, exact same word, in the next sentence or on the next page, and her little brain treating it like she had never seen it before in her life, and just how perplexing that was. And by now they were all crying, and I commented that they talked about the family strife and they had talked about the rapes, and nobody cried. But they cried about this, and I asked them what that was about. And the girl said, you know, I'll get back with my family. That'll get better. I know that'll get better. It's already getting better. I'm probably going to move in after this. And she said, you know, the rapes will be behind me at some point. Those will start to disappear behind me. They'll get further and further in the past, and I'll get over that. I'm already getting over that. But she said not being able to read. She said, that's all the time. That's every day. That's— that's gonna still be there tomorrow. And just how really deep that frustration goes. You know, we had a conversation about what it's like to know that you're smarter than most of those other kids in the class, but you can't show it.

Yeah.

That nobody believes you. You know, the conversations I have with kids will tell me they have great ideas in their head, but writing them on paper is so painful because they spell so poorly and writing is so difficult. They— like one kid, boy, said to me recently, I write stupid little kid stuff, and so they think I'm like a stupid little kid.

Yeah. Steve, I know, um, you, you tend to see the most severe cases in your professional, um, field. And since we know a little bit or a lot about, you know, the science of some of these learning problems, and we do know that a lot of this tends to run in families, in your professional— in your field, do you tend to see families who this is sort of a cycle?

It's very common. One of the things we run into, and a lot of my clientele are poor and minority and urban and, you know, all the things that go with this. One of the things we see is the challenge that parents have, how hard it can be to rally themselves and address these issues because it brings back so much of their stress and trauma from the difficulties they had. How hard is it when you are a child who did— when you as a child did poorly in school Got in trouble at school, hated school, avoid school at all costs. And now your kid's getting in trouble at school, and the school says, "We need you to come up here for a meeting," and you're going to sit as one adult in a room full of five or six educators who are going to tell you everything you're doing wrong. And you still feel like that third-grade kid who just feels like being in school is the worst experience of my life. I don't ever want to be in the school. You know, one of the things I say when I do trainings for teachers is. They need to keep in mind, teachers really need to keep in mind that when they— that it's not going to be natural for them to understand a kid who struggles in school. Because teachers are people who did so well in school and liked school so much that they went to school for a long time so they could get a job working in a school. You know, that person is not going to automatically understand that 3rd grade boy who figures it would be worth getting suspended and yelled at and had all that trouble, because at least I wouldn't have to go to school for 3 days.

That's an excellent point. And that was part of my question. And the next question is, why do you think that the dots aren't always connected? I mean, you answered some of it. But even in the fields like psychology, psychiatry, social work, and the education system, it looks like a lot of the behaviors are what I would call avoidant behaviors that some of these students have, everybody starts to focus in on the behavior as the problem, as opposed to finding that underlying thing, the difficulty in the learning. Why do you think that those dots don't necessarily get connected?

You know, one of the things that happens is we have to remember it is a two-way street. We've treated it as a one-way street. Sure, he's not learning. He or she isn't learning. This boy isn't learning because he can't behave himself. If he would just behave himself, He would learn someday when he behaves himself, when you people over there get him to behave himself and fix him, then I'll be able to teach him. Well, that day is probably never going to come. Um, and that, that lane is real. I mean, that side of the street is real. It's just that it's a two-way street. If the child could learn, their behavior would get better. If their behavior got better, They would learn more easily. Both sides of the street are real. The question is, for any given child, where do we have the best chance to intervene? And if we follow the science, the fact of the matter is, except you know some kids, you know the most common medication we give to kids who have behavior problems are stimulant medications, and for some kids they're very very effective. Yippee! That's wonderful when that happens. But for a lot of kids, they're marginally effective or not effective at all. And after those medications, their choices are pretty poor. And so in those cases, our most effective intervention is to figure out how to teach them to be readers as a way of addressing their behavior and recognizing that the scale tips more and more the longer kids are in school. Most kids come to school in kindergarten and first grade with a pretty positive attitude, pretty excited about what's going on here, just blissfully expecting wonderful things to happen. This is going to be the greatest experience in my life. And they're expecting wonderful things. And then it doesn't go that way. And worse, they can see that for other kids in the room, it is going that way. And they feel ripped off. This study I'm going to describe now, I can't cite it because it's been done a million times and it's so universally known you almost don't I don't have to cite it. If you hand slips of paper to kids in first grade and you ask them, assuming they can write, to write down the name of the 3 smartest kids in their class, they'll mostly write down names from the same 5 or 6 kids. You're not going to see all 25 names turn up on these slips of paper. They're mostly going to write down the names of the same kids. Who are they going to write down? They're going to write down the kids who read out loud the best. That's who they're going to write down. Well, you know, here's the thing. If you can't read well out loud, if you sound like crap reading out loud compared to the other kids in the class, you know it, they know it, everybody in the world knows it, and we all— and everybody's going to draw the same conclusion from that. That is, I'm not very smart. And that is a devastating thing where kids go in a matter of weeks or months From I get to go to school, this is going to be this great thing, and where I'm going to— this is going to be wonderful— to what's gone wrong, why are they making me do this, I don't want to be here. And that's going to show up in their behavior. And then we have the whole brain thing, you know, whereas we talk about regions of the brain like 4 reading centers in the brain, it's, it's not like these things aren't like books on a shelf where each book is a discrete thing. All these books are connected to each other, all these parts of of the brain, if your brain is kind of bad at one thing, there's a fair chance it's going to be bad at something else too. Not everything, but brains that struggle with one thing may struggle with something else, and often that spills over into executive function. One of the other things that happens is if you're not good at acquiring language, language is one of the organizing principles of the brain. Experience with language drives brain organization. It benefits everything else your brain does. It keeps your brain kind of neat and tidy and well-organized and well-oiled and functioning smoothly. So if you don't get a lot of experience with language because your brain's just not very good at language, you suffer the consequences of that.

Yeah.

In a lot of different ways.

That's the first time I've ever heard anyone say it so clearly and explicitly. So you've got children who then we label speech language impaired or dyslexic or developmental language disorder who lack the language experiences.

Yes.

To even say it. So what do we do? How do we approach these children?

Well, I think one of the things that we do, and we take a book out of my main gig as a clinical psychologist, is one of the most effective things you can do for people is what we refer to as psychoeducation. That is, give them, or them and their family, them and their parents, them and their caregivers, information about what it is that's happening. You know, I sit with kids who struggle to read, and I'll touch the left side of their head in no particular place, and I'll say, it's not you, it's not all of you, There's just one or two spots here on this side of your brain that don't want to dance nice with everybody else. You know, all these parts of your brain— and I'll tap on their head— to do really hard things— and learning to read is a really hard thing— all these different parts of your brain have to dance really well with each other. And you've got one or maybe two spots over here, parts of your brain that are really crappy dancers. They're really bad dancers. And they're falling down and the other dancers are tripping over them. And they're just off a little bit, but boy, you can really tell. It's not you, it's just 1 or 2 spots. Your brain is really good at other things, but we're going to— we need you to do some really hard work over and over again to get these 1 or 2 spots in your brain to dance better than they do now. But the main message there is, it's not you.

Yeah.

It's just this one or two spots in your head, and I'll touch their head with the tips of my fingers. Just these one or two, one here and one— you know, you can touch anything on the left side of there, it doesn't matter. It's not like anybody's gonna go check and say, you know, you touched the wrong spot. This idea that it's just this one little thing, and we don't notice it until it's time to read. We don't notice it until it's time— you know, the other thing that we need to do as a society is— and I come back to some research here— everybody knows about the word gap. Everybody knows that poor kids, disadvantaged kids, come to school millions of words behind. They've heard not just millions fewer words, but they've heard words of lower value, lower quality, lower complexity. And they've heard those words used in less sophisticated sentences and phrases and language. And it's happened millions and millions of times and puts them at a tremendous disadvantage. We all know it.

Yeah.

We see the consequences of it. It's the main vector by which poverty impairs kids' ability to learn. There's nothing inherent in poverty that should make you less of a learner in 1st and 2nd grade. It's not like somebody has to drop quarters into your back to make you learn. Because your family has fewer quarters, you learn less. It's this accumulated experience of language in the world that has set you behind. We can fix that. We can make up our mind as communities, as a nation, that we are going to shower kids with words, with printed words, with oral language, that we're going to talk with kids till they can't stand it anymore. That we're going to surround them with words, we're going to inundate them with words, we're going to put them under an avalanche of really good words. You know, the worst thing— of all the old things we used to say about children, of all the traditional maxims of child-raising, the worst one by far is that a child should be seen but not heard. Children should hear us and we should hear them. We should not just hear them, but we should be talking with them and to them and carrying on rich conversations with them from the time they're born that greatly exceed the language that they can produce.

And when you take that then to the classroom, so then we have to give teachers the knowledge that they need to take a little bit more time with these children, but still fill them with the language experience.

Yeah, we need to, you know, we need to be filling these kids with language experience before they come to school and then really, really filling them with language experience after they come to school and never stop. You know, if somebody asks the question, how long do I have to keep this up?

Forever.

You know, forever. You just keep filling them with language and interesting things. I think, I think, you know, Nobody's going to give me this chance. If I was running an elementary school, a significant part of what we did during the day would be about having wonderful, interesting experiences and learning interesting stuff that I'm never going to test you on. I have no intention of testing you. I just want you to fill your life with words and discovery and have experiences and talk to me about it and talk to each other about it because it, you know, 'Cause it's the language, stupid. It's all about the language. It's about the language. Social studies is about language, and science is about language, and English language arts is about language, and mathematics is about language. We can teach you the rest of it later. As long as we fill your head with words and language and get those parts of your brain working and dancing beautifully together, we can fix the rest— anything else that's missing, you know. If you missed the unit on Egypt in 4th grade, we can teach you about Egypt later. You know, it's not a big deal that you learn about Egypt. It's a big deal that you learn stuff and use language to learn it and use language to tell people what you've learned and get into that reciprocal experience of language, both in writing and orally, and do it absolutely as much as possible.

And Steve, do you, again, in your professional field, and it's been my experience that mostly the kids that are struggling, maybe they've come to counseling services or they've wound up in the ER for crisis things, they don't know that the reason that they were struggling in school, they don't understand that, the families don't understand that. Is that your experience that people largely, if they have a learning problem, that they don't understand that? Nobody's told them that. Nobody said, as you said, hey, you know, you just have a couple little areas that aren't functioning well, but that's not, you know, you're not broken. Do you mostly see that people don't really understand that, or?

It's been my experience that you could have a language-based disorder from the time you're born, arrive in school, struggle obviously from day one in school, struggle all the way through 12th grade, See 5 different doctors and 3 different therapists and be in and out of hospitals and clinics, have an IEP and M-Team evaluations throughout the time you're in school, and never encounter even one person who has any idea what's going on.

Yeah, I, I feel like that's dangerous. Um, and again, like, why are the dots not being connected? I mean, why is psychology not addressing it either? Education?

What happened is that People assume that that's the school's thing, the school's gonna take care of that, that's where the experts are gonna be. But the experts, the people at school who should be experts have been cut off largely from the information they need. I'm not suggesting that these are bad people. These are really, really good people who do a job I lack the courage to do. And, but they have been deprived of the information they need to have. It isn't provided to most psychologists or physicians or pediatricians. Because the presumption is that this is outside the scope of their practice. They aren't going to need it.

Yeah.

It's just like medical school doesn't teach you how to change a tire because the assumption is you'll either learn that someplace else or somebody else will do it for you.

Right.

That's not what medical school is about.

Yeah.

But we're all assuming somebody else has got this. Well, somebody else has got this. Somebody else is going to take care of this. Nobody's going to take care of it. For the most part, nobody's going to take care of it. We're all going to cross our fingers and, and hope that the light goes on. And, you know, the fact of the matter is, most kids who struggle to read, the light will eventually go on to some degree. They'll develop phoneme awareness, and they'll, they'll painstakingly pick up phonics, however kids do that, by 6th grade or 7th grade or 8th grade or 10th grade. The problem is How do you make up for everything they missed in the meantime? And how do you make up for the opinion of themselves that have been ingrained in them?

Yeah, that— what you've just said is a significant problem. You talked about, you know, stress adding to the trauma, and I think that's what you're getting then talking about now.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, when I've talked to You know, I'm not a tutor. I don't tutor kids. I've never taught anybody how to read. I know something about— I know about those things, but I don't have the practical experience doing it. When I talk to teachers who do it, one of the things I say that's the most popular is I say, you know, it's my considered opinion that there are days you will look into a child's eyes and look into their soul and realize today is going to be a light day. They just can't take it today. We're going to need to back off today and go a little slower. Because there just are going to be days like that. You just can't have too many of them. You know, you have to find some way to, to take the practice of learning to read and turning it into something that adds to the child's resilience and adds to their sense of themselves instead of detracting from their sense of themselves.

Right.

It's really important that kids see themselves making progress, and it's really important that we get to these kids You know, one of the other things I want to say, and on this the research is abundantly clear, we should be intervening with kids before we're sure.

Yeah.

Because if you wait to be sure, if you wait to be sure, you've already waited too long. And if you intervene with a few kids that you look back later and go, you know, we probably didn't need to intervene with those kids, so what? You didn't hurt anybody. It's not like you amputated their leg. It's not like you said, well, there might be a tumor in their leg. I'm not sure. Let's hack their leg off. You're doing a good thing for them. It's a good thing that you're doing for all of these kids. And if you wait to be sure, I mean, that's one of the most insidious things about the prevailing views of reading instruction for the last 40 or 50 years. was because they saw intervention and the explicit teaching of phonics and phoneme awareness and all these other things, because they saw the explicit teaching of those things as really regrettable and sort of soul-sucking kinds of experiences that we should save our kids from if at all possible, the idea was that you wouldn't do this unless it was absolutely necessary. You should do it at the first hint that it even remotely might be necessary. You know, somebody asked me, how do you tell if a kid is at risk for not being able to read? My answer is, can they read yet? And if the answer is no, then they're at risk that they won't. Treat everybody who's not reading yet as being at risk of not reading. You know, wait and see is never, ever, ever— it serves no purpose. You'll get away with it with some of these kids, but it doesn't do— wait and see doesn't do anybody any good. Yeah, wait and see. You know, sometimes these kids just blossom later. Sometimes by 3rd or 4th grade they really blossom. I don't think there are any such kids, but what's the point of waiting? Why?

That's when we have trauma, right?

They're suffering. They're suffering.

Yeah.

The other thing I want to say, and we're going to be done in just a few minutes. So if I ever write a book, and I don't even know what the hell the book would be about, any book I write, one of my chapters is going to be how B.F. Skinner ruined it for everybody. And what I mean by that is this overreliance on punishment and reward as a way of thinking about things and treating kids. You know, the worst thing we do to kids, and we do this to boys more than girls, is we find out what's the one thing they love.

And take it away.

And then we take it away from them. We hold it over here and say, if you want it back, I need 3 good days in a row, or 3 good math quizzes in a row, or you have to read 4 books tonight, or whatever the hell it is, or I won't give it to you. All that does is teach those kids to hate our guts. You know, I let you see the thing that's the most important to me, You know, I understand the need, just because there's only so many hours in the day, to limit a kid's access to video games. You can't have a kid who needs to do 15 other things playing video games 6 hours a day. But if, if you're limiting a kid's video games, I want to challenge you to spend some time, real time, sitting with them and watching them play video games, you know. If your high-achieving child loved dance and playing the piano, you would listen to them play the piano and you would say something about it. If your struggling kid, or even your high-achieving kid, loves video games and you've never watched them play video games, you don't know what those games are, you couldn't have a conversation about their video games, what does that say to your kids? This is the most important thing in my life right now. This is really important to me. I really enjoy this, and you don't want to know anything about it.

Yeah. Just, I've listened to a few of your talks and I know that you're passionate about also including teachers as opposed to excluding them. So when we come at teachers as parents and say, you're not doing this right, you're not doing that right, people shut down. Nobody wants to hear that. But how can we all get on the same page where there's a cohesive support between parents and the schools and the doctors and psychology and all this to just understand the whole package. I feel like that seems to make sense, and we're not there.

It's really, really hard, and there are reasons for this, but it's really, really hard sometimes to have these conversations with teachers and not leave teachers feeling like you're accusing them of something or that you're blaming them. It's super difficult. It's the number one barrier we have to get across. You know, a lot of the presentations I do at conferences, are preaching to the choir and they're rah-rah and they're like pep rallies. People really love it and I really love it. Oh my God, he's so good. You know, but you can't talk— when you come up against people who see things differently than you do, you can't be like that with them. I can't, I can't go to an IEP meeting and have that kind of energy. Um, But on the other hand, it's a different strategy when I'm talking about this kid in front of me right now. The clock is ticking. This kid's future is at stake. I'm going to be a lot pushier than when I'm working with a district or working with an educational entity around the big picture of what they're going to get. I do think we are turning a corner. I do think we are getting better. I think we're getting closer to that day when we have on our side in this And they are sides have the momentum. Let me say this too: I do not hesitate to use the phrase the reading wars. I have no problem with the reading wars. I think people have to understand how science works. Science picks winners and losers, and people hate being losers. Oh, too bad! So sad! You were wrong. That's it's not personal. It's not personal. This idea that we're all just going to strike some sort of. Intermediate balance. Well, you'll get some of what you want, we'll get some of what I want. You'll get some of what you want some of the time, and you'll get some of what you want some of the time. I know you say it's not enough, but it's more than what you had before. Shouldn't you be happy with this? No, no. If I say it's X number of miles to the moon and you say it's Y number of miles to the moon, the only thing we do by taking the average between X and Y is guarantee that we're wrong.

Yeah, both wrong.

We guarantee that we're wrong. At least if we pick X or Y, there's some chance that we're correct. If we average them together, we know that's wrong. We know that's wrong. And the other thing is science is hard. Let me give a shout out to the worst thing to happen to the world of reading reform in a zillion years, and that is the What Works Clearinghouse. Because that's not how science works. You do not do science by asking a narrow question and then counting 1, 2, 3, 4 studies that seem to answer that question and looking at those 4 studies and now I have my answer. You look at the big picture. You look at the converged research. You look at what we know about brains, what we know about human development, what we know from classrooms, what we know from laboratories, what we know from looking at whole states, what we know from anecdotes, what we— yes, even anecdotes.

Yes.

What we know from longitudinal studies, when they all line up and point you in the same direction, that's the direction you go. You know, if you're driving— I'm in Wisconsin— if you're driving from Wisconsin to Florida and you have Google Maps tells you to turn left, and another map tells you to turn left, and the sign tells you to turn left, and the guy in the backseat who says, I've done this a million times before, you should turn left right now, And there's one guy on the side of the road going, go this way, go this way. You should ignore him and go in the conver— the direction of the converged evidence. Well, the converged evidence on reading is pretty damn clear. The converged evidence on reading is pretty damn clear, and it says the answer lies with explicit teaching, systematic instruction, And attention to sounds and letters until a child is doing pretty darn well figuring out sounds and letters, that that's your priority until it's not your priority. It's not your priority until the end of this unit. It's not your priority until the middle of kindergarten. It's your priority with that kid until that kid shows you it doesn't need to be their priority anymore. The other thing I'm going to say, we're running long and that's okay. The other thing I want to say is, for the people who did not see what I wrote on Spell Talk, I do not believe that kids read— kids learn to read because of what we teach them. I think kids learn to read because what we teach them starts a series of dominoes toppling in their brain that ends with them being able to read. You can't really teach them how to read. One of the things that's the most frustrating to me is people making People say, I'm going to explicitly teach orthographic mapping. Orthographic mapping is mysterious brain sorcery. You cannot teach orthographic mapping. You can increase the likelihood that orthographic mapping will occur. You can increase the likelihood that one day a brain is going to go, oh, that's what you told me. That works. This is the greatest thing ever. Then it's going to stumble across it, but you cannot teach a kid to orthographically map. You can show a kid the correspondence between letters and sounds. You can draw their attention to it. You can assess that ability and explicitly teach where things are. You can inundate a kid who really needs those experiences with as much of those as they can, as you can get them. But you cannot teach orthographic mapping any more than you can teach somebody to play music by ear. You can teach them the scales. You can teach them how to play an instrument. You can encourage them to listen for things, but the ability to play by ear is something that grows within the kid's head in a mysterious way that we don't understand. Another thing I want to point out is many of our kids are in RTI. The research study that argued for the benefits of Level 3 RTI was based on teaching phonological awareness to kids who lack phonological awareness. You can look it up. David Kilpatrick throws it around. It's a Joe Torgerson study that was done in Florida. They were taking kids with specific phonological awareness deficits, and I think they were working with them on phonological awareness like 4 hours a day. And if they did that 4 hours a day for like 6 weeks, they got to where they didn't need Level 3 RTI anymore. That's not what we're doing in RTI. You know, the model of Level 3 was all hands on deck, nothing else matters. This is what we're going to work on. We're going to work on this incessantly, one-to-one, super intensely, so that we see a day in the foreseeable future where we won't have to work on this at all anymore. And we need to find a way To do that. Now, that's practical in kindergarten and first grade. If you're not intervening in PA until third and fourth grade, you can't do it because 4 hours a day for 6 weeks expands to 16 hours a day for 7 years. You know, nobody can do that.

I do have to comment on your, your orthographic mapping. My quote is from Galileo. You cannot teach anybody anything. You can only let them discover it from within themselves. Steve, thank you for being here today. Thank you for talking. I've got so much from you. It's somewhere in the brain. It could be anywhere. I love that, that your brain isn't dancing properly. We didn't get to relationship, but stress and trauma combine to make bigger problems.

And we don't let the kids We need to have relationships with children and encourage them to have relationships with each other and as many other people as possible. The brain thirsts— the young childish brain thirsts for 3 things. It thirsts for safety and security, language, and relationships. You need to get as many of those battened down as you possibly can. They're instinctive needs of a child's mind— language, relationships, and safety and security. And if you can get those things queued up. If you can get those things working and working together, everything else becomes possible.

I printed that out, actually. I don't know if you can see it.

That's my really crappy graphic that, you know, if I was—

I like it. I think it's pretty easy to look at and it makes sense. And I think that we don't take this seriously enough, and we better start to take this seriously. And that's, uh, that was part of that. I, I enjoyed that.

I will put that up on my website. I'll make sure we have a copy. Thank you, Steve. Thank you for talking to us. Thank you for your time and for sharing your knowledge.

Thank you all so much.

Next week we've got, um, Hillebrand Pelsner joining us with reading pains. So thank you. What do I have to do? Oh, my website. I've lost it. I'm still here. You find me on— hit like and subscribe. Facebook is loislatchford.com and Twitter is @LetchfordLois. I forget all the things. Facebook account? You said your Facebook account is your— Lois Letchford. Oh, my website. I'll find it. You'll find me.

Google it.

Thank you, Lois.

Thank you, and we'll talk to you next week. And be sure to like, comment, and subscribe to my channel because those things help the YouTube algorithm know that my videos are wanted and liked by everyone. Thank you.