Lois Letchford talks with Lisa McCarty, Nurse and Mother from Pennsylvania

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3:58. And we're on now, are we?

Fantastic.

Ah, there it is. Welcome, Lisa.

Welcome. Hello.

Oh, fantastic. Very good.

So if she goes to your Lois Letchford She can now see it's live.

Yeah.

And if she mutes the video through the playback, she can scroll down and see the live chat.

And when I touch on her—

Through this.

Right, okay.

How do I mute this? Is it already muted?

Uh, in the video player itself, you should see a little speaker, speaker icon. Just click that and it should mute it.

We're recording live, darling.

Geez, Dad.

I'm, I'm hiding again.

Good on you.

But I have— but I have— somebody can come this way and I won't know it until it's too late. So we'll see what happens.

Was Kieran happy about us deleting the other one, or it didn't bother him, it bothered you?

Oh, what, my son?

Yeah.

No, I didn't— he doesn't care.

He doesn't care.

Why does he care? I don't know if I'm muted. I haven't seen a mute button, but I don't hear any noise, so—

Well, that's very good. I'm Lisa. We'll get our introduction down. I'm Lois Letchford.

And I'm Lisa McCarty.

And we're here talking about When Learning Is Trauma. And when we start it live, it'll be, and our guest today is—

Got it. I'm so excited.

Now Chris was talking about having a bit of controversy, so we want to work out what questions we want. I don't know if I want controversy or just information.

I think we've got plenty of controversy, don't you?

Relax.

Oh, okay. Well, I think we've got plenty of controversy, really. You've got to do that.

Relax.

Yeah, yeah, I can't relax, Isaac. This is a worldwide show. Okay, then sit up.

You're gonna sit like that?

Yeah.

You're not gonna move?

I'm not gonna move. Not allowed to move. Yeah, I have to be careful what I say because I've really got to think about it, uh, you know, how we deal with children and how we accept the failure of children. No, I think I find that's what I find most difficult, that we just say we blame the child and we accept that that's the best that they can do instead of really focusing on the instruction.

Right, right.

You know, that, that I think is the most distressing part.

Yeah, and I'm excited with a lot of these speakers that we have coming up, and each one is going to touch on a little different subject, or a little different part of this subject.

Yes.

And I'm excited to also hear some solutions to some of this.

Well, the solutions have got to be in the teaching.

Or recognizing.

Recognizing that they can be taught before we start blaming. Is that what you're saying?

Well, what I mean is recognizing the— recognizing dyslexia, for example. One of my main focuses is on the emotional impact that undiagnosed and/or unsupported dyslexic students, you know, what that can do to the self-esteem and the self-concept. That's huge.

Even when they are diagnosed, the lack of progress, right? The lack of progress even under intervention.

Well, what I find is mostly people don't quite understand the nature of the problem. And we've talked about, you know, as a nurse— I'm a nurse— and in the medical field, we, we research things and we improve upon things based on what research shows. And the school system is really kind of— that they're lagging in some of this knowledge, or I would argue all of the knowledge when it comes to these learning differences, right? I don't like this— the term— I don't like the term disability. I understand the term and I know why people use it, but I like the term learning difference. And by and large, they are not keeping up with what's going on. And so even if these kids that you're saying are diagnosed, They don't know what to do with them. And that's where I would call unsupported. That's what I call unsupported.

I agree. And Lisa, this is the part that kills me. I think that's the only word I can say, the only way I can describe it. I read academic papers from the 1980s and one from the 1990s, and that's Brian Camborne. He said children fail for— he gave 7 characteristics. Children fail for 2 reasons. One, insufficient demonstrations is what he called it in his paper, Beyond the Deficit Theory. And the second was— the second was demonstrations that children do not understand or cannot engage in.

Mm-hmm.

And that's— that describes Nicholas's I saw a cat to a T. And we don't realize how that happens again and again and again and nothing changes.

Right.

Right. And then we provide our children with standardized reading programs that are at the heart of insufficient demonstrations. And demonstrations which are absolutely useless to our children, which also leaves them behind.

Well, would you mind just telling everybody again why you thought of this series? What was it that, that brought you to this? You're big on the teaching end of this. So just, just recap that a little bit.

Firstly, my son went from total failure in grade 1. He sat, he withdrew in the class. And he learned nothing and the teacher shouted at him. And they shouted at him and never contacted me and said, this child needs something new. At the end of the year, he gets tested, he knows 10 words, he's got no strength and he's got a low IQ. 25 years later, that boy receives a PhD in applied mathematics from Oxford University.

That's your—

Yeah, that's my story. And then I think, you know, everything's fine, he's wonderful, he's done well. And I said, Nicholas, tell me what happened in grade 1. And my son cried. Tears ran down his face. His tongue went— and no words came out. And that's when I realized the level of trauma that he suffered. Even though he was successful every year after that, that year has left, you know, a— A scar. Locked in his in his brain, and he's not going to open that box. Right. That was one. And then I met with sharing Nicholas's story. I've met other people online, and one lady said, wrote and said, "I can't like your post," and I immediately got back to her and said, "Da da da. My son learned to read through just a series of accidents, which is not good enough for me." And she wrote back and said, "Well, this is what happened to my boy." And I asked them for blog posts. Let's tell your story.

Yeah.

And the blog posts never came. And that's when you realize the blog posts haven't come not because they don't want to share their story, but the families and these children are so devastated by the trauma our children have experienced that we can't even write about it, or the effort of writing is just too great. So that's what really started me thinking about it. And you— I'd heard you talk about mental health issues. And, you know, mental health is at the bottom of everything because we can't succeed in this world or survive in this world when we're panicked about ourselves, I think.

Yeah. Well, and I think in the education system, the way it stands right now is that we have this you know, failure is necessary in order for these kids to get some help. And we have to change that, of course. And my focus is on the— I keep saying unsupported dyslexic learners. And what I mean is some kids are not diagnosed at all. Some kids are misdiagnosed. Some kids are diagnosed with dyslexia, but still the understanding of what that is isn't in the schools. So they're unsupported. And I've talked to so many people as adults my husband being one of them, who never understood the nature of why they struggled so much. So even those adults who have become quote unquote successful, they're still carrying a lot of negative feelings from those earlier experiences in school. And I had one woman come up to me, a good friend of mine. She had listened to one of those little things I did on Facebook about the mental health and about dyslexia. And she came running up to me and she said, oh my goodness, thank you so much. She said, I always thought that I was the dumb one. So here's a woman who's successful. She's, you know, they're bright people, of course, and they'll— they have ways of getting around what they need to sometimes, and sometimes not. Sometimes they fail miserably. But this woman was successful, and here she was in her 50s still harboring those feelings of I'm the dumb one.

Yeah, yeah.

And she was so relieved to find out that her struggles weren't because she was the dumb one. It was because she's dyslexic and she had some weaknesses in certain areas and had many more strengths in other areas. So I think that's also at the heart of the issue, is we have to be able to support those people with their strengths and keep those— that self-esteem where it should be.

I'm with you. I can't I can't, um, change it now. I don't know how to do that. I have to ask the boys. I'm with you because I, I grew up non— non-reading. I mean, I could read words, I couldn't comprehend. And with that, you know, something goes wrong, the first thing I'll say is I'm stupid. And my sister, my sister Lenore, Lenore Hall, who is going to talk on our show, and I'm going to recorded thing with her, grew up reading. And she said to me, Lois, why do you say that? Because that's what comes.

Right.

That's what comes from feeling you're never good enough in school.

Right. I think that's why the support for a dyslexic person is so important, because in school, you automatically know who's good at this or not so good at that. And reading is one of those things that we need— the teachers expect kids to be good at. And if you're grouped in the group that's not so good at reading, you really do feel like a failure. You do feel like it's your fault. And if you don't understand the nature of the problem, how are you going to feel otherwise? How are you going to know that it's not— your brain's not broken, you're not stupid, there's nothing wrong with you? It's just a different— I call it a genetic variation in brain wiring. And then, you know, what comes with all of that is that you also don't know where your strengths are.

Yeah.

And, you know, that can be devastating.

That's where I survived in school because I could read words. But you knew— I knew I was missing something. And until I, you know, did the SRA reading, that's where it really came home. You cannot comprehend. But no one, no one helped me ever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, your son was lucky in that you pinpointed the problem. Oh, but how many parents don't? They don't know what the problem is.

And I, I, I pinpointed the problem Because of a series of accidents. And that's what, that's what I find interesting, because if I had left Nicholas in Australia, if we had stayed in the school system in Australia, I don't think that the pinpointing of the problem would have been so easy. I think it would have been much more difficult. And just before I pinpointed the problem, The school diagnostician said to me, Nicholas is the worst child she's seen in 20 years of teaching. So I needed that combination of factors to come together to say, this is where the problem is.

But you're still lucky because, again, you know, a lot of parents will hear something similar and maybe their child's starting to have some pretty significant avoidance behaviors, and then they become targeted as the behavioral problem, and then everybody focuses on that, and, and they're— they never get to the heart of the matter. And, you know, parents trust the schools. I mean, I did. I was an ER nurse. I didn't know anything about educating kids in a classroom, but I knew something was wrong, and I questioned it a bunch of times. And then once I realized the nature of the problem, then I fought like heck. I don't think we should have to You know, to go through this, the same thing for decades. Families have been going through this for decades where, you know, it takes the parent to finally understand what the problem is and then realize that the school really doesn't understand what the problem is and then fight. I mean, we've got to fix this early, not wait to fail.

And when the child does fail, we turn around and retest. We look at the test results and say, well, this is why the child can't learn. And I think the whole setup of testing and looking at strengths and weaknesses actually doesn't do us a favour because it's putting the blame back on the child and they can look at these results and say, oh, look at that, look at that, as opposed to examining the teaching.

Right. But in order for the teachers to understand how to teach, Specifically dyslexic kids. I think teaching needs to change for everyone, but specifically these dyslexic learners. I mean, they've been likened to the canaries in the coal mine.

Yeah.

To show that there's a lot wrong with our education system.

Yeah.

So if you don't understand the nature of how those kids are thinking, how are you gonna help them? You have to understand this. And I've said this many times again in the medical field, you can't be an endocrinologist and not understand diabetes. Like, you have to have a good understanding of what the nature of the problem is in order to help them. And that's where I've found a lot of pushback.

The problem— the problem is the endocrinologist only sees the people on the spectrum. They've got— they've been diagnosed, they've got something wrong, other things are going wrong. The teachers have the whole population to deal with. And the focus is on the middle, not with the few minor ones who are having problems. Do you see the difference?

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, I think part of the problem is in the recognizing, in the testing, as you're saying. And I'll give a perfect example from my family. I mentioned, well, I have 3 sons and 2 of them are dyslexic. One of my sons was very obviously dyslexic. You know, it's on a continuum. You may have mild difficulties up and up, up and including severe difficulties with this. So my youngest son was on the more severe end, and so it was obvious. But my other son, he flew under the radar. And what I noticed was when he was in elementary school, he was proficient in reading.

Yes.

But then it started to sink. And that's also when I realized, I mean, his handwriting is atrocious. And when I think back, there were all the classic signs of a dyslexic student, but the test wasn't pinpointing that. It was a standardized test. And what he would do is he could— he was pretty good at reading and picking out the answer to the question without quite understanding maybe the rest of the passage, whatever. He had a trick, in other words, to get through that standardized test.

Yeah.

But he was, you know, I couldn't teach him the alphabet when he was younger. He still had trouble, like his spelling. He's got those common dyslexic spelling mistakes. His handwriting was really hard to read. He's got those classic symptoms and some other things that he shared with me later on that I didn't even know. But a screener would have picked this up as opposed to a standardized test.

Yeah.

So we've got that problem, right? We've got to screen these kids early on to find those kids that are really going to have trouble. But we also have to get the knowledge into the colleges of ed. You know, how to teach these kids or how to teach reading in general better. And then also, you know, also the knowledge of what dyslexia is so that the teachers know what to do. I mean, you know, once my son was diagnosed in the 8th grade as dyslexic, the teachers didn't know what to do about that because they didn't know what dyslexia was.

Yeah.

And the special ed teachers also, they didn't know what that was. I mean, I didn't know.

And that—

As a parent, I didn't know that they didn't know that. That's why I do what I do with advocacy, to bring that out so people will understand. If you have a struggling student, you have to do your own research so you'll know what to say to the school. And we've got to also simultaneously fix all this in school.

That's the point, isn't it, Lisa? You know, here's my son being taught one-to-one, 4 days a week, 30 minutes a day. There's no reason why that teacher should not have been able to teach him.

Yeah.

Well, it was the method, clearly, and not understanding what the nature of the problem was. I mean, I had the same thing. My youngest son, He had extra reading help. It was a complete waste of time for years, and summers included. And once we finally realized that he was dyslexic—it's a long story; I won't get into it—but once we realized the nature of the problem, then we were able to find better ways of helping him with that. They're not perfect ways. He was doing the Wilson reading, and we've talked about that. That is a giant problem of dyslexia—is the phonological awareness. But That's not the whole story, right? And if you have an idea of how these kids think, you are able to move past just the phonics portion of this and help them with the rest of it. But you're not going to be able to do that if you don't understand the nature of dyslexia. So I don't know.

Lisa, I'm doing, I'm doing my little, uh, 2-minute, um, videos every day. And one of the things I talked about this week was how we teach in sound bites or do our professional development in sound bites. And the sound bite this week is the science of reading. It's a sound bite.

Yeah.

It's not a philosophy. And every academic paper that is published, you know, on pure research, it's about 1,000— I'd say 1,000 hours are involved. in writing up, doing the testing, data collection and analysis to get that paper to that standard. And we reduce it to science of reading.

Yeah.

And the reading, the reading research, each paper just adds a slice, a millimetre to the whole bucket of the philosophy of reading because you've got to match your control group and your uncontrolled group, control group and your trial group. That's really quite challenging in itself. So you're only ever dealing with small groups.

Right.

And that's only dealing with, you know, trial and control. You're not even dealing with the whole component of reading. They're taking one slice of reading. Like phonemic awareness or like sight words or, you know, whatever they're doing. It's one slice. And a lot of reading research is not done in education. It's actually done under psychology.

Right. And then it doesn't get into where it needs to be somehow.

Well, the amount of reading I have done across a whole range of fields is huge. Huge. Because you're— one question is answers. And then you go and search and you read the next and the next and the next paper. Ah, this is what they're saying. This is what the researchers said. This is how it's working. You know, and it's fascinating to me, the whole field of reading research, because it's really so complex.

Well, it absolutely is, and we do, we kind of reduce it down to a program.

Oh, oh, oh.

And that's what I'm saying, like, it needs to change for everyone, but those dyslexic learners are the canaries in the coal mine because it really does a disservice to that population. I mean, you can, you know, my son was doing a program. I don't know if I should mention it, but it was—

Don't mention the name.

Yeah, I don't want to get people all screwed up about it. But there was 4 parts to it. And one of the parts was you just plopped the kid in front of a, you know, a computer. And it was very boring. And it really wasn't engaging at all. And then the other part was they were supposed to listen to the reading and follow along. Well, my son was doing this for 3 years. I didn't even know this. He was doing this for 3 years and he said, Mom, I get lost and then I just move my eyes back and forth so they think that I'm doing it. And then they just— he answers the questions based on what he's heard. So for 3 years he's doing this. It's not helping him. He, you know, it wasn't helping him at all. But it was easy for the school to do because they could just plop the kids into this and educate a whole mass of them as opposed to really understanding the complexity of how you teach Reading to someone, especially who's dyslexic like that, and you know to have a one-on-one teacher that understands this is expensive. So so I think that you know the schools are always looking for this easy fix, and that's a problem because it really wasted a lot of a lot of my son's time years, and he wasn't the only student that you know struggled with this. And in fact, it was funny because that particular program, which I'm not going to name, the special education director for our district said that it was a it was a program that wasn't. And I'm raising my hand going, I can tell you why it doesn't work. You know, because they were dismissing the whole concept of dyslexia as though that was just a made-up thing. And that was disappointing because, as I said, you can't help these kids if you don't understand the nature of that problem.

You know, you've hit on so many things here. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say, How thankful I am that I had the opportunity to work with Nicholas and really transform the reading instruction and not have him stuck in one of those boring programs, right, that cost a fortune for the schools.

But that's what I mean, you were lucky that you knew that. So how do we get this information to the parents who— parents are overwhelmed?

The first thing we have to have with our students Believe it or not, is engagement. And it doesn't matter what we do, if our students are not engaged in reading instruction, like your son was stuck in front of the computer staring at his book, they won't learn to read. We've wasted that time.

Yeah.

And that's, that should be number one.

Yeah.

Is the child engaged? Are they actively engaged in the process and be able to talk about what they've just heard or read or produced, what's come from it. And that's ignored.

Yeah, but worse, the kids are faulted for— it's their fault for not being engaged, they're not paying attention. If they would only pay attention, if they would only try harder, they're not living up to their potential. I can't tell you how many evaluations I've read on other students who that's the language that they're using. they're not living up to their potential. They're struggling with the thing that you're asking them to do, and you're just assuming that they should just be excited about reading. You know, that was part of the problem with the whole, um, the whole word reading, uh, issue. Oh, well, you know, get kids excited about books and then they'll— they're going to want to read. Well, that makes sense, but if you can't read, how, how are you going to get excited about it? You've got to learn how to read, and you have to know, especially dyslexic learners, how they learn best. I mean, and as you've mentioned, it's a complex problem. I mean, it's a complex— reading is a complex— it's hard to teach reading. It's complex.

It's a complex issue.

Yeah, right. You can't just shove somebody in front of a computer or hand them a book and say, here, this is exciting, you know, practice this and you'll love it. And I think that's what's missing In our schools?

What I would love to see and what made me a really specialist reading teacher was I had the opportunity to teach these children who had fallen through the cracks for 5 to 10 years and my task was teach them to read and I'm given— they were given to me 5 days a week, 30 minutes to an hour a day. There are no excuses.

Teach your child. Can I share something funny?

Yeah.

I just had this conversation with my middle son the other day, and I was telling him about your, your box experiment, which I think is so clever with the could, should, and would. And I was explaining a little bit about this, and my son, who's 20 years old at this point, was so excited about that. And he's like, that's Terrific. Like, I would have loved a teacher like that, you know, because I would have remembered that, you know. I didn't do the experiment with them, but I told him about it, and he was just so thrilled with, like, the difference of how that would have helped him, you know, in the classroom trying to read as a kid that was struggling. But remember, this is the kid that looked like he was doing okay on a standardized test. When in reality, he was really struggling. And this is where my passion— I come back to my passion with those undiagnosed or unsupported dyslexic learners.

Yeah.

And, you know, you're hitting on a lot of different things too. You have to have engagement. They have to have background knowledge. They have to have correct instruction that's intensive and engaging. And we don't have the time for this in the public schools at all. But we've got to help them because we can't afford to let these people fail like this.

No, you're absolutely right, we can't afford to let loose. I'm delighted to hear your boys say that even at 20, because my first point is that children must be engaged, and they have to know that the instruction with this person is not going to be the same as what I failed at before.

You know, that's an important part too, because my youngest son who's been in the public school system, he was in till the 8th grade, now he goes to a private school. He spent his first year in the private school last year, But he was still distrustful.

Yes.

Of some of the teachers. He's got a lot of old habits and a lot of distrust for that reason. And I think that's important. So it's important to understand these kids from the get-go and then have somebody that can be in their corner to help them. That's so important. And I hope that one of the speakers is going to zoom in on that part. We were talking today about maybe the person that we'll get for— I won't give it away yet, but that was a very big part of that conversation. with somebody, a mentor if you will, that really helps these kids. Because it's, again, the whole series is centering around the trauma that's happening to these people in the classroom when they're having trouble learning. And that's what we're— that's the biggest focus, is what can happen and how can we help them.

And the trauma doesn't just happen today, you know, it's It's there for life, right? And it's got to be dealt with in some way or other. I mean, Nicholas just doesn't touch that box, and that's, that's not healthy, that it sits in there and it's an undisclosed thing. I can't go near that one. And so it's going to come back to bite him. And my sister will talk about this.

Yeah, I can't wait to hear what she says. Yeah, I'm very excited.

We're going to have— we'll have a conversation with her. We'll have a couple of conversations and I'll record them so that, you know, that people can listen and hear about 2 children from the same parents in the same setup with 2 different outcomes.

I'm excited. I'm really hoping that this is something that people will watch and start to really think about.

Yes. Well, I have to promote it. I'm waiting now for you to see if we've got this change before I— I don't think I should. I think I should just promote what I've got.

Yeah.

And, you know, as we— as it changes, it changes.

Yeah, it's really ready to go except for that one last speaker that we're trying to nail down.

Yeah.

But we've got some great people lined up.

We have.

Stephen— Dr. Stephen Dykstra's first.

Yes. Uh, Hillebrand Peltz Yes. Prison to Pipeline. Rosalind, Rosalind, I can't remember her last name, from Ghana, talking about how she grew up.

Kyrie Knightley.

Thank you. Rosalind Kyrie Knightley, 17 before she learned to read. Don Winn, an author who went through school. I don't— I'm curious to ask him How he survived, how he survived that school scenario. Horrendous. My sister Lenore, from a health, mental health point of view, and what it does to the brain. Who else have we got? Have you got the list there? I should have printed it.

Yeah, and Dr. Neil Alexander Passy. Now, he's tied into a lot of mental health. He's written a lot of academic papers on this too and a few books. So, you know, that's a good— A good fit. And then we have Ashley Roberts.

Oh yes, a mother.

And, and, and Amy Raja.

Raja. How do you say it? I, I can't remember her last name, but Raja is her first name. Amy is her nickname. So that's—

Oh, I got it. Marhaba. Marhaba. Now I don't know her just yet. I've been researching some of the people I don't know.

Right. And she's an advocate because her children went through school non-reading. Or, you know, with enormous struggles.

Yeah, I'm excited.

Yeah, so that's our lineup. Join us, join us. It will be 4 PM Eastern Daylight Time, and people will be joining in from around the world. The other person we've forgotten is Martin Bloomfield, who is another person who's also struggled with— struggled through school. I don't know How he survived school and has come out to be such a phenomenal person, advocate for literacy and promoting entrepreneurship and all sorts of things. So yeah, so that's our lineup. We'll have to say it every day.

Your what?

We'll have to say our, our speakers, give our list of speakers every day.

Yeah, because I won't be able to keep up.

Yeah, yeah, it's fantastic. It's fantastic that so many are involved and listening. And, and, you know, people are watching us not necessarily live, but they certainly go back and watch us, um, on the replay on YouTube.

So yeah, and it's all about getting the message out there. So, because my— one of my problems is how do parents know? I was one of the parents that didn't know. You were fortunate you knew.

I guessed. I didn't. I guessed.

Well, it shouldn't be a guessing game.

No, it shouldn't be a guessing game.

It should be a waiting game.

And I had the opportunity to do the research, and I had to take Nicholas out of school to do that, because without that, he wouldn't be where he is today.

Right.

You know, it was, it was an accident. It cannot be an accident. Learning to read Cannot be an accident.

Right. And it can't be a matter of privilege either. And I think that, you know, we talk about that. I think one of the speakers will probably delve into that too, that, you know, these, these parents that have the means to pay for these expensive evaluations or tutoring or, or lawyers, uh, you know, it shouldn't have to be like that. That's not, that's not, that's unfair. Everybody should learn Good literacy skills, and everybody should have a chance to be the best person that they can be.

Yeah, certainly. That's certainly the case in the 21st century because it's now critical to read and write effectively. Yeah, well, thank you. Thank you very much. We've done our 30 minutes, and we'll put it up on YouTube and see what happens.

Okay, good talking to you.

Thank you, Lisa.

See you later.

Bye. Switch off.