Lois Letchford's son Nicholas earned his PhD but broke down in tears when asked about first grade, unable to speak. She's launching a two-week series with dyslexia specialist Lisa McCartney on how early schooling can inflict lasting trauma that children carry for decades.
Chapters
Hello, I'm Lois Letchford, author of the book Reversed: A Memoir and Literacy Problem Solver. And here to you this week, I'm talking about the upcoming series that I am doing with Lisa McCartney from Pennsylvania Dyslexia, talking about when learning is trauma. There's a background to this series, and it started after my son received his PhD. He received his PhD in 2018 and, and of course everyone's delighted after a very long journey. I went to him and I said, Nicholas, tell me what happened in first grade. My thinking is everything's fine, you know, we've overcome, we've done the best we can and everything will be great and he'll be able to tell me exactly what happened in first grade. My son stopped. I was recording him. Tears started to run down his face. His tongue went round and round in his mouth, and he couldn't say anything. I was shocked, and that's when I realized. That year was so traumatic, he actually cannot even talk about it. When we send our children to school, we expect the best. We expect that teachers will be kind to them, that they will learn, and even if they don't learn, there will be an adjustment period, there will be things going on. We do not expect our children to come out Traumatized. Because that was the only word I could find to describe how my son reacted to my question. Traumatized. That's a significant problem when they have an experience that they cannot even talk about that happened 20-something years ago. So that's the series that we're going to explore, and I'll be talking about it over the next 2 weeks. Hit like, hit subscribe, share my YouTube channel with other— with your friends and family, and I'll talk to you again tomorrow. Thank you. Lois Letchford, Literacy Problem Solver.
