Dyslexia Isn’t a Barrier — It’s a Brain Difference: How to Help Your RV Kid Read, Write, & Thrive

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Today I want to talk about kids on the road. But more than that, I have seven kids, and three out of seven of my kids are actually dyslexic. The thing is, if your child is struggling with dyslexia, it may just be something more about how their brain is wired than a problem. And so a lot of parents approach it very differently. My husband Frank has dyslexia. And the thing about dyslexia is he actually is a retired Marine and has a college degree. Now I watched him struggle for years getting through his college courses, and I can read four or five times faster than he can on any given day. And so I didn't understand it for a very long time. But when my first child actually had dyslexia, I had to learn how to navigate that as a homeschool mom. So today I'm bringing on a very special guest. This is Russell Van Brocklin. He's a New York State Senate-funded dyslexia researcher. He also has a classroom called dyslexiaclasses.com, and it's an inaugural program, if I'm not mistaken. But he takes college-bound kids that may be reading at an elementary or grade school level and turns them into kids that can read just like anybody else. And so welcome to the podcast, Russell. I'm so glad you're here. Thanks for having me. So I want to start kind of like what got you into this program specifically. Why did you research dyslexia?

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Well, this is the last thing I was ever supposed to do with my life. I was supposed to be a bureaucrat for the New York State government, but it was the late 90s. I wanted to know how laws were made, not some class. I wanted to know, so I signed up for the New York State Assembly internship program. But I showed up and I said, here's my neuropsychological evaluation. I have a first grade reading and writing level. So I couldn't do the internship the way it was designed. The speaker's response was, we are going to educate, we are going to accommodate this kid to whatever needs to be done. I don't care what it costs. So they got a committee together and they physically removed me from the legislative office building and they brought me to the Capitol and to the Majority Leaders Program and Council's office, where I walked in and I can immediately see why they did it. Because they had three administrative assistants in this office, ran the assembly day to day. So I was treated like a graduate student, which was much better. For the actual uh academic portion, instead of the big paper, I did a multi-hour QA session, uh, you know, presentation QA session. And at the end, they said they recommended 15 credits of A minus, 3.67 at a 4.0 scale. So they send that back to the uh State University of New York Center at Buffalo's Political Science Department, who looked at these insane accommodations and said, We don't like this. So we're lowering your grade. Guess what they lowered it to?

SPEAKER_01 2:41

Did they fail you?

SPEAKER_00 2:42

Take a wild guess. They failed me 15 credits of F.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 2:47

So yeah. So at that point, like countless other dyslectics before me, I said, I'm going to solve dyslexia so nobody else has to go through this. Well, I actually did. So the first thing that I did is I went to my professors and I said, Where can I go in graduate school to force me to learn to read and write so I can show other dyslections? And they said, Well, if you like political science, then it's obvious law school. So I went and audited two law school classes and property and contracts where you read and write more than anybody, and I couldn't read or write. So I kind of forced myself to learn to read a little bit, and it was my second day in contracts that I was called on. Just remind remember this key point. The professor was a law professor longer than I was alive at that point. So he calls on me, and what they do in American law schools is they use the Socratic method. If you don't know exactly how to answer the question, the professor will respond by asking you questions you can't answer, embarrassing you publicly until you eventually adapt. That didn't happen to me. I responded as his equal, not as a student. So he's going after me, so I decided to get a little snarky. I went and I went after him after answering. He's kind of bewildered, so then he's going after me harder, then I'm going after him harder. I know exactly where he's going, multiple questions ahead. He knows exactly where I'm going. We're going back and forth. We ended up having a draw after 15 minutes. He finally threw up his arm and said, Russell, you couldn't be any more correct. In the interest of time, I have to move on to the next case. I learned to read within a month. I learned to write within a couple of years. Well, here's the interesting point. So then I'm like, okay, I figured out law school. So then I went back to the New York State Senate because my center was the majority leader, and I said, I want you to fund my dyslexia research program, which they don't do. So they sent me to the New York State Education Department. They looked it over and said, Well, we want the State University of New York, uh distinguished professor in psychology to do an evaluation and to give a recommendation, or you're done. I said, Okay, no big deal. So I go out to Buffalo and I found out there's two of them. That's it. One just happened to be the professor who gave me the original evaluation that started this mess. Her name was Dr. Irene Halichka. And she tested me under New York State funding for three days, 20 hours over three days, of the smartest woman I ever met. And she came back and she said, I evaluated this kid a couple of, you know, years before. He had a first grade reading and writing level as a baseline, which I reconfirmed. When he turns his system on, his writing goes up to above average veteran grad students. It was about the 70th percentile on the GRE writing assessment test. And then if he turns his switch off, it goes back down to first grade. It's a light switch. She said, We're moving from a part of the brain that doesn't work to the part that does. Here's the five-page explaining what's going on. So this was the last thing the education department was expecting. So at that point, then I was told as I had to connect it to a senior professor. There's only one person that made any sense in Western New York. His name was Professor James Collins. He wrote a book called Strategies for Struggling Writers with three default writing strategies of copying, visualization, and narrative. Got a million half dollar grant from the U.S. Education Department. And remember, this was the 90s. That was a lot of money. Yeah. So this was supposed to take me years to get him approve anything. I was told he's really tough. Took me less than two weeks. So you're noticing I'm doing really well in grad school. That's a point we'll come back to. So then I enter a university-wide competition. I get 15,000. We test out the curriculum on the first student. Her name is Michaela. I want everybody to know I am cheated. I wanted to work with people that were like me. Highly motivated, highly intelligent. These are high school juniors and seniors with middle school writing skills. But again, highly motivated, highly intelligent. Kayla had got the zero percentile on the pretest because she was writing at the eighth grade level. Key point was her spelling and grammar was atrocious. On the post-test, she scored about 50th percentile on the GRE, so about 50th percentile of undergrad students. Key thing is her grammar increased from horrendous to clean at the grad level. Key point. I had a little better experience with the next student. So then I got the funding from the New York State government. We went into the Averill Park Central School District, well, my old high school, which is right outside of Albany, New York. We took their very best teacher, Susan Ford, and we worked with their dyslexic, their super motivated, intelligent kids for a couple of years. The kids started, uh they all had middle school writing skills, seventh or eighth grade level, one class period a day for the school year. Then they increased to the average range of entering graduate students. They all went on to college, they all graduated, GPAs of 2.5 to 3.6. Cost to New York State taxpayers was under $900 a kid. My biggest competition at the time was landmark college. We were 3x as successful as they were for less than 1% of the cost. They're over $100,000. We are under $900. And that's how I got started.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

Wow. That's crazy. I mean, like I was, I say it all the time. I was just a homeschool mom. I was married to this Marine, and we had had my daughter, and we were getting ready to um teach her how to read, you know, and she couldn't, she couldn't make words work for her. And so she's now 31. She can now read. She's still a terrible writer because I I didn't find you, clearly. But, you know, I found this book in the library called The Gift of Dyslexia. And that book changed how I saw my daughter in ways that I would never understand. And the book is out of print if you can find it now. It was an amazing book for me because as people call me a super reader because I can read, you know, five times faster than most people and absorb the knowledge and the information in it. So I'm exactly the opposite of a dyslexic. So like I get bored listening to audiobooks because I can't I can read way faster than they can audio to me. But my daughter that year, um, there was there was this, you know, there's this, you know, old, like everybody in grade school does this sentence, the quick brown fox jumps over the fence, right? And so we're working through this this thing. And she's like, yep, the horse. I'm like, there's no horse. She's like, no, there is. You said it was brown. In my head, it's a horse. And so it gave me some insight. So we went back and we made letters out of clay and we made, you know, we made everything tangible, which is what the book told you to do. And it changed the equation for her in ways that I can't even, you know, understand still. But it would prepare me for the other kids that were coming that were dyslexic. And so my 16-year-old, um, I had him tested in Idaho a bunch of years ago. And they're like, no, he's not dyslexic, but he's completely dystographic. And I don't know, I he still has our all the markers of somebody that's dyslexic. And so it's definitely something I'm gonna be looking at for Aaron because, like I told you in our in our pre-meeting, he's actually meeting up with a friend of his online and learning Moore's code just because he can, but he understands Moore's code and he struggles with reading. So that kind of leads me back to, you know, there's there's a break in that brain somewhere that there's just a place that can get fixed. It's just a matter of figuring out how. So I think you have that path, you know, in in your research over the years. Um, but you know, you weren't just watching this, you were in it. And and that's what's so amazing about this story. Now, I read somewhere that you were an Eagle Scout.

SPEAKER_00 9:57

Is that true? Yes. Um that was one of the more interesting points in my life, and also one of the stupidest things I ever did. I was a Star Scout at 13, and then I got my life at 17. And the stupidest thing I ever did with my life is you have to understand that my scout master, his name was Tom Russo, he not only went to West Point, he taught at West Point. He ended up his career as a uh, he's a Vietnam vet. He ended up his career as the head of the math department at Siena. And I was offered a uh my congressman at the time was Gerald Solomon, and he only appointed Eagles. That was it. And I was offered West Point as a congressional nominee. Okay. So I went up there and being the incredibly arrogant and foolish and stupid 17-year-old that I was, I noticed that the cadets couldn't walk on the sidewalk. Uh, most of them. And they said, well, that's reserved for like the seniors or whatever it was. And they had all these what I thought were Mickey Mouse rules, so I turned down West Point.

SPEAKER_01 11:01

Wow. Stupidly.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

Okay. Um, and I found out later, as you know, you grow up, these are not Mickey Mouse rules. West Point produces officers that immediately go in in charge of dozens of guys in a platoon. Okay. This is how they manufacture that. And they know a lot about it than I did as an idiot 17-year-old. So, yes, that was one of the stupidest things I did in my life.

SPEAKER_01 11:24

That's fascinating. You know, I mean, a type of learning, and I don't mean the military side of it, even though my husband's a retired Marine. My youngest, who's 14 now, doesn't remember his dad as a Marine. He retired when he was four months old. The oldest will never forget her dad as a Marine because she was 18 when he retired. But, you know, we live this on the road where, you know, our classroom is literally wherever we are. And we hit the road in 2013. So we did it long before COVID, long before it was cool. But I think that our children overall have excelled better on the road, you know, than they did in even a homeschool setting, even though I was always the mom that like started the co-op if there wasn't a co-op because we were a military family and we moved around. So I mean, I was always searching for that community. Um, but I guess I'd like to know how do you know? And and let's just pretend our audience out there is just all road schoolers are homeschoolers. How do you know if your child is dyslexic? What are the telltale signs?

SPEAKER_00 12:18

Well, honestly, first thing that we're going to do is this is not something parents can do. You literally need to contact me through dyslexia classes to do this. You'll think you know what it is, but you don't. It's just take oh, just know what it is that I do. The first thing that I do is I ask two questions. And I ask the kid, first of all, what's your speciality? So let's take your 16-year-old. You said his specialty is what?

SPEAKER_01 12:40

Math, usually.

SPEAKER_00 12:41

Okay. So when I'm I would I'll take him and say, when you're thinking about math, do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed but with little to no organization? He will say yes to that. So if you say yes to that, that means you're ADD, ADHD, or mildly dyslectic at least. Second question fingers, keyboard. Fingers, keyboard. When you're thinking about math, if you you want to write something about it, you take your fingers, put it on the keyboard. Does the idea then take a flay out of your head, leave you, leaving you with an empty brain? Dyslectics will say yes to that question. Now it's not, this is not scientific. This is not proven anywhere. I've just known as the through anecdotal evidence, through doing this over 500 times that when they say that, when they answer those two questions, yes, yes, and then no, that's ADD or ADHD or mildly dyslexia. Of the answer yes to both, that's dyslexia. What happens is when they go get tested, is I found out it's accurate over 90% of the time. It's to give you a ballpark idea. And the reason for that is because what I want to discuss today is not to give you some tips on dyslexia. I want to show you how to actually solve it. So let's start off with what I get most of the time. The kids in elementary or middle school, and let me know if this sounds familiar. They're writing a bunch of apparently randomly placed misspelled words.

SPEAKER_01 13:57

Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's it's funny that you say that because my youngest, his name is Judah, and everybody, he's been tested. He got tested the same year in Idaho that my other son was tested. Um, so we travel around. One summer we were sitting still long enough, and there was this workshop place in the mall that said, you know, we test for dyslexia. And I'm like, well, I gotta know. These two, you know, Judah still wrote his D backwards. Judah at 14 still writes his D backwards. And often the J is backwards still to this day. And so he has to really, really concentrate and think about it to write his name. And so, but he can type it just fine. And so, you know, it was one of those things where you, you know, and I understood this by now, right? Because I've had several kids now that are dyslexic. I have Frank who I have to sometimes explain things more than once or have him read something more than once to understand what it says. And that's okay. I've learned that, you know, just take a step back as a parent, as a wife, and let their brain process it and, you know, do that. But it's not about whether or not they're smarter than everybody else, because my kids are brilliant kids. They just can't put it on paper. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 14:55

Right. So when I'm going to show you how to put it on paper, the first thing you're going to do is take all your pens and pencils and throw them in the trash. No, I am I am absolutely serious about this. What you these kids should never try to communicate with a pen or pencil again. Let me tell you why. When we did that first exp that first experiment, I took the smartest kids who score in the 70th percentile, roughly on the GRE, and then I had them handwrite it. It was so bad that they dropped back down to about the six per six or seventh percentile. Wow. Just by handwriting. Because just you know what it is, the connection between the front and back part of the brain. What I found is I want you to imagine a gen ed person that that's like 5G. For dyslexic, it's like dial-up. Remember old dial up? I do. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 15:37

It's now everybody knows how old we are.

SPEAKER_00 15:40

Yeah. So when you try to type the letter W, it's a key. When you try to handwrite it, it's like this, you're killing your all your bandwidth. Okay. Okay. So that's why I throw them out immediately. And I don't care if the kid can't type. What I'm about to tell you, I I have it done by seven-year-olds and they're typing like this. I don't care. They eventually get past her. So, what I'm about to do is show you how to take these randomly placed misspelled words and to write a decent grammar, correct spelling sentence in about 10 minutes. Wow. Okay. Now, I'm going to ask you during I'm going to pre-warn you, I'm going to ask you two questions that I asked a seven-year-olds. These are not trick questions. Okay. If you answer them exactly, this will work. If it doesn't, you are going to get incredibly confused and then have an epiphany on what dyslexia is.

SPEAKER_01 16:25

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 16:26

Okay. First thing we're going to do is let's take one of your kids. Who's your 14? How do you pronounce his name again? Judas. Does he still have trouble with basic senses?

SPEAKER_01 16:34

Oh yeah. 100%.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

Okay. Here's how we fix it for Judah. First thing you're going to do is pull out a laptop computer with a real keyboard. Not an iPad, not an iPhone, and certainly not handwriting. And then you're going to type out hero plus sign. What are we talking about? And then Judah's gonna copy that until it's correct. And I can hear your audience now, but the kids aren't allowed to copy. Professor James Collins, Strategies for Struggling Writers, default writing strategy of copying. It's okay. Once that's correct, then we're going to swap out hero for Judah. Now we've got Judah plus sign. What are we talking about? Then we're going to go to a list of 10 things that Judah really, really likes, and then 10 things he really, really dislikes. Now I want you to tell me what is Judah's speciality? What is his area of extreme interest in a building?

SPEAKER_01 17:22

Extreme interest right now, it's Dungeons and Dragons.

SPEAKER_00 17:25

Okay, Dungeons and Dragons. Okay. So now we got Hero Plus Sign. What are we talking about? We're going to swap out what are we talking about for Dungeons and Dragons. So now we got Judah plus sign, Dungeons and Dragons. See how we got there? Now I'm going to try to fool you with two of the simplest questions that I ever you'll ever be asked. I give these to seven-year-olds. If you answer it exactly, this will work. If not, you're going to get tremendously confused and then have an epiphany on what dyslexia really is. Okay. Do you think I can fool you?

SPEAKER_01 17:55

I do, actually. I feel like it's possible.

SPEAKER_00 17:58

So here we go. We got Judah, plus sign, Dungeons and Dragons. Dragons. We have to swap out the plus signs for a word. Here's my specific question. Does Judah like or dislike Dungeons and Dragons?

SPEAKER_01 18:10

He likes just he likes Dungeons and Dragons.

SPEAKER_00 18:12

Yes, but that's not what I asked. Let's try it again. We got Hero. We got Judah plus sign Dungeons and Dragons. Here's my here's my specific question. Does Judah like or dislike Dungeons and Dragons? He likes Dungeons and Dragons. Yes, but that's not what I asked.

unknown 18:28

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 18:28

Do I have you nice and thoroughly confused?

SPEAKER_01 18:31

A little bit, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:32

Are you ready for your epiphany on dyslexia?

SPEAKER_01 18:35

I am actually. And actually, for the if you're out there listening or you're watching this on YouTube, keep in mind that this is not, we don't give our our script to anybody. The only person that knows the questions here is me. So the fact that this is happening is real life, just so you know, if you're out there listening right now.

unknown 18:53

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 18:54

So uh just so you know what's going on, this is the top book in my field. It's called Overcoming Dyslexia. Second edition by Dr. Sally Shewitz from Yale.

SPEAKER_01 19:03

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 19:03

Okay. That's dyslexia. So there's a do you see there's so there's there are two brains. The the the normal brain, do you see the massive neuroactivity in the back part of the normal brain?

SPEAKER_01 19:13

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 19:14

Now the back part of the dyslexic brain has next to nothing. Do you see that? Yeah. Now do you see how the front part of the dyslectic brain is about two and a half times overactive? Yeah. Okay. So what's going on when I asked you, what's you use this part of the back part of your normal brain with this massive activity. So when I asked, does Judah like or dislike Dungeons and Dragons? You automatically added the S to make it a proper sentence. Okay. Oh. Here's the aha moment. Judah has nothing going on back here, essentially. He doesn't know how to add the S. I asked specifically, Judah, do you like or dislike uh Dungeons and Dragons? He would say like, because that's exactly what I asked. That's crazy. Okay. So what's going on is Judah doesn't know how to add the yes. So I want you to think back to when you were in elementary school. And imagine they're explaining a simple grammar rule. Imagine if if some kid had to be taught four or five times from the teacher, do you see how they would start getting annoyed?

SPEAKER_01 20:15

For sure. And I mean, as a homeschool mom, I guess that would be my question. If you were painting a picture in real life for homeschool moms, road school moms across the country, for like maybe a parent that doesn't go back or doesn't find a teacher. And even though we found somebody to flag them for dyslexia, it was never caught. And I think that's because dyslexic kids, my daughter was no different for this, is she learned all the tricks to get her through to make her not look dyslexic in a test situation. But how would parents know, other than finding out with your tool with a laptop, what would that look like?

SPEAKER_00 20:52

Well, before we get to that, let me I need you to understand exactly what it is and how to solve it. Okay. Understand the model. Okay. Okay. So what parents need to understand is let's go back to the science, there's nothing going on back here. That's why Judah can't learn this. So what we have to do is we have to move it forward to the front part of the brain where Judah has two and a half times the neuroactivity. Okay? Now that solution is really simple because what Yale tells us is the front part of our brain deals with word analysis followed by articulation. So what we would do is we would ask Judah to read what he wrote out loud. It would be Judah like Dungeons and Dragons. And I would ask Judah, read that out loud again and answer this question. Does that sound generally correct? And he would go and read it out loud, Judah like Dungeons and Dragons. No, it doesn't sound generally correct. I would say, Judah, fix it. Judah likes Dungeons and Dragons. Now remember, we're doing this for that, for and for the next nine likes and ten dislikes. There's lots of repetition here. Okay? Do you see how that's a simple form of word analysis?

SPEAKER_01 21:57

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 21:57

Okay, now we have to do articulation. So We're gonna go because reason one. Give me a simple reason of why Judah likes Dungeons and Dragons.

SPEAKER_01 22:06

Well, I mean, there's a lot of reasons. Um, I would say he likes the fantasy and role-playing aspect. So the role-playing aspect.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

Judah Judah likes uh Dungeons and Dragons because he likes the fantasy and role-playing aspects. Okay. Now, do you see how we got a whole mess of a huge grammar problem here? Yeah. So what we do is we have Judah, we tell him to keep reading what he wrote out loud and keep fixing it until the whole sentence sounds generally correct. Now, what that does is it gets rid of the horrific grammar errors, and now you have some little ones and some medium ones, which the teacher can take care of, or for homeschoolers, now that's something you can focus on over time. But the horrendous stuff is now gone. But now we still have a bit of a spelling problem. Like a lot. So here's how we fix that. It's not hard. We tell Judah to drop a period, then each time he type he retypes that sentence, if he makes any spelling mistake, he has to retype the entire sentence.

SPEAKER_01 23:02

So oh, that's smart, actually. So I mean, like when my oldest daughter got her first phone and she could text people, that was the first time she even cared if she could spell.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

No, no, no, no, no. On a no no iPhone, no iPad, and take all your pens and pencils and throw them in the trash. This is on a real keyboard on a laptop with a real keyboard. Don't even I have seen parents waste years doing this stuff. Literally years. You are pulling that iPhone away and it is banned. Okay. Okay. I cannot overemphasize this. We're typing on a real keyboard. So as you're doing that. Right? I mean, is that yes? So here's the key thing. You're going to do that until it's correct. Then we're doing the other nine likes and ten dislikes. Exactly like that. Okay. Then we're going to keep reason one. Everything we've already typed is saying the same. Then we're going to add a second reason, which is going to be new, connected by the glue word and, and we're doing 10 likes and 10 dislikes until all each one of those is spelled correctly. Then we're going to do keep those two reasons, add a third one and 10 dislikes, 10 likes, and 10 dislikes until all that's correct. How long does this take? For a nine-year-old, most parents do 10 to 15 minute sessions. It could, you know, a couple times a week, that could take five months. For a 14-year-old, you could get through that within a couple of weeks. Wow. For a 17-year-old, you're probably talking a day or two. So the difference in my system is the older you are, the quicker you pick it up. What the millionaires use, it's the exact, it's the exact opposite.

SPEAKER_01 24:42

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_00 24:43

So now that is part now, do you see how that's using word analysis followed by articulation?

SPEAKER_01 24:49

Yeah, that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 24:50

That is part three of the model. First part, I'm going to tell you about Casey. I want you to know I never met anybody like Casey before. I will never see this again. Of the hundreds of teachers that I've trained over the years, they will never see this. This is a one-off edge case used to illustrate an important point. I met Casey at the end of fifth grade. She was 10 years old. She turned 11 over the summertime. She was reading at the second grade level. And she was fanatically interested in Theater Roosevelt. Just you know her family background. She came from a lower middle class family in the Midwest. So I assigned her this little book, The Rise of Theater Roosevelt. Oh, 900 pages of it. Wow. This won the Pulitzer. This is considered 10th grade at the first year college level, depending on who you ask. Nobody told Casey to do this. Not even hinting at it. Casey wanted to do reading first, so I gave her a simple process. She went up to her room and shut her door for three hours a night for the next six months. Most of the days during the summertime. At the end of that time period, you could flip to this random page, point to that random word, and she would literally tell you the dictionary definition. Verbatim. She jumped at eight grade levels in six months, and I worked with her for 15 minutes a week.

SPEAKER_01 26:04

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 26:05

That's crazy. And that's not the point of why I'm telling you this. The point is her mom said, Does this only work for stuff she loves? I said, Let's try something she hated.

SPEAKER_01 26:16

That's actually a great question because I think that, you know, kids that love something are more willing to learn it. And then if they hate it, like they just don't want to, usually. So that's fan fascinating too.

SPEAKER_00 26:30

Well, here's the point of why I'm spending all this time on this. When we looked at a book she hated, we we finished in about three months. I asked her, What happened to your motivation? How much did you lose? The most motivated kid ever worked with. She said she was down to about 50%.

SPEAKER_01 26:46

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 26:46

For most ADD, ADHD, and dyslectic kids, you step outside their speciality, which is what normal schools do all the time. They're down 75 to 90%. So during the inter, here's the takeaway. During the intervention period, we have to focus on the kid's speciality, their area of extreme interest and ability. There is no other option, okay? Until we get them to grade level. That's number one of the model. Number two, if you ask an ADD, ADHD, or mildly dyslectic kid, do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed, but with little to no organization, they're going to say yes. So what we have to do is force the dyslectic brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output. Now, let me give you an example to put this into English. I want you to imagine Bill Gates came to you and said, I'm going to pay you a million dollars over the next two weeks. We've covered all your needs so that you can focus on this. You only have access to a major university library. You can't ask any questions. Would it be hard for you to write a high school level paper on this question? What effect did Martin Luther King's famous I Have a Dream Speech have on the American civil rights movement of the 1960s? Would that be that hard for you?

SPEAKER_01 27:54

No, I think I could do that.

SPEAKER_00 27:55

Okay. Now, here's why that's easy for you. It's just work, okay? Right. Because it starts off with this big question and you eventually get to the details.

SPEAKER_01 28:04

Right, but I'd have pencil and paper, right?

SPEAKER_00 28:06

Well you have pencil, paper, computers, and the whole library. Right. But the key thing, the key point is it's big picture, eventually getting to the details. For a dyslectic, it's like grabbing fog. There's nothing there. We can't do it. So what we do is we have to flip that, because that's what normal schools do. That's why we have such problems. So we have to flip that to start off at a very specific point and then to slowly go out. So we would ask what personally compelled Martin Luther King to want to give his famous speech. We would then go to his biography. Now we know exactly what time period, and we can find the answer. That answer will give us a question, which gives us an answer, which gives us a question, which gives us an answer. That forces the dyslectic brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output.

SPEAKER_01 28:54

Wow, that is really fantastic. I don't know. There's not even a word for that. That is really cool that you know you can rewire that thought process. And essentially that's what it is, is you're rewiring that thought process. Um, you know, and I think that maybe road schoolers sometimes miss it because we are doing things that our kids don't hate. Um, you know, we're we're learning on the move. It is tangible history. Um, when we go to a national park, we're digging in, we might be pulling. I mean, for us, it's we pull out like small art equipment near the water and we'll do pictures and then we'll compare it to John Muir and, you know, talk about stuff like there's there's a tie-in for everything that we do as road schooling families a lot of times. So like those road schooling days are super education heavy, but you don't feel like you're learning. And then the car ride home is also educational because you're like, hey, this is what I found neat. What did you like? And so then they get to talk about those things that they love. But then I used to have them journal it. I used to love to have them journal it, right? But my my some of my kids couldn't journal it. They couldn't articulate that with pens and paper. And so that explains all of that. Um, but the other side of it is, you know, a lot of homeschooling and road schooling families don't have a check-in, an IEP coordinator, or that sort of thing. So, how many families can, you know, actively choose and understand that? You know, what's the first step to figuring it out? I guess let's start there. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 30:20

Well, let me first of all just kind of give you the model, and then um I want to give you another example for your kids your age. Okay. And then kind of tie it all together. Awesome. So so what you need to understand is if you're going to follow this model during the intervention period until they're at grade level, you start off with their specialty, teaching from the specific to the general, word analysis followed by articulation. Now, parents ask, how fast does this work? The example I like to give is Kimberley. She's a very religious homeschooling mom with some college. I met her on December 27th of 2024. She just had a few weeks later, spent seven, a few weeks before, had the state of Ohio test all her kids. With her four gen ed kids, she taught brilliantly using standard methods. Her fifth grade son, uh, his name is Reed, he had a problem. He was reading at the 11th percentile, writing at the fourth percentile. So I worked with her for half an hour a week for the next eight months. Over the summertime, uh, Reed's friends came to him and said, We want you in public school to be with us socially. Beginning of August, I know she worked with him for an hour and a half a week, three half hour sessions. Most parents do 10 to 15 minute sessions. So beginning of August, eight and a half months later, he was tested in a public school. Kimberly doubled what he did. He would still be placed in special ed on Happy Kid. That didn't happen. His reading went from the 11th percentile to the 64th. His writing went from the fourth percentile to the 65th. Grammar jumped to the 97th percentile. As of April of 2026, he's in mainstream classes, getting mainly A's and B's. That's fine. Kimberly did. Oh, yeah, Kimberly did in part-time in less than nine months, what every parent dreams of. That's how powerful this is. Yeah. But we're running into a problem. I just told you how to deal with elementary school kids. What about your kids now? Because teaching them basic sentences is fine, but what about advanced paragraphs for the middle, high school, and college level? All right. And so that's what I want to quickly just show you so we we can take word analysis and articulation and show you at an advanced level. So just so everybody knows, how far did you go in your education?

SPEAKER_01 32:20

So I have some college. I do not, I didn't graduate. I married a Marine instead.

SPEAKER_00 32:24

Right. But you're very well read. You read book after book after book.

SPEAKER_01 32:28

I do. I do. And I, you know, we we run two companies. You know, we own two companies. So I write contracts on a daily basis, and then I own learned RV, which in itself is a media thing. So I went to school for journalism. And so if I'd finished that, I would have been, you know, somebody that did write regular and I do write regularly.

SPEAKER_00 32:48

Okay. So the main thing is I'm gonna now show you how you can write body paragraphs even better. Okay. Uh I just got a review from a lawyer who said this helped him out. Okay. So the first thing we need to do is I'm gonna give you a very dyslectic solution. We're gonna start off with the movie review so we can discuss universal things. Like anything dyslectic, this is gonna feel like it's coming out of left field, but it'll make sense momentarily. So I'm gonna need you to tell me uh a movie that meets these three questions. You know it intimately, you think it's one of the best of all times, and everybody's seen it. What's the name of that movie? Sixteen Candles. Okay. Now, I'm gonna ask you something very difficult. Now remember, you're a journalist. Okay, you you're educated, you've been doing this, you have you you read a lot. So here's my very difficult question for you. I need you to reduce 16 candles to a one-word universal thing you think the best represents it.

SPEAKER_01 33:40

One word?

SPEAKER_00 33:42

One word universal thing that is unique to how you see the movie. Awkward. Awkward. Now, see how long that took you. Yeah, yeah. If I were to pull any of your dyslexic children in and I asked them that, how long do you think it would take them?

SPEAKER_01 33:59

A lot longer, actually.

SPEAKER_00 34:01

No, instantly. Oh, you think. Okay. I not only think, I know. Let me tell you what's going on. Let's go back to the brain research. Okay. We are now dealing with the front part of the brain. We have two and a half times more neuroactivity than you do. You're now playing in my sandbox. There are advantages to being dyslectic. It tends to show up in grad school.

SPEAKER_01 34:22

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 34:23

Where it is profoundly unfair being dyslectic. Profoundly. And for those who are into head and hands, my second student, his name was Adam. Adam, he did his first year of college. It wasn't for him. And then he became in the union. You know the schools where they have those big boiler things? They called him in on vacation, and he took like a day and a half to solve the problem. He said, sorry, it took me so long. They were trying to figure it out for weeks. It is an unfair advantage when we're doing what we're good. It is so unfair. So you said, what was what was your solution again? Your your universal thing awkward? Awkward. Okay. So here's how we would do an appropriate movie review. We would take the major actors and characters, asked, How do the actors do with the with the universal theme of awkward? How do the director do? How do the screenwriter do? Then you'd write your review. People wouldn't decide if they want to see it or not. If they wanted to see it, you've had enhanced their experience because then now they know what to look for and from whom. But you haven't ruined it by saying this happened, this happened, and this happened, which a lot of reviewers do. Make sense? Yes. Now I'm going to traumatize some of your audience just for a moment, because we're going to go back to high school English and Shakespeare. Just because I'm very happy. Some other people were traumatized by it, but just so you know, it's just a moment because Shakespeare was the best person in English language history of communication. So let's go back to any play that Shakespeare ever wrote. We have a hero. Hero needs to do something, wants to do something. Based on one or more universal themes, then there's an ultimate villain, a character, a concept, a universal theme, or some combination there too that tries to prevent the hero from accomplishing their goal. They conflict in act one, they accelerate like crazy in act two, resolve in act three. Sound familiar? We're gonna simplify that. So which one of your kids would you like to use as an example?

SPEAKER_01 36:08

So you're asking me which one to give you is bait.

SPEAKER_00 36:11

Who's the victim? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 36:13

Uh let's pick on Aaron. He's 16 and he hates Shakespeare.

SPEAKER_00 36:17

Just to make it easier for your uh audience, let's go back and let's use your movie review. So let's just say Aaron was interested in 16 Candles. He's gonna love me for that one.

SPEAKER_01 36:28

He's been drugged into watching it with his sister. So you know, I mean Okay.

SPEAKER_00 36:32

So we're gonna get the script of 16 Candles. Now, just remember, in dyslexia classes, after the sentences, we have a course on how to write basic paragraphs. So we're gonna assume that that's where the kids are. We're gonna have Aaron then write out as many paragraphs as he can on 16 candles. Then he's gonna go through each sentence and pick out the most important word in each sentence and then write it out, type it out. All this is type it in a list. Now we're going to come to what I like to call a I hope I'm not gonna offend anybody, but I don't know another term that's more accurate, a come to Jesus moment. Uh, if I can help these kids or not.

SPEAKER_01 37:07

Well, and you know, I think this is a real important time to say, you know, if you're out there and you're a parent and you're struggling with this and you're listening to this episode, you're in the right direction. You know, this isn't a judgment for this isn't a judgment zone, you know, this is you, you're seeking answers. And so that's kind of that was my first step with my, you know, then eight-year-old daughter who couldn't figure out how to read and write, is I was seeking answers. So if you're out there and you know that things are not connecting for your kids and they're connecting for you and you can't figure out why, you know, this information is exactly why it's here, you know. And and we're just fortunate enough to have him on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 37:43

Well, yeah. So just so you know, because here's my main question. The front part, I'm just going back to the science real briefly. The front part of the dyslexic brain is two and a half times overactive. Yale tells us that that part starts with word analysis. Here's my question: How can you use word analysis unless you know exactly what the word means? And I mean exactly it's almost impossible, right? You can't. You can't. So here is why I'm spending so much time on this. If the kid, most kids will do when I say we're in your specialty, we're teaching you from the specific to the general. I need you to do this so I can teach you to read and teach you how to do this. If they most will say yes, if they don't, remember that list of 10 things the kids really disliked? Let's pick on Aaron for a second. What is the I always tell parents, pick for the number one dislike, what's the chore that the kids absolutely freaking hate? For him, what is the thing he absolutely hates to do for a chore?

SPEAKER_01 38:36

Scooping the cat box.

SPEAKER_00 38:37

Okay, so if he doesn't do the work, you are literally going to have him scoop the cat box and then have your young your younger sibling fill it back up and have him scoop it again. Wow. And you will repeat that until he decides to do what I'm about to ask. And then you but the key thing is please videotape that and send me a copy because 10 years later you'll still be laughing. Because the kids are like, oh, I do that horrible. Well, yeah, so you're gonna do your homework. Finally, they get in. Ten years later, people are still laughing about it. All right. So uh here's what I need them to do and why. We have a reading problem. This is how we fix reading. He's gonna we have the list of the most important words. He's gonna go to Marion Webster's online dictionary, and his parents, you are looking over their shoulder. There isn't zero trust here. Zero. They're going to he's gonna go to Marion Webster's online dictionary, find that word, pick out his definition. He's going to type out the word and then type out the definition. And you're gonna make sure he's not copying and pasting because then you're wasting your time. You are literally looking over the shoulder. There is no trust here. Okay. I'm sorry, this is this is the heart of the program. Yeah. And he's gonna do that for all the words. Then he's gonna pick the one that he thinks is the best, the best one. And that's our base universal thing. But it's the same problem we had with your movie review. It's so broad brushed. We have to get very specific. So now you're gonna put that word into the thesaurus and you're gonna come up with five synonyms, n synonyms, the entire level, multiple levels, whatever the parent and the kid decide. Really what the parent decides. And for each one of those, he's gonna go and he's gonna type out the word, go to the online dictionary, find his definition, and then type it out. I used to have kids look it up in a book, but that was too much torture. So, and it was ineffective. Don't do that. Do the online one. So then he they type it out for each one, then you're looking for the one that best matches what's in his head. At some point, he's gonna be typing out the word so many times. He's gonna know it. So, what happened with Casey? A year later, I would ask her, because that's exactly what I had her do when she was learning to read. I would ask her, go thesaur size. That's my word for it. She went down multiple levels. She said she looked at over 200 words, and then she said this is the best one, and she could explain why and defend it at to a university professor. So, over six to 12 months, that's how long it takes, your kids can develop a vocabulary of hundreds and hundreds of evolved words, and their reading level is going to skyrocket. That's awesome. Remember, they can write it, they can read it. But here's the point in all this. Now we have the one that best matches what's in their head. So now we can laser focus from that and find the ultimate villain. Okay. That was an advanced form of word analysis. Okay. Now we're going to get to articulation. We're going to go because and add three really good reasons, the best ones you can come up with. For each reason, we're going to simplify that to a simple universal theme. Then we're going to go to the script of 16 candles or whatever you're using, and we're going to find a quote at the beginning of the movie that deals directly with that universal thing, one sentence, and a quote at the end. We're going to put those two quotes together as our data. And because each paragraph has two quotes, by definition, this is not a BS paper. By definition.

SPEAKER_01 41:46

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 41:46

Now, for from those two quotes, we're going to form our topic sentence. Now, as somebody who studied journalism, have you ever noticed that when you have your topic sentence and your data, that the transition doesn't always flow that way. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:58

Easily. I mean, you know, it happens all the time.

SPEAKER_00 42:00

Well, here's how we fix that. Have you ever thought of applying a warrant to a body paragraph?

SPEAKER_01 42:05

How so?

SPEAKER_00 42:05

Okay. Well, what we do is we a warrant is uh answering a how and why question to connect a topic sentence with the data. So you just answer a how and why question between those two and now it flows.

SPEAKER_01 42:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 42:17

It's from the craft of research. Did you know what a warrant was before our conversation?

SPEAKER_01 42:21

No.

SPEAKER_00 42:21

Okay. Anybody outside of a PhD candidate doesn't know. But now you can tell them now that you have your your your two quotes, you have your topic sentence. We're just going to answer a how and why question. That's a warrant. Why is this so important? Because when a university professor sees that's done, they automatically think this is at least at the college level. This is what they want desperately.

SPEAKER_01 42:42

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 42:42

And none of their kids know it until grad school. Okay. So that is so important. And also now that you know about it, if you don't use a warrant, you will be arrested. That's a joke.

SPEAKER_01 42:52

Yeah. I got it. Uh can I take us to AI for just a second?

SPEAKER_00 42:57

You were asking about dyslexia and artificial intelligence. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:01

So does AI help them or does it hinder them?

SPEAKER_00 43:06

I will not allow my students to go near AI until after they're doing advanced body paragraphs. I want to let them touch it. Okay. I think it's a just a whore. Because they're using, you don't I hear parents all the time, but if my kid doesn't need to know AI, how are they going to get a job? Well, I can tell you, from my experience, I have when ChatGPT came out with uh the $200 a month pro plan in December 24, I bought it that day. I am one of those people who who produces more than 10x the amount of work a normal person would do who's educated, really with AI. So it helps, but at the right moment. So here's the main issue that is going to happen in AI. You don't need to worry about how fast it's going. Five years, 10 years from now, it'll be the same thing. If you're going to use AI, the secret is the craft of research. It's context, problem statement, solution. I just showed you a simple An advanced form of context. So now we have to go on to the problem statement. But before we get there, what you need to understand is that the biggest issue with AI is you have to know in your bones what is good and what is bad. Okay. And then how to tell AI to fix it. So, and that is not the hard part. The ability to know what is good and what is bad is the key point. All right. So when you're doing that, for example, I'm just going to give you a quick example. There was a company that was that they sell information, they create reports. Exactly what AI is supposed to put out of business. They're doing phenomenally well. They had a budget for 2026 of 700,000. As of April, they were spending on a pace for 7 million. By the end of the year, they're expecting to have spend more on AI than salaries. Wow. So what you need to be an AI employee is you need to know what good looks like and when it and when it doesn't come back, how to fix it. So what they what you do is now you're having agents actually drafting out the work and you're managing them. But how do we train our kids to do this? Right. What I found is it's the problem statement. Okay. How do we come up with a problem statement where if we solve it, it's well worth more than the economic input putting into it? That is the biggest issue that we're finding. And that is the second step in the craft of research. So I want to bring you back to remember when I said we start off with something very specific with dyslexia, then we get an answer? The ability to take that answer and then to uh to get another qu uh question out of it and then to answer that. That is the basic skills to develop that. So let me give you an example at an extreme level. Uh, one of the most advanced kids we're working with now is Grayson. Grayson's not dyslectic in the least, he's just your typical 99th percentile math and science student. Grayson wants to get his PhD, work for NASA to Terraform Wire Mars. So I literally have to get him published in a peer-reviewed journal for him to do that. So, what I'm gonna teach him to do, we're starting off with the advanced body paragraphs that we showed you, is he's now becoming homeschooled because he's too advanced for normal school, is his parents are teaching him that now. Then we're going to walk him through the problem statement and everything else. What we're doing for that is I already know from the AI, I know where he needs to publish, and their AI is brilliant in finding the holes that need to be filled. I'm giving him customized material that I create for him. He's 10. Okay. What? He's 10, yes. Grayson's on the young side. So the first I thought you were gonna say he's 16. So no, he's 10. So I'm giving him material that's written at the 12th grade level, the contents at the third-year college level. Okay. And then how do I expand that out? He's interested in Japanese history from the Japanese side. So I'm giving him a book on Japanese history, what happened during World War II from their perspective, and post-war Japan embracing defeat from Professor Dower. Then I'm handing him this book, Post-War Japan is history, this essay, the first one from Professor Dower. He will then go through line by line. This article will literally turn most adults dyslectic. They can't read it. Because the first paragraph has 17 points and it makes most adults go off the rails. They literally can't read it. Most reading teachers can't read it. So we will show Grayson how to do that. For other students, we start off with what they're interested in. Another student we're working with, he's a genet kid, 12, math science kid, not dyslectic, nothing like that. His name is Alfred. He's interested in hawks as hunting birds. So I started him off at the 11th grade level, and I'll eventually make them more and more difficult and mimic what he's interested in at this level. Okay. So at that point, Duncan read the actual journals, all right? And then as we're going through and he's learning about it, he's question, answer, question, answer. What I have him do is I have him read each packet once. Then he reads the second time, he circles everything that he's confused about. Third time he reads through, he tries to answer all his questions. While as he can't, we use those questions to make the next packet. And we would keep recycling back until he can answer all the questions on his own. That's building up the knowledge, and we're eventually getting to the point where we have the problem statement. I mean, the thing that needs to get filled from the journal and where he's going until they meet. That's how we meet the problem statement. And that will take years.

SPEAKER_01 48:21

Right.

SPEAKER_00 48:22

So so while everybody else is trying to do the traditional thing where he's making that connection, then all we have to do is show him how to make the solution. So at that point, we've done the entire craft of research thing. Here's why that is so important. I've had my former clients get done with that before they step foot in college. And every university professor I've ever talked to said, I want these kids to have these skills before they stepped foot on college as a freshman. And nobody teaches this besides us. So the so he gets on that my students go through for four years from this. I'm going to tell you about the students who freaking hate AI. They get out, the boss requires it. They call me up in a panic. I don't know how to deal with AI. I said, I trained you in the craft of research. I said, go do context. I said, talk to it, type with it, swear at it. I don't care. Come back with a context. They come back. And I said, go ahead and do the problem statement. They come back and they said, I hate this. I said, Welcome to the adult world. Then they come up with a solution. They go back in, they're pouting to their boss. The boss goes, Wow, we can use this. This is an actual solution to a problem we have. Within a matter of weeks, they're training their peers on AI.

SPEAKER_01 49:35

That's fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 49:36

So that's the general connection. Knowing the craft of research and combining it with overcoming dyslexia, that front part of the brain, word analysis followed by articulation, starting off with what the kids are interested in, eventually going down to the specific to the general. You do that and they're fine. And if they want to do a head and hands job, we just do the advanced body paragraphs, the thesis and conclusions, so you can get through the community college. Fastest way to a six-figure salary is becoming an electrician. Yeah, I'd agree with that. But here's what all my kids tell me that have done that, who I taught initially. They said, you know, we're getting in our late 30s, and my body, it's not like I'm 25 anymore. And I and they they they got their associate's degree. So I said, let's have you start working on getting your four-year degree. And over time, because their wife normally contacts me because they're going through this, they get their four-year degree. Now they can become the foreman and they can do that at 70.

SPEAKER_01 50:34

Yeah. So let's bring it back to road schooling families. What can families do today to help, you know, figure out like not just awareness, but action? Um, you know, a road schooling family that's listening out there, maybe finishing this episode today, and their kid has three or four of the signs that we've discussed. Um, what do they do first?

SPEAKER_00 50:53

First thing you're going to notice is for your kid, and boys are different than girls. Boys will tend to throw temper tantrums when you ask them to do things they can't do. Girls tend to be quiet and just take it. Interesting. So, what you want to know, if if they're writing randomly placed misspelled words, if they can't learn to read, first thing you're going to want to do is find out their specialty and just simply ask them this question. In that speciality, when you're thinking about it, do you have ideas flying around your head at life speed but with little to no organization? You know if your kid's lying to you. Most of them will just say yes. If they're not, ask them in a way, maybe ask uh their favorite non-parent adult. A lot of times it's an older cousin, it's somebody who's in college, somebody who's you know close enough to their age, but they don't consider a real adult. Have them ask it. Once you find that out, that's dyslexia. Now, how do we fix it? That was a problem I ran into because what I found is the solution is the the private schools are $75,000 a year just in tuition. Right. For four to five years. Well, I went to private school.

SPEAKER_01 51:55

I mean, like that that isn't always the answer either. So a lot of road schooling families are coming from background education that was like my education. And so they want to do it different so that their kids aren't doing it the way they did it. So I get that too.

SPEAKER_00 52:09

Right. But I'm just saying the specific schools that actually work, it's four to five years of $75,000 a year. That's just what it takes. Got because it hasn't changed much since the 1950s. And that's just tuition, not room and board. So how do we have parents do it? So that's where I had to simplify the heck out of this. And I decided to set up a program on dyslexia on a learning platform called school, SKO L dot com. The reason why we chose that is because it also has it's like a Facebook community with no ads with the actual learning on it. And the person who teaches us, who I found we actually have to have a parent teach this. Her name is Angela. She's a homeschooling mom, but she started off as a certified elementary school teacher in the state of Texas with a two-year master's degree, 11 years of experience. Her daughter was born, she became a homeschooling mom. She has taught her son, August, how to go through this. She's there each week to ask a question. Then we came back to the pricing problem. Most anything in my field where a parent has any access to a person costs 500 to 1,000 bucks a month. And unless if you're driving a half a million dollar RV or a bus conversion that's a couple of million, that doesn't work for, you know, people. So we had to lower the price to 147 a month, and parents could stay with us for as long as they need. We literally start with the basic sentences and we go all the way through having a kid pitch an idea for a doctoral dissertation. I mean, for a for a journal article. Wow. And so that's per student, correct? That's no, no, that's 147 a month, period. Parents are the teachers. Okay. Okay. If we ever get to a point where you need to take multiple courses, then what I'm going to tell you is to contact me directly. You go to dyslexiaclasses.com. There is a button that says download free guide, fill out three questions and set up an appointment to talk to me. If you're finding you need two courses at the same time because your kids are different age, let me know because I have to do a manual override. That's okay. I'm not going to be having you spend more than $147 a month because I'll give you a little hint. Most people can't afford that. Okay. So I can do an override. It's my company. I can do what I want with it. All right. So I I don't want, and why did I have to price it at that? Well, Angela's not cheap. Okay. It's a lot of prep time for her to do this because we ask parents to submit their questions ahead of time. This is most of them asking pretty much the same thing. And I need her there to be there to answer it. And because people ask, well, why should I trust you? I'm an academic, okay? She's a certified elementary school teacher. For teachers, she's one of them. And she's a homeschooling mom and she's done this. So that's that's why she's there. She's trusted on both sides.

SPEAKER_01 54:49

That's fair. I need you to come road school with us, seriously. Come on. Russia has been incredible. Okay, so let's go over it one more time. Where can people find you? Because they need to find you if they have any issues.

SPEAKER_00 55:00

Best thing to do is to go to school SKO SKO.com and just search for dyslexia classes. We have two courses up right now. The third one will be coming up shortly. One's for parents, one's for teachers. Don't do the teacher one. It's really accelerated. Assuming you're a trained and experienced educated, pick the parent one. And when you have uh go ahead and just sign up. And you said Angela will be there each week to answer your questions. If you want to get to me directly, just go to dyslexiaclasses.com. That's with an S Dyslexia Classes. There's a button that says download free guide, answer three questions, and actually set up a time to speak with me. It's a half an hour, it doesn't cost anything. I can walk your kid through this because they're gonna be like this. I don't want to do it. And then I asked them not only that question, there's a total of three that I I tend to ask. They're like, How did you know? What just a real quick, funny story. One kid, because I asked all three questions, he's like, That's me. How did you know? And his mom said, Well, there's hidden cameras around and he's been watching you for the past six months. He's like, Where? Where? And then he realized it was a joke. So how did you know? And I said, Well, because I was you, I know exactly what you're going through. And with kid with uh uh um with her son August, um, Verangela, he's trying to get out of stuff sometimes, and I would just look at him and say, I was you, I know exactly what you're thinking. You're thinking of this. His eyes go, huh? I said, I know what you're thinking before you think it. Yeah. Just the look at his face was priceless.

SPEAKER_01 56:35

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, listen, thanks, Russell. We so appreciate you today. And I know this episode ran a little long, but if you just listen to this episode and you have this knot in your stomach right now, and you're sitting there and you're thinking, this could be my kid, that's not a verdict. It's it's just information, and now you have more of it. Your child is not broken, but they may not have all the tools they need to get to the next level. Your child's brain might just be wired differently than the system that you're you've been taught your whole life that that's how that works. You know, and if you're on the road with your kids, you're already doing it differently. So, you know, take the time, reach out to Russell, fill out the assessment and see if that helps you in some way. I guess the one other question I have for you is do you know if um, like there's a lot of states right now that give funding. Do you guys take funding from those places at this time?

SPEAKER_00 57:25

We are strictly private pay just because I run a very lean business and it's you go through the government, it it takes more time than than it's worth.

SPEAKER_01 57:35

So and if you're out of New York, that makes sense. I actually grew up in the New York state school system. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 57:40

Yeah, it it's it's just uh it's we we we try to lower the price as much as we can, but that's what we find works for you know for most people.

SPEAKER_01 57:49

Sure. Yeah, and uh, you know, a lot of people are gonna spend the money on the road going out to dinner, so you just gotta reallocate that money. So in in that way, you know, I think it's a very affordable price point. Links to all of everything that Russell has discussed today will be in our show notes. And if this episode hit close to home, share it with another road school family out there. We so appreciate you tuning in to Learn to RV the podcast. This was a road schooling edition. We don't always do those, but we want to thank Russell for his time. Thanks, Russell. We appreciate you.

SPEAKER_00 58:17

Thanks for having me.