Interview with Lisa McCarty: Nurse and mother; Discussion about Dyslexia

We're streaming already at 3:50. I don't—

you can do what you want.

I just want to get this done so that I can— So, and I've got to make sure I stop streaming at the end. Yep. There, done. I will try and talk, but maybe Thursday it might just be easier if you click on it, and then Friday onwards we'll do side by side and vlogs. Okay. Hello, Lisa, we're here!

Hello, Lois.

I've got to get our introduction. When Learning Is Trauma. We're talking about when learning is trauma with all our guests. I've got it printed out now so I can see it. I'm not doing it from memory, which is it. And I have put together a playlist on my videos of all the people speaking. I haven't got all of them yet, but anyone who's got a video on YouTube, I've been able to put together and people can go and check them out.

That's terrific.

Yeah, and see what's there. So I'm Lois Letchford.

And I'm Lisa McCarty.

And we are doing a series on when learning is trauma. I've had a lot of interest in it on, on LinkedIn. I've sent out all of our, um, posters for advertising. I expect to see more of them, and I'll do more of those posters, and I'll do them on Facebook and, and Instagram and everywhere else. And I imagine you'll do the same. And I'm waiting for my editor to get a registration button so that we can— people will email us as well, and we'll know who's supposed to be coming. So that way we can remind them to log in or check, you know, if they've missed it for whatever reason or if the time zone is not great, they can go back onto YouTube and listen again.

Oh, that's a good idea.

That's the goal. That's the goal. Ah, Lisa.

You're doing so much work on this and it's fantastic.

Well, you know, it's really quite interesting that it's something that has not been acknowledged, I don't think. And my sister has sent me another blog post and I haven't read it yet. I haven't had a chance to read it, so I've got to go and read that, and that'll all be incorporated into The whole series. And I've written some blog posts about a lady in London who— Elizabeth Talkey, I think, I can't remember her last name. But she grew up in London and when she was 2 they went back to Ghana and she didn't learn to read there.

Hmm.

And how that impacted her and how you grow up feeling stupid. And the most damaging one, I think, is when you sit in assembly and everybody points to the child and says, you're dumb, you're dumb, you're dumb.

Yeah, it's definitely, it's something that really is kind of missed, like you said, and I don't know in this day and age why that is. You know, we've known for 130 years what dyslexia was, for example. And the information still isn't where it needs to be. And that's why we're doing this series, so we can bring awareness to this, but also so people can tell their stories and others might hear some stories and say, hey, that sounds familiar. You know, I think that's important.

That's exactly right. That's— and that's the goal, isn't it? So that they're not— so people are aware that when children don't learn to read, it's not just that They're not learning to read, but there are social and emotional implications going on in their learning that is also being damaged.

Yeah.

And that's what my sister Lenore said, you know, she talked about making sure we give our feelings, you know, of what it's like to send our children to school. When your boy, when your eldest one or the second one?

My second and my youngest, my middle and my youngest.

When your second one went to school, did you get the feeling in first or second or third grade there's a problem?

Well, it actually was a little bit before that. So it was in preschool, and I think I mentioned that I missed one of the classic signs of not being able to teach him the alphabet. And I was the first one to label him as obstinate. So I thought, because I didn't have trouble with this with my first son, and my first son learned the alphabet and everything was fine, and I thought, what a wonderful teacher I am. I'm just terrific at this parenting thing. I should have more kids. I should have more because I'm great at this, clearly. And then my second came along and I went, oh, wait a second. You know, there's something wrong. And I couldn't teach him the alphabet. So I always assumed, because he did finally learn it, but I think I mentioned that— The teacher that taught him the alphabet, she was a friend of mine at the time. She was very dynamic, and I never thought to ask her how did she teach it to him. And I can only imagine that it was a real dynamic, multisensory, you know, thing that she would have done with the kids. And so he learns it. Do you need me to stop?

Isaac is listening in, and he's saying you don't need to speak so loudly because there's an echo.

Okay, so do I have to turn down anything? Just talk low.

Just talk, because that is a normal voice for her. That's a normal voice for Lisa.

I'm an ER nurse. We're loud. We got a lot of people to yell at. All right, let me— so let me try to bring it down. So he— is this a little bit better?

Is that better, Isaac? He's sending— yeah.

So I'll just keep talking again. So, you know, I— because he learned the alphabet when he finally got into— when he finally got into school, I just assumed that he didn't want to do it with me, that it was me, that he just was being obstinate. He just didn't feel like doing it. Then fast forward, when my youngest son came along and I had the same problem with him, I thought that that, you know, that my youngest son would have no problem once he got into school. But he was more severely affected by this, and he really did continue to have trouble with it. So when I look back to my middle son, that was the first red flag that I should have seen. Once he got into kindergarten, first, second grade, I think he had some trouble with reading. He did a little bit of one-on-one. He seemed to make some progress. But I think I also mentioned that he had tricks that he could use to get through the standardized testing.

Yes.

So he was doing okay on the standardized testing, and so they deemed him as being, you know, caught up and fine and didn't need any more help. Where here, he did. He did need ongoing help, but nobody recognized that. So he wasn't— my middle son wasn't as obvious. He's the one that flew right under the radar. And I think I mentioned before that a screener probably would have been better for him to pick up on some of this difficulty. Whereas my youngest son, there was an obvious problem from the start.

Yeah, yeah. You know what I think about, you know, when I think of Nicholas failing first grade, you can't do something parallel. You know how I wished I'd taken him out of school in grade 1, but if he had failed after a year with me, school would have come back to me and they would have said it's your fault because you didn't leave him in school. And when we left him in school He failed dramatically there with enormous repercussions and implications which have never been acknowledged. So as a parent, you've got this decision to make. What do I do? Do I keep the child home, you know, or do I send them to school? And you can't— it's an either/or. You can't do both.

Yeah. So what do you think the solution— I know you've mentioned that instruction has to change. in the classroom, but do you also think that awareness of what these issues are? I think it's both.

And, well, the first awareness, the first thing has to be, you know, the mindset. And I've said this before, that we cannot see these children who fail as failures. Here's a child with a low IQ. He can't do anything. He's got no strengths. That's appalling. We have to look at that kid and say, this kid's a future rocket scientist. How are we going to teach him? You know, and it took, what, another 10 or 15 years before Nicholas's strength showed through to say, yes, he is a rocket scientist.

Right.

So why do we have to have this failure in the beginning to say— to get further down the track? I mean, that's— it's the mindset that we come to it Right in the beginning, the child's a failure and can't do anything. That's what's so damning.

Yeah.

You mightn't have had that.

Yeah. And again, with just in our society, the hierarchy that we place on certain skills where reading and math and sciences are always at the top and the humanities and the arts are always at the bottom. You know, some of these people who are real creative may Maybe they're not going to be an English professor, but they stand out with art. And I don't think that we put the same importance on those skills in school. So unfortunately, some of these people have to essentially wait until they're out of school then to feel important. And that, I think that's damaging to your self-esteem.

Well, you know, That's why in a curriculum with young children in particular, it needs to be multisensory. And it's not just learning to read and write, but art and music should be there, allowing them to build up their skills and provide opportunities to learn in different ways.

Right, right. I just thought of something that happened when my— I think it was my youngest son. I had gone into the school for a party of some sort, like a Christmas party or a holiday party.

party.

And, um, they— so the teacher decided to play a game with the kids, but the game was who could come up with the math fact the fastest.

Hmm.

And which, I mean, you know, you would— you want them to know their math facts, but I felt bad after the fact watching as one little kid kept coming up with this, you know, with the answer, and the rest of them just sort of sitting there feeling so defeated during their party time that that was such a public such a public demonstration of who can do this and who can't. So I know my son struggled with memorizing the multiplication tables, still does. You know, you give him a calculator, he can do the higher math concepts, but he struggled with the multiplication tables. But here he was, a little kid, and he was at his party, and he was never the one that was answering his— answering the question. And I thought about that later to think, well, you know, a lot of these kids would be sitting there aware that they're not good at this. And I'm not trying to take thunder away from someone else, but I just, I guess I'm trying to point out that it's such a public failure.

Yeah. So, well, Professor Jo Boaler from Stanford University points to the fact that, you know, memorizing the tables is the least important thing in mathematics that we can do. And there are so many other ways, and she's really trying to change Yeah.

You know, but you, you mentioned something important because you said the mindset has to be that, that these, that these kids aren't stupid, that they don't have low IQs. But I think what happens if you're a kid that is having trouble memorizing the multiplication tables, you are right away labeled as dumb. I mean, I, I don't, I don't mean to say that the teachers say they're dumb, but they get put into a math class and the kids call it dummy math.

Yeah.

Because they're struggling with this narrow skill set. Because my son, and not all dyslexic learners are the same, as we know, but my son is better at the higher math concepts. But he does struggle if you ask him what 7 times 8 is, he has no idea. But if you give him a calculator, he can punch that into the calculator and go along and do the rest of what you're asking him to do. But the teachers didn't quite understand That they thought that because he didn't know his multiplication tables, he was stuck in this this quote unquote dummy math, and that was assuming that he he wasn't bright. And and in fact, he he did well on something in science. I think it was they were doing something with place value, and he could understand place value well. And the teacher was surprised, and she said, "I was surprised that he knew knew that." And I thought, "Well, that's a problem that you're surprised." Because that means that you don't expect anything from them, and that's, I think, what you were speaking to.

And it's the way we're teaching then. You've got to do these foundational things. We're not going to let you get past doing mathematics if you can't do the multiplication. And I think that's where the problem lies as well. We see it as a sequential step rather than a concept.

Well, math and arithmetic aren't the same thing. You know, and I don't— I think we have to, we have to make those distinct distinctions. That I remember when I was in college, that's when, when I had had physics together with calculus, that's when calculus made most sense to me, is because I put it together with physics.

Right.

And I thought, oh, wow, now I see what's going on here. You know, but, but, and that was in the college level, and I didn't have trouble with multiplication tables and things like that. But I guess, I guess my point is that there are different Math is different than simple arithmetic and memorizing multiplication tables. You know, some students might be better at physics and calculus, and maybe they're better at geometry or whatever, but they struggle with these— what you're saying, like the basic first step, and they're not given that opportunity maybe to get that second step.

My husband is a professor of civil engineering. You know, and he talks about he doesn't use numbers when he's doing his calculations for his students or when he's teaching and how they don't like that. His students don't like that. And I've seen on the Professor Rate My Professor, he has an aversion to numbers. But it's not about— because— and what he keeps saying is that the calculators and the computers do a far better job at numbers and make less mistakes than we do. But it's the critical thinking that we have to have.

Right, that's interesting. Yeah.

Yeah, and that's what, that's what he's aiming for. And I think that's what we're forgetting with our children. And your Nicholas, his wife was talking to him about, you know, what did you, what were you good at in elementary school, early in elementary? And Nicholas said, I wasn't good at anything.

Oh.

I was, you know, the bottom of the class in everything.

Well, wait a minute though, but when, so when did you introduce him to the K'Nex toy?

Uh, it actually started in Oxford. They came in the packets in Oxford as a promotion in the breakfast cereal box.

Yes, yes, I remember.

And he loved them. He loved them there. And though that was '95—

And how old was he?

7. That's when they started. But we really, really only got into it in '99 when we were in the US. And he would still—

okay.

The interesting part is that the cost of K'Nex in Australia was very expensive. One box, you know, the, the biggest box that you could buy in the US was about $100. The same thing was $400 in Australia.

It's crazy.

And it's that— yeah, you know, and that, that really was out of our price range then. But when we came to the US And you could buy $100, you could buy one for $100, but $400, you really balked at it. And that was so—

But at 7 years old though, he knew he was good at that.

He was good at that. He was good at Lego. And this is the other part, we had Nintendo, and we bought a Nintendo set in England for them for the 6 months. Nathaniel, my eldest, would zoom through it at the speed of knots. Nicholas went through and he would click out every brick and he would come to Nathaniel and say, I found this and I found this and I found— So Nicholas's persistence, even at this level, is what was ignored.

And he thought he had no strengths?

Yeah. And the school didn't see that.

So I'm asking, he thought he didn't have any strengths even though he was very good at certain things? Like, his perception of himself as, as a student was very low?

Yeah.

And that's, that's a shame.

Even in hindsight. Yeah.

That's, that's, that's what I mean. Like, that's the level that, that affects somebody.

Yeah.

You know, and you talk about people in the workforce, once they get out of school, if they get out of school, um, you know, they still may, might have some issues in the workforce or in other areas. And it, and if it still affects people, I'm, yeah.

Yeah, well, that's what he said quite recently. I had no strengths. I never felt good at anything.

Does he feel differently now?

I, you know, that's a good question. I think yes, he certainly— yes, he does feel differently now because he says, I can tell you exactly where I am in space. And he really hates Google Maps. And I don't know if he hates Google Maps, but he hates The navigation system, because his brain is equal to that.

That's crazy. So he's not stopping to ask for directions?

No.

And you put him—

and he loves the maps, loves maps. And that's what, you know, what I found interesting about the way he— I taught him was that tapping into his strengths was by accident.

Yeah, you mentioned.

And he just— it's something that he loved and he learned That he loved it and it was so much fun. And that was— I found it.

I remember how in the book, um, I have it somewhere. Here it is. Can I show it?

Yes, please show it.

I don't know if this will be backwards. Will it be backwards?

No, it's perfect reversed. I can read it.

And in the book, um, the, uh, I forgot what I was gonna say. What were we just saying? I was gonna say something about Oh, great. So in the, in the book, you mentioned that the teacher said he had no strengths. And then I think you were in Oxford when he wanted to see the map, the actual map of something or other.

Captain Cook, yes.

And then you said, oh, wait a second, how can you call this kid dumb?

Yeah.

If he's asking to see this, was that the first time you realized, really realized that he was Not what they said?

That's right. And, you know, and he, in reality, he asked me twice, can we see Captain Cook's original maps, before I called up the British Museum. And it was the, you know, the, then my child's been thinking about this, he's retained the thought, and I haven't given him a satisfactory answer, which is what surprised me. Yeah, and that's when I really realized this question doesn't come from a child with a low IQ.

Right. Yeah.

You know, and that was really important for me to see him as a child who has some strengths. I'm not— I'm not going to make any predictions about what's going to happen or whatever, but he's got some strengths. And that was, you know, when— when you then go back to Australia and the school diagnostician decides to call him the worst kid ever, I needed to have that background of seeing a child with strengths. This is what he can do.

Yeah.

Otherwise, her words would have— they could have— she could have run over me.

Right.

But no way in the world after that experience are you going to put me down.

So that's something important for parents to realize. That, you know, when, when you have testing and you have certain test results, and you know, that your child has strengths in other areas. I think, again, parents are afraid to stand up to the school, to the teachers. We mentioned the other day, you know, you're going in for a meeting with the teachers and you feel like you're sitting in front of the firing line.

Yeah.

And you're trying to explain where they, where they do excel.

Yeah.

I had to do that with, with my son, who his special education teacher called him uncreative. He called my son uncreative. My, my son, who spends all of his day telling me what he's gonna build. He's going to build this and that, and he's imagining all these great things in his next great project. And constantly, he's constantly coming up with these ideas for building all these things. And she called him uncreative. And I went, how? How do you call him uncreative? But he's not talking about building all these terrific things in school. He's paralyzed at his desk feeling like he can't do you know, what the rest of the class is doing, which isn't building stuff. I mean, this was the public school. Now he's in a private high school and they're more creative. But that was really hard for me as a parent to go in and say, uh-uh, no, you have this wrong.

Yeah.

You know, he has strengths over here. And we finally— we got him out of that atmosphere. But, you know, the kids that continue to be in the public— I don't mean to make public schools the enemy, but, you know, who are in everybody doing things the same type of a learning environment, it's hard. It's really hard for them.

You know, when I think about Nicholas's learning— no, I want to make a point there. What the word you used then was paralyzed.

Yeah, paralyzed.

Paralyzed, frozen. The important part of Nicholas in that time that we had out together, he learned not only to love learning but to make connections that otherwise wouldn't have been available.

Hmm.

And one day I finished teaching him early, and it was very rare that I did that. I must have been tired. And he went and turned on the TV, and he turned on and it was BBC History. Children's program, and they started to show Bolton Abbey, which is a place in Yorkshire that we had visited within the last month or two months. And Nicholas became so excited. Mum! He's calling. Mum! Mum! Mum! You got to come! You got to come! You got to come and see this! You got to come now! And all he could say was, "We've been there! We've been there! We've been there! We've been there!" Where is it, Nicholas? I don't know. Who were we with? I don't know, but we've been there.

Yeah.

And it was just— he was just so excited to connect that we had been there and there it is again now. And then it showed the history of the place, which I hadn't appreciated. And that took us on another search and another journey and making more connections. And his love and excitement of learning is what struck me as so important.

Yeah.

And when we talk about structured literacy, that's what we forget. We forget we have to engage them and teach them so many more things. You know what I did last night? I watched Steve Dykstra talking in Ohio about learning and trauma, and he told the story of the girl, you know, who had been raped. And that's the problem, and then that's okay, that's happened. But what was more problematic was I cannot read.

Yeah, that's a powerful story.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's— I had seen that talk too.

And I think that what struck me is in the beginning of that talk, he talked about reading research. And I think that's something that I really am quite passionate about. All of it. And he said reading research is complicated. And I talked on one of my videos this week, for every academic paper that is published, there would be, at a guess, 1,000 hours of work into one academic paper that increases the knowledge about a millimeter.

Mm-hmm.

Because it's not— it is conclusive for that group of students because you're always looking for a trial and a control group in general. Getting that, a trial and a control group across all the ages, across the socioeconomic field, across a race, all of that, the groups are only small.

Right.

So they can only say this worked for this group of children under this set of circumstances compared to— and there's what your comparison is. So people, I think, get a little bit confused about how detailed the reading research has to be. And as a consumer of it, I know how much I have read to come up with my philosophy.

Right. You know, well, doesn't he also talk about research in like the What Works Clearinghouse is what a lot of our school districts look to to see what prepackaged program is going to work. And his point too was that really, really good research is, you know, it's hard to do. You're not going to get a bunch of the same experiments to be able to make it into What Works Clearinghouse. you know, been, as you're saying, it's complicated. You can't hit absolutely everything. But I think that, I mean, the reading wars, I know a little bit about that and the whole word literature and the structured literature. And I think that one of the arguments was, well, if you're teaching phonics, you're teaching all the rules, you're not going to be as engaged. You want to give them like really good material. And then that's how they'll learn to read. But it's not as simple as either of those things.

Exactly. Exactly.

It's as simple as that. And that was the problem with the program I was talking about the other day that I didn't name. But it was terribly boring. It wasn't engaging them at all. It also wasn't teaching them any phonics. It was doing none of those things. It was just cheap and easy for the school to say, here, kids, sit here and do this. And the teacher didn't have to be well-versed in anything. And these kids were— you know, it's funny because this group of kids was They were faltered for screwing around. Well, what do you expect? Like, you got a whole classroom full of undiagnosed dyslexic learners, probably. That's A. And B, this is boring, you know. You can't—

Yeah.

What do you expect? And then, you know, some of these kids look like, oh, they're not paying attention, or they're not good, you know, their behavior problems.

And it's just— it's—

you have— there's so many pieces to this, and we've got to do better with all of it. You've got to keep them engaged. You've got to, and, you know, especially those dyslexic learners, you're going to have to do some specific teaching. I think that's good for everyone, but especially that population, because they're the ones that just don't, they don't pick it up like, like, like your typical easy reader.

But it's not even specific teaching. It's, you know, have we taught it? Can they recall it tomorrow? And if they can't, Why not? What else is going on? What— and that's the part that's missing. And that's true. A long time ago, it was early 2000s, a guy called Professor Michael Presti wrote a book about reading instruction, Reading That Works, and he said teachers need to be more diagnostic. And he's right, because I think what we're doing with programs is putting them in front of children and expecting them, well, just learn it.

Yeah.

And if they don't, we're back to blaming the child.

Right.

One of my students in Lubbock—

Or the parent.

Yeah, yeah. And the student in Lubbock was in a reading program that did long vowels first, which means there is, there's no transference to any other early reading book because most early reading books are short vowels, you know, the short, the CVC words. So you're going to long vowels and we're living in Lubbock, Texas. It looks like a wooden table, plateau, right? And we're learning about the /oa/ words. We're talking about goats, coats on goats, and we're talking about moats. Now, what's the problem? Why can't the child remember this? Because they're not learning the sounds. She may never have seen a goat in her life. She would never have seen a moat. And she wouldn't have put what a coat is when we've got coats on goats.

Well, that doesn't make any sense.

No, it didn't make any sense. Didn't make any sense.

Well, I noticed with, with my youngest son, and I mentioned he had the more obvious reading problem. And I remember when, when we finally realized that he was dyslexic, Um, I, I asked him a few key questions, and I remember one thing that used to surprise me. As he would be reading to me, um, he would have trouble with those super abstract words, you know, those function words too, you know, and the was saw there where when, those kind of things. Um, and, and then he would be able to read a word like mountain.

Yeah.

And I remember being so thrown by this because one night we were reading together and I was reading ahead just to see what was coming, and I saw the word mountain. I thought, well, he's not, he's not going to know the word mountain because he doesn't— he can't always read the word was correctly. And he just said mountain like it was nobody's business. But here his mind had assigned the word mountain to something else. He was better visually. And so then I had to try to think of ways that I could have him remember these abstract words, but it's difficult. And some of these programs, although I think they're helpful, they don't address that. And I don't speak bad about any program, but I— and I think there's good parts to a lot of these, but that wasn't helping with that piece of it.

What I would like to see is teachers have a greater understanding of every single word that they are teaching, and particularly the sight words. Because the exercise I get teachers to do in professional development is ask them to take those first 100 sight words and sort them into pronouns, words with multiple meanings, prepositions, nouns, verbs, and all of those sorts of things. Many teachers struggle with that activity to start with. And then we fail to recognize that these words often have more than one meaning. Even a word like on. Turn the light on does not have the same meaning as the cup is on the table.

Yeah, yeah, I think we take that for granted.

We do. And we assume that if the child has read the words correctly, therefore they've created the right picture in their mind.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's an assumption. We've got to get rid of these assumptions about children's knowledge. Yes.

And here's something that goes with that, that sometimes the teachers in talking with the kids, they assume that the kids know what they're talking about.

Yes.

But the child might not have a good understanding of what you've said if you're using a word that they have a different meaning for.

Yeah.

And then we say, well, the kids aren't paying attention, or whatever. You know, there's a lot of reasons why these poor kids would feel paralyzed in a classroom because of some of these things that we're talking about. These are the kids that aren't picking up, um, you know, multiple meanings of a word, as you're saying. If you have a— if you run down the street, that's different than having a run in your pantyhose that nobody wears anymore, or paint running down the wall. You might not be able to, you know, get the meaning of that easily.

That's right. And even as the language gets higher, then we use analogies and the river snaked its way through the mountains or whatever. I mean, we totally lose our children thinking it's only decoding.

Yeah. Well, I'm reading a book with my son and it's a tough book to read. And it's actually, there's a lot of French words and it's just hard. for, you know, because the words look different. And so it's very hard for him. But there are a lot of analogies in there. And I find myself as I'm reading, I think, well, that makes sense. But then I stop and I question him because I have to make sure, did they really mean this? Or do you think it was, you know, a metaphor for something? Just to see where his thinking is.

Yeah.

Because I have to be conscious of that. What I think makes sense or what I realize is, Um, you know, I can't think of an example, but what I, what I recognize as a metaphor might just be in his mind, um, something that he's taking quite literally.

Yes, yes. What's the book you're reading?

Well, I don't want to, I don't want to mention because it's, it's, it's really not an appropriate book for teenagers, but I think that they— the school, the school wants them to read it because it's so raunchy and they'll pay attention to it. I mean, I think that's Brilliant idea, but I don't want parents out there going, see, you're reading the wrong stuff. So I'm not going to say—

Absolutely valid. Because I was thinking there's a book—

There's a few choice words in there, but that keeps them engaged.

There was a book about, you know, an island, and it's a fairly famous common book, and it's got the French words in it, and it's got dialectic speech in it that made it more difficult. And it was a fairly common book that the kids would read in 5th or 6th grade in Texas. I can't remember the name of it now, so, but that's all right. Yeah. But that—

This is a book about cooking. This is a book about cooking, and that's all I'll say about that. A lot of people might know the book.

Yes, that's right.

And I didn't pick it.

The school picked it.

Yeah. That's very—

but, you know, there's a reason for that, you know. And one of the You know, as I say, I read a lot of academic literature and there's a few papers that really stick in my mind. And one was a paper called The Difference Between Skilled Readers and Unskilled Readers, or What Skilled Readers Do and What Unskilled Readers Do. And it was fascinating to me and I still remember reading it and I can talk to you about it now. It was over 20 years ago that I read it because it so resonated with how we teach. and how we see children. And we teach the unskilled readers in this way, irrespective of whether we call them dyslexic, learning disabled, or whatever. And this is what we do with— this is what skilled readers do. So yeah, you know, yeah, so I spent a lot of time trying to make sure my unskilled readers become skilled readers.

And then again, the point of this whole series that's up and coming with Dr. Stephen Dykstra first is that, you know, whether you're— if you're an unskilled reader, or you're having trouble in the classroom, how do you save your self-esteem? How do you— how do you get through that experience and feel like you've got something to offer this world? Because everybody does.

Yeah, and that's a good question for him. Good question. What recommendations do you have besides saying, yes, we have to teach them to read effectively? You know, one of the things I'm working with a student now is to get him— if he doesn't understand a question, Even to say to me, this is what I heard you say.

Mm-hmm.

Is that what you meant?

Mm-hmm.

You know, so you're giving them the power. Ah, no, I— you, you know something, my speech wasn't clear, so you've missed the word end and you heard N. And you're right, there's no N in that word. So the word was end, and I have to then speak more clearly to help you, particularly when it's on, on, uh, via the internet.

But that requires a lot of trust on the student's part. And also, I would assume you're talking that you're working one-on-one.

Yes.

Now what's the kid gonna do who's sitting in the class with 25 other students?

And they won't say that.

They're not gonna raise their hand. There's no way.

No, but even on the one-on-one situation, to get the confidence up to say that is huge. You know?

Yeah, a lot of the— yeah.

Yeah, and then it might not transfer to the classroom instantly, and particularly with young children it won't. But as they get older, they've got to build the confidence in that one-to-one situation to think and to start to verbalize, what do I understand? What don't I understand? What, you know, I've heard this. What have I— have I missed something?

Yeah, but you need that— that student needs to trust you, and a lot of these kids don't. I think I mentioned the other day that my son in the private school now, um, he still has some mistrust issues, some trust issues, you know. And, and I remember his, um, teacher saying something. We were standing in the hallway and the teacher was saying something to him. And I kind of had the feeling that my son didn't quite understand what he was saying. And after the teacher walked away, I asked my son and he says, I had no idea what he meant. And I said, well, you're the one, you have to, you're in a safe place now. Here's where you get that, your own advocacy skills to say, I don't understand that. Can you explain that? But he was terrified and again, paralyzed.

Yes.

He wasn't going to trust this adult had his best interest because it's been a nightmare for him coming through that, that other system, that other schooling system.

And, and again, you've said, you know, he's paralyzed and that shuts down everything.

Mm-hmm.

Shuts down everything. Like my sister said, the brain cannot function when it's paralyzed, let alone think.

Yeah.

You know, but even if, if we as parents can Encourage our children to say these words and verbalise at home what you are hearing as opposed— and again, you know, even at home, it takes time, it takes effort to do that, and we can't be in a rush, which is, you know, another problem.

Yeah, who's not in a rush?

Yeah.

Yeah, so we're all in a rush.

That's right.

Yeah, so it's, um, multifaceted issue. Yeah, I feel like, I feel like my video has stopped a few times and I'm wondering if we have that echo going.

Uh, it has stopped a few times. I will ask Isaac about it because I think he's listening next door to us. He's been very good and I look We've got to get our intro down right and our conclusion, and then I've got to remember to stop streaming because my eldest son was, was texting me, Mum, Mum, Mum!

You kept going?

Yeah, well, I, you know, the stop streaming is not a button on here, it's a button somewhere else.

Well, we don't do too bad for winging it every day. That's what we're doing right now. We're just we're just chatting. We'll have this. We'll have this better together when our guests are here.

Well, we've got. I think Colleen's coming tomorrow. Colleen Tralongo is coming tomorrow to talk to us, and on Friday, Raja Raja Mahaba. is talking to on Friday, just to get an idea and to practice and chat to us and, and tell us what she's on about. Okay, that sounds good. Yeah, and give us a bit of her background. Yeah, you know, and I think that's all helpful for us, and then we can come up with some questions.

And yeah, sounds good. Sounds good.

So what, how will, what will our ending be, Lisa? Thank you for listening.

I like that.

Thank you for listening to When Learning Is Trauma. Contact us, connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. Join us. And thank our guests for your time, for your expertise, and all the takeaways that you have given.

I think that's perfect.

I'll write it down.

You like it?

Ah, thank you. Thank you, Lisa. And I'll talk to you again tomorrow.

Okay, stop streaming.

Stop streaming.

We'll talk.