Dyslexia Solutions That Actually Work With Russel Van Brocklen, The Dyslexia Professor

Today, I sit down with Russell Van Brocklen, known as the Dyslexia Professor, to explore the realities of parenting, mentorship, and education when a child struggles with dyslexia. We discuss how dyslexia impacts not only academics but also self-esteem, social relationships, and mental health, and we look at how parents can step in as both guides and advocates. 

Mr. Van Brocklen shares his personal story of overcoming dyslexia, from facing severe academic discrimination in college to developing effective methods that transformed his ability to read and write. He explains how brain activity differs in those with dyslexia and why conventional teaching approaches often fail. Through his lived experience, he developed a system that helped students move from elementary-level skills to graduate-level writing ability in a fraction of the time traditional programs require. 

We also explore practical strategies that parents can implement at home without expensive training or specialized schools. Mr. Van Brocklen breaks down simple, repeatable exercises that help children organize their thoughts, build vocabulary, and strengthen both reading and writing skills. His methods prove that with the right tools and consistent effort, children with dyslexia can thrive academically and socially. 

If you’re a parent, educator, or mentor looking to better understand dyslexia and support children who face it, this episode has both insights and actionable steps. 

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Transcript

 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Couple of Nukes. As always, I'm your host, Mr. Whiskey, and today we are be getting into parenting and mentorship as well as teaching sometimes as parents. Um, uh. Our children experience difficulties, and we are called to step up and be a teacher at home and help our child navigate difficulties in life.

One of those is dyslexia, which we'll be talking about today. We have the dyslexia professor himself here to help us with resources that make navigating this, uh. Often unexpected challenge a lot easier. It can be a frustrating field as we'll get into today when your child is struggling to learn to read.

It's not just about the academic struggles, but also the social struggles of, of fitting in and, you know, keeping up with the peers. And we're gonna get into all the mental health aspects today as well. So, Mr. Russell Van Brolin, great to have you here. And could you please tell us a little bit about yourself?

Well, uh, thanks for having me. Um, my journey with dyslexia, I, the, the most interesting chapter was when, in the late nineties when I was in college, I wanted to know how the laws were created, how it worked, not some theory I wanted to know. So I signed up for the, uh, New York State Assembly Internship program.

And I showed up and I said, well, here's my neuropsychological evaluation. I have a first grade reading and writing level. And they looked at me and said, this isn't going to work. So they got a committee together and they really said, how are we gonna make this work for, you know, how are we gonna accommodate 'em?

It was exceedingly extensive. They said, we're placing you in the majority Leaders program and council's office that operate the assembly day to day, because there are three administrative assistants who could help me with my horrendous writing. It turned out very well. And then for my ma, for the academic portion, you had to do a major research paper.

My standard accommodation back then was just to give a very long and detailed oral defense, and it was so involved that other students wanted nothing to do, whether they were just. They found writing a lot easier. So I did that and they recommended, uh, 15 credits of a minus. Well, the political science department at the State University of New York Center of Buffalo looked at the accommodations and said, we don't like these accommodations.

So the only time in the history of that program and happened 27 years ago is that they said, well, instead of 15 credits of a minus, we don't like your accommodations. Here's your 15 credits of f. Hmm. Okay, now decimated my GPA and I said, no more. I'm tired of this discrimination. I wanted to solve reading and writing for dyslexics, and I talked to my professor.

I said, where can I go in grad school that would force me to do this? And they kind of laughed. They said, law school. Hmm. They didn't think I was serious. I was serious. So I went to, um, I went to work with Professor Warner and it was the second day of contracts. I'm auditing, so I'm not getting credit. I'm just there to learn, to read and write.

He calls on me and using the Socratic method, if you don't know the answer, it's almost nobody does. The second day of law school, they keep asking you questions to really just to embarrass the living heck out of you. Mm-hmm. Alright. That's, that's. That's what, that's how it's done. If you're interested, there's a famous movie called The Paper Chase from the seventies that demonstrate that, well, that didn't happen to me.

What I found later is for dyslexics in our specialty, our area of extreme interest and ability, when that's grad school, when we walk in, we own the place, day one. So he called on me and everything changed. Everything just lined up and my thoughts were organized for the first time ever. I started responding very heavily back to him.

Uh, then I started shouting at him and he started shouting at me. I leaned forward to yell at him as rapidly as I could get, uh, my arguments out. He did the same to me. Apparently, this is acceptable in law school. Well, that ferocious exchange went back and forth for 15 minutes. At the end, professor Warner said, Russell, I have to stop.

You couldn't be any more correct. In the interest of time, I have to move on to the next case. My classmates looked at me with a sense of kind of trepidation and awe because the ones I've kept in contact where they said, you know, we've been practicing for years and we still can't do that. Not to a law professor.

So at. So that kind of just cleared everything in my head. I solved reading within a month. I solved writing within a couple of years, and then what I wanted to do was to just go back to seniors, juniors, and seniors in high schools. The students who were like me, highly motivated, highly intelligent, and just.

Just solve it. So I, and I said I wanted the New York State government to fund my program, and they said, my professors said they can't even get the state government to fund their research. Well, I got them to do it after a number of years. What happened? Remember, we ki, we cherry picked these kids, highly motivated, highly intelligent.

The best teacher that they had, uh, to teach it. They were juniors and seniors in high school with a middle school writing skill. One class period a day for 180 day school year. Approximately at the end, they scored in the average range of entering graduate school students, not college, graduate. Stu entering grad, like the writing skills of a college graduate, they alled from college gpa, a 2.5 to 3.6.

No accommodations. My the best. They all got jobs. The best private school at the time was Landmark College. We were three times as effective for less than 1% of the cost for less than one 25th of the effort. I presented New York City in 2006. That was where I got started. Now before we get further, I wanna take a big step back for everyone listening.

I'm sure they've heard of dyslexia before, but I wanna do some myth busting and some, you know, just getting everyone on the same page. So can you break down for us, what is dyslexia? How does it kind of play out in an individual's life, and what are the complications that follow with that? Okay, so the first thing we need to do is go to the top signs for those who are watching.

It's overcoming Dyslexia by Sitz from Yale Medical Doctor. Brain Scans. For those listening, it's the second edition I'm going to turn. It's Overcoming Dyslexia second edition, page 78, figure 23. This is dyslexia. So do you see how the back part of your brain has this massive neuro activity and mine is next to nothing?

Right, right. I'm seeing that. Okay. Now do you see how the front part of the brain, I have about two and a half times the neuroactivity. Hmm. Okay. Now our brains are fundamentally different. So when you're dealing with a dyslectic, after I presented New York City, I thought I did something amazing. I thought I was done.

I was wrong. The teachers asked, what about typical students? Will this work for them? I said, absolutely not. So to answer your question, the first thing that I had to do is when I did in my initial program, Yale said, it's word anal. I'm sorry, it's articulation, followed by word analysis. I usually, the graduate records exam, analytical writing, assessment, analytical articulation.

To me that was the same, essentially the same thing, very successful. But with typical students, what I found is we had to flip it. We had to do word analysis first, then articulation. But before we do that, we're talking about average kids here. They don't, they're so frustrated, they don't wanna do anything, right?

So the first thing I found is we have to focus on their specialty. We have to focus on their area of extreme interest and ability number, and how do we determine that it's a Saturday morning, they can do whatever they want. What is it that's their specialty. Secondly, we had to teach them not from the general to the specific.

The way they're taught in school, but from the specific to the general, why you ask a Dyslectic, for example, what effect did Martin Luther King's famous I of a dream speech have on the American Civil Rights Movement? It's like asking us to grab fog. We can't do it. But if you ask a dyslexic in your specialty, do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed, but with little to no organization, they're going to say yes.

So then we're gonna say, what we're gonna do is we're gonna force your brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable. Output. So what we do is we teach from the specific to the general. For example, what personally compelled Martin Luther King to wanna give his name of speech. We go to his biography, we find out, and then another question will present itself.

We answer that, you know, the question will present itself and we answer that and we keep going. And that forces our brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output. And then we teach word analysis followed by articulation. So I, I still want to go back. So you talked about the difference in neurological activity in the brain.

Mm-hmm. So how does that manifest? You know, a lot of people hear dyslexia and they think, oh, it's just words rearranged themselves when people are trying to read. Like, how accurate is that statement? Like, how does it actually manifest when people are trying to learn and study who have dyslexia? Okay. Well that is a, you're describing a symptom of dyslexia.

And what I find, what a lot of current scientists are trying to do is they're trying to focus on how do we fix the symptom? Mm. But they're not getting at the court issue. So it's kind of like somebody has a cold, we're gonna take the, you know, the cold pills to get rid of the stuffy nose. That's a symptom.

The real problem is in your chest. And the doctor's still trying to figure out how do we deal with that? Alright. Okay. Okay. So how do we deal with dyslexia? Let me give you an example for most of your parents out there, say you have an elementary school child. What you're going to notice is their writing.

As one teacher told me when I present New York City every year is my student, she's a special ed teacher. My students are writing apparently randomly placed misspelled words. I don't even know where to begin. So if you are super rich, you're going to use an Orton-Gillingham multi-sensory structured language approach.

Orton Dr. Orton passed away in 1948. Gillingham sometime in the fifties. Hasn't changed a lot since. They use seen, touching, hearing to overcome the issue. It's four to five students per teacher, and these schools generally run about 75,000 a year, and they need four to five years to generally fix the problem.

Oh, yeah. So if you're rich, you can do that. Yeah, that's, that's now if you wanna do it at home and not go through two years of training for $11,000 and that's at a non-for-profit after a bachelor's degree. Here's how we do it at home. Are you ready? Mm-hmm. Do you know any dyslexic elementary school kids like that?

No, not personally. Okay, so I'm just gonna give you my, the example that I use a lot. The girl's name is Sarah. She's extraordinarily dyslexic. She's 10 years old at the time. In fifth grade, we start off with things, 10 things the students like and 10 things they dislike. The favorite thing she has in the world is swimming.

She's actually, uh, took a course where she's actually an assistant swim teacher. She's on the swim team. She gets in the pool every chance she can get. So what we do is we have the students, the parents start off typing, not on an iPad, not on an iPhone. Not handwriting, typing. Usually on a laptop you type out hero plus sign.

What are we talking about? And the child's gonna copy it. Why is that? Okay. Copying Default writing strategy. Professor James Collins. Strategies for Struggling Writers. So then we're gonna switch out. Hero for Sarah. Sarah plus sign. What are we talking about? We're gonna switch out. What are we talking about for the first thing on her list that she likes swimming.

Sarah. Plus sign swimming. See how we got there? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Now. We have to do is we have to swap out the plus sign for a word to make it a, a simple three sentence paragraph. Now I'm gonna ask you some of the most simplest questions you'll ever be asked. If you answer them exactly, it'll work. If you don't, it's gonna collapse.

Alright. If you think I can fool you, uh, I suppose so. I fool most of the teachers. So do you think you can answer the questions exactly because they're, they're gonna be the simplest ones you're ever gonna be asked. I'll try my best. Okay. You ready? Yes, sir. Alright. Here's my question. Does Sarah like or dislike swimming?

Sarah likes swimming, but that's not what I asked. Right. Kind of confused. Does Sarah like or dislike swimming? No, I, I, you didn't do what I asked. Okay. Are you ready for that aha moment? Sure. Yeah. Okay. You, what you did is what virtually every educated person did. I asked the Sarah, like, or dislike you, you pick the correct word, like.

But it wasn't going to fit in the sentence you, so you just added the S. Mm-hmm. And you made a correct sentence because that's, you're educated. Sarah doesn't know how to add the S. Interesting. Okay. This is why this is such an expensive problem to fix. How do we get her to add the S? Well, if you're using an Orton-Gillingham.

Multis century structured language approach. It is complicated as all heck college graduates, which were required before you take, before you get trained in that approach. Take a very long time to learn how to solve this, and it takes a long time to work with the kids you're seeing, touching, hearing, all this stuff, right?

We're gonna sh I'm gonna show you in the next few minutes how to do this really quickly. What we're going to do, 'cause what Sarah would do is she's gonna say like, 'cause that's what I asked Sarah, like swimming, how do we get her to Ds? I'd ask Sarah to read it out loud. And does it sound generally correct?

That's a key thing. Read it out loud, Sarah. Does that sound generally correct? No, fix it. Sarah likes swimming. We practice that 20 times. The 10 likes and 10 dislikes. If she messes up on number 18, redo it until she gets 'em. Perfect. It's a lot of redoing the same thing over and over again. Right, right. Next, do you see how like and dislike is a form of word analysis?

Right. Okay. And we're gonna go because reason one, give me a simple reason why Sarah likes swimming.

Because she likes to exercise. Okay. Sarah likes swimming because she likes to exercise. Now, what do you have there? A whole bunch of misspelled words. How do we fix that? What we do is we tell Sarah before she puts the period down, she can ask any question. Mm-hmm. But she might ask, did I spell exercise wrong?

She probably did. If she, the answer is yes, you misspelled it, you type it out, she copies it. Okay. And then what you do is say, now she just has to do that one word. If that's the only thing. You made a mistake, but kids don't do that normally. They drop the period. Once they drop the period. You tell them this beforehand.

If there's a major, and I mean major grammatical mistake or any spelling mistake, they gotta retype the entire. Sentence. Okay, what happens? They say, I'm not gonna make that mistake, and they make it typically three to 13 times. As they progress, they're getting more and more annoyed with themselves to help lower the stress level.

You can say, you made a silly mistake or silly error. Those are the two least offensive terms I ever found working with this. As they approach five or six retyping of them not making a mistake and they keep making it. They start getting really annoyed with themselves, so they start to hyperfocus, and that's where the magic starts to happen by 10 or 11, they're concentrating so deeply that sometimes you see sweat coming down their forehead.

The the concentration is immense, and then finally they get it right, and you keep them doing that until they get it right for 20 times in a row, repeating the same thing over and over again. Then it's reason one and reason two. You glue them together, the glue word end, then reason one, reason two, and reason three.

Okay. Now what I told you, for a fifth grader, a 10-year-old might take two, three weeks on the short end, maybe a month, month and a half, and the longer, and typically if they're in second grade, it'll take a. But what I just showed you takes a Dyslectic student from second, from kindergarten writing to end of second beginning, third grade level.

Mm. All right. And here's a little secret. People ask me, what do I do about reading? I said, I don't teach reading. Huh? I said, if you can write it, you can read it. You can write out the word, you can read it. Do you see how, again, I'm going back to the. Going back to the book, overcoming Dyslexia. I'm showing the brain scan again, back part, almost no neuroactivity.

Yours is going crazy. Front part my two and a half times overactive. It's word analysis followed by articulation like and dislike is a simple form of word analysis at after, because the reasons are articulation. Now, now you could do that or you could go and, you know, spend all your money, drop enough money to buy A BMW to have a private dyslectic school go.

So I guess what I'm not tracking is right. You asked. Does Sarah like or dislike swimming? Right. And you said most people, uh, will say likes or dislikes with the S You said Sarah will not add the SI guess why is she not adding the s? Is her brain just physically incapable of thinking in that way or, or you have to develop it like I, I guess I'm not understanding why she doesn't add the s herself.

Okay. Because I'm just going to go back to the neuroscience. Right. Showing that. Do you see the massive activity on the, uh, that you have in the back of the brain? Right. Let's look at the dyslectic. Let's look at that from, um, you know, that we just don't have the brain activity. Hmm. It's kind of like asking me, I Did you ever play any sports, competitive sports at any time?

What'd you play? Uh, I was on a basketball team and then I did a lot of solo sports for like cross country, so not a lot of competitive stuff. I did do swimming, so. But you did, you played, you played reasonably competitive basketball. Sure. Yeah. I mean, to the, to the middle school level, I suppose, but, right.

But you a game of basketball right now. I want you to look at, um, not just somebody who's just not meant for basketball. Let's say we're talking about somebody who, right. Um, I'm gonna mention my, uh, cousin Timmy, when he was that age. He has a genetic disorder. He's very, he's short. And he has a genetic order that made him very hefty.

Okay. You know, he is like five foot two and weigh like 280 pounds. How come Timmy couldn't be, and he, he's just like me. I am horrible at basketball. So is he how it is kind of like asking Timmy, how come you can't go and play competitive basketball? How come you're not dunking? Yeah. Body's not designed for it.

The brain for a dyslectic is not designed. For this it is completely, it's kind of like when I go in, like for example, when I went into, um, to, to do my original program, I had to get Dr. James Collins to sign off on it. So a million and a half dollar research grant that he had before in this general area, people said it was gonna take years.

I did in less than two weeks. Why there's a university-wide competition for 15,000. That's all the time I had, and I did get his written approval. He said a plus. Excellent. If I didn't do that, I wouldn't have gotten the 15,000. I would've never gotten the state funding, 'cause I'd run it through multiple schools.

I could do that because I'm dyslexic. I could walk into law school and dominate it on the second day because that's the part of my brain that has two and a half times the neuroactivity. But how come the kid can't do, because it's just not how our brain is, is designed. So what I'm using is I found the parts of the brain that are overactive and I said, how can we adapt things for this?

Does that make sense? Right. It does. I'm just scientifically curious if like, I don't know how much research we have on this. Uh, do we like understand why the brain is incapable of it? Is it just like. The physical structures, are they just dead cells? Like what, what is like the physical science behind it?

Uh, it is, you're, you're absolute, um. I'd get this and read it through. It gives the front part, uh, Dr. Uh, um, doc Sally Schitz, uh, ideas on what to do with the research. I disagree with. Why is it, it's an incredibly complicated question, and to be honest with you, um, I looked into that, but I'm more the guy who does the solution.

Right, right. Okay. As far as the solution goes, let me just tell you what the difference is. Uh, how far did you go in your education? Um, it was my, my educational history is kind of strange 'cause I was a nuclear operator in military, but it's, uh mm-hmm more than a college level education. So, yeah, you, you went out in high school, then you went into the na, you were on submarines?

Uh, yes, I did training on submarines. Okay. Yeah. And yeah, and they only let the most, and just so your audience understands this, they don't let anybody on that submarine that's not checked out sub ways to Sunday because they just can't take even the possibility of a mistake. Right. Okay. So yeah, you're dealing with the heart of the, of the modern Navy.

So, but. What we're looking at here is when you are Dyslectic. Okay. When you're going through your K through 12 school, do you remember an English class where they gave you all these books every year you had to go through five 10 or whatever the number was? Yeah, of course. Okay. Do you know how they taught you from the general to the specific?

Mostly, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, so I want you to imagine you're a dyslectic, the most motivated kids I ever worked with. You step outside of that specialty. Their motivation's down 50%. Typically they're down 75, 80%. Next we're looking at, uh, they don't teach from the general to the specific. So they teach me junk through the specific and the dyslexics, like grabbing fog.

They can't do anything with it. And then they're certainly not doing word analysis followed by articulation. So lemme show you how frustrating that is. Is there a sport that you're really horrible at? And I mean, you're just horrible. For me it's basketball. Um, I dunno. I would say, uh, like you, you and I discussed off, I'm like, I can't throw a football too well.

So, okay. So I want you to imagine. That you were told that your economic future is based on your ability to be an excellent football player, but we'll accommodate you. We'll give you a thousand dollars football, we will give you $10,000 protective equipment and we'll make sure the people you're going against or getting the cheapest used garbage out that was once sold at Walmart.

I get what you're saying. It's really gonna matter if I still can't play good, it's not gonna matter. That's what's going on with dyslexia in school. So when we finally get to grad school, we walk in and they ask in this very narrow area, can you contribute? What's your idea? It's all that matters. All the other stuff you're supposed to learn in a PhD program, nobody cares about that because if you weren't an exceptional student, you wouldn't be there to anyway.

It's the idea, it's the currency of the realm. That's why it's like me asking, well, how come? Well, I, I got approval from my research within less than two weeks. I got funding from the university. I got funding from the state Senate. Why can't you do it? Why can't you come up with something that's worth mattering to somebody?

And, and a lot of them can't. It's just, that's what it is. It's just our brains are so completely different. The system is stacked against us. Now, this does not mean that dyslectic have to be in specialty forever. Let me give you an example. Last December, I start December, 2024, and on the 27th I was meeting, I was working with Kimberly at full permission to tell her story.

She's just spent 700 bucks to have her kids tested by the state thoroughly. Um, she's the homeschooling mom. Her son Reed was in fifth grade reading at. He scored a one 90 on their test, which is in somewhere in the mid second grade level. Okay. For the next, for the rest of the school year, they expected him to increase by 2.8 points to a 1 92 0.8 grade level was two 11.

I worked with Kimberly half an hour a week, and she worked for Reid, you know, three half hour sessions a week on average. She didn't get him to increase 2.8 points, he increased by 20 points. Wow. That's over three standard deviations. That's one. In 2000. He scored a two 10 grade levels two 11 essentially at grade level.

Then his friends came to him and said, Reed, for social reasons, we want you to come with us to public school. So he and his brother who's not dyslexic, both went to public school. Reed's doing fine. Okay, now that's But during the intervention period. We have to be in the kid's specialty. So the next thing people want to know is how do I deal with the reading aspect?

So I'm gonna give you an example of the specialty and how to deal with the reading. I'm holding up a book called Walt Disney, the Triumph of the American Imagination. This is by far the most popular book that I teach when I do this privately. All 1000 pages of this monster. Wow. It's designed for 17 year olds.

Would you be surprised that I give that to a 10-year-old? Yeah, it's a big reading at the second grade level. Right, right. Okay. You make, why would I do that? Well, because for the most motivated kids, I just go for the insolution. Other ones we'll go through with two books or three books. My start off at Harry Potter, but this particular girl, it's representative of a lot of students.

'cause I teach that biography a lot. Have you ever been to Disneyland or Disney World? No, unfortunately not. Okay. Well, what's supposed to happen is you walk into the Magic Kingdom, right? Or Disneyland, and it's Main Street USA, and you're supposed to feel the Disney Magic. Yeah. Yeah. Disney Magic is two universal things.

First one's easy to find. The second one, I've never had a parent find it, so what do I do when they walk in? Is the amount of work these kids are willing to put in. I will. I took the girl and I, she doesn't want her name used. I'm just gonna call her Jen, and I said, Jen. I'm gonna move you when you walk into Mar the Magic Kingdom.

That's Marline. That's Marline, Missouri, which it represents. That's where Walt was between five and 10. He spent the rest of his life trying to recreate that experience his life. I said, you wanna learn about the Disney magic? You gotta start off there. And she's still excited. I said, yeah, you don't wanna know the work I'm gonna put you through.

I wanna know. Okay. So I sent her over to that section. It's 3,500 words written at the ninth, 10th grade level. She's 10. Writing at the second grade level, reading at the second grade level. So I have her listen to the audio book while following along her real book, trying to answer a specific question.

What does Walt like? What does he not like? What does he dislike? What does he want to do? And then she's going through, if she finds a word, she doesn't know what she's practically every word. I have her type out the word. And then go to, um, go to, uh, the Marion Webster's online dictionary. You cannot copy and paste.

You can't copy and paste. She has to re pick her definition and then retype it. How many times do you think you need to retype a word in the definition until you know it? Probably two to three times on average. Okay. Maybe it's two, three, maybe it's five, maybe it's 10, maybe it's 20. It's some number, right?

It doesn't matter. It's some, they're gonna be going through this chapter like this, like literally over a hundred times to start. So she goes and she types out the word in the definition, and she does that for every word. She doesn't, no. And she finishes the section and she starts over and we repeat the process.

And parents, I can hear right now, my child won't do that. I said, in the specialty once they understand, they do. The motivation is extraordinary. For kids with a DD or A DHD, it's the same solution for dyslexics. They can't concentrate on anything else. You get them in their specialty. They are hyper-focused the entire time.

Okay? So what happens? If we go through that, and then what you're going to find is at the end of two years, and that's what it takes. She's reading this book. How do I know she's reading this book? We come to the second universal theme, and I, in this case her mom is, has a master's degree, and I said, what's the second universal theme?

She said, I can't find it as her 12-year-old daughter will do in these situations. She'll say, mom, it's right there. And the mom goes, I can't believe I missed that. It's right there. I said, you have a master's degree, but in this instance, your 12-year-old dyslectic daughter can comprehend better than you can have.

I done my job? Now, that's a rather extreme example, but for highly motivated kids, highly intelligent, that's what we do. If you're talking to a more typical student, Reed was using X-Men, um, graphic novels that were age appropriate. Yeah. Approved by his mom. I mean, that, that's just to give you an example.

All right. I just wanted to illustrate just how effective that is, and we have students go through that Within three to six months, they're gonna start developing a vocabulary list of dozens of evolved words, and then over time, hundreds of evolved words. That's how we jump up the reading level. Here's the key thing.

If you're going to college, they're ju, they're, you know, 10th through 11th grade, you're taking the PSAT or SAT or a CT or whatever The verbal sections are essentially vocabulary tests. My kids who do this between 10 and 12, they remember 70 to 80% of the word definitions. Of the definitions. They don't need to go memorize hundreds of old words.

They've already done it drives their classmates crazy. What do you mean you're not studying these lists? I said, I, I did that five years ago. Hmm. Hey. And they don't need it. It's that powerful. So basically what I just showed you how to do, here's how we take care of beginning writing and here's how we take care of the reading issue.

Yeah. And I can say that your brain and mind work different in a sense that my perspective on it, uh, based on my questions, was how can we stop dyslexia? Right? If we, we look at the brain and what's happening mm-hmm. Can we do something procedurally, medically, or something to shift the, you know, the neuro actions so that the dyslexic brain then acts like.

I don't, you know, like a, a un dyslexic brain, right? Well, now your, your, your stuff is more practical, right? Hey, we have dyslexia, what can we do to work with it? Right? So two very different approach styles, but that's why I was asking, I was curious about what research is out there and, um, about it to see if people are trying to figure out, I don't wanna say a cure for it, but you know what I mean?

So, uh, and it seems like one of those things that. Maybe there is no cure. Like the only cure is working with with you, right? Because maybe it's just something that if the brain is just designed a certain way and it can't be rewired or redesigned a different way, then you have to work with that. Okay? Now I'm gonna show you our age differences.

'cause you only get a pretty young guy. How old are you? 23. Okay. Um, in 1999, you weren't even considered. Right? You're just not. That's when they solved that. The company is called Scientific Learning Corporation. It was a Dr. Temple from, uh, Cornell University. She was a young, uh, newly minted PhD at the time.

And what Scientific Learning Corporation did is they came out, I'm gonna really oversimplify very complicated neuroscience. They went and they had students play a kind of involved video game. Somewhere between three and 12 months they got a one to two grade level increase in reading. Okay. Very efficient at the time, and they've extended that work since then in the back part of the brain.

The reason why I'm mentioning Dr. Temple's work is the neuro activity did increase quite substantially. Not quite like a normal brain, but it quite an increase. Okay. Now here in elementary school, one or two grade level increase matters, but I want you to imagine if you were a senior in high school wanting to go in the Navy and you're reading at the seventh grade level, now you're reading at the eighth grade level.

Does it really matter? I get what you're saying. Yeah. It's all about the scaling, right? Are they gonna even let you near a nuclear sub if you can't read, right? Yeah. You're, you're, you just forget about it. They, they just won't, I mean, they can't take the risk. So what my fundamental, and, and that's generally you're going with exactly how the field's been going.

Okay. But my field, I mean, I'm, I'm just showing my level of frustration here. Again, overcoming dyslexia. This first came out in 2003. I mean, that was 22 years ago. So what I'm saying is I, I took the overactive part and if I could get you to read this monster, well, do you think you have the reading skills to go on a Nu nuclear sub?

Right? I get what you're saying. Yeah. So it's essentially. Um, I'm just, it's, it's, I I was looking to solve it from a very practical end. Yeah. Yeah. Um, does the other side work? Absolutely. I just, I just try to go, I went for what the biggest core problem is, which for dyslexia, a lot of people don't understand.

Again, you ask a dyslexic or an A DD or a DHD kid, do you have ideas flying around your head in your specialty at light speed key, questionable little to an organization? Yes. That's the problem. If you're dyslectic, I ask if, if you answer yes to that and is really fine. If you're really dyslectic, I'll ask a second question.

Fingers keyboard. Fingers keyboard. You have an idea that you wanna write about. You can type. You take your fingers, you put it on the keyboard, then the idea flies outta your head. Leading you with an empty brain. Hmm, that's rather bad case of dyslexia. How are you gonna write with an empty head? The researchers have no concept about this.

Zero, because they haven't lived it. So mine was strictly how can we get this done as cheaply and as efficiently as possible? Yeah. 'cause what we're spending now and the results would make you sick.

Yeah. I get that. And so I. We're gonna have your website in the description below for people to check out, just speaking of resources and, and calls. So what can people get from your website? Well, if you go to my website, it's dyslexia classes, uh.com, that's plural with an s, dyslexia classes.com. It's gonna say download, pre report.

So just click on that. And the document is the three reason your child's having trouble in school and how to get past it. You fill out, you answer a few questions, and then you, you can go and set up a free 30 minute, uh, interview with me or I speak to you and your dyslexic child and they are so hard to convince.

I ask them that question. Do you have I about the specialty? Do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed bill with little to no organizations they say. How did you know? And they're like thinking there's cameras around or something. I said, I went through what you went through and we discussed it a bit more.

And then because they've gone through so much, nothing's worked. Every adult said, Hey, I can show you how to solve this and it doesn't work, or they find it really frustrating. And finally I ask, is this how you'd like to overcome your concerns? Yeah. And then I talk to the parents. We work with parents on a yearly basis and we make it affordable.

And you know, we're, we're there on a webinar each week to answer questions. That's, that's awesome. That's awesome. I think it's, like you said, that lived experience, that relatability is so important and, um, you know, parents can be reading all the books and textbooks, but you know, you have a way of connecting with them that just really sets that foundation for learning and education.

Well, when I started this at the assembly, I was your age. Now I finally figured this out about a year ago. Everything, I mean, it, it, it, it, yeah. It just took everything. So, yeah, it, it was a, it was a, it was a fun ride, but now we're finally ready to help parents so they don't have to go through the hell that I went through in school.

And, and I'm gonna make no mistake about it. It was hell. All right. There's, there's just no need for it. Right. Right. And I think the most important part too is setting it up so that these children are living, uh, dare I say, relatively normal lives. You know, they don't have to go to a, a school and feel isolated or outcasted from their peers, and they don't have to just.

I, 'cause I think that's so important. You know, especially nowadays, we have so much outcast with our children, so much bullying. Obviously it's been going on for a long time. But I think just minimizing that aspect so they can have a fulfilled and happy life. I mean that's, I think that's so important for us to do as parents and mentors to the best of our abilities.

Exactly. And just again, going back to Reed, if he went into public school. After I talked to him in December, he would've went right into special ed with most of his classes. He would've been so frustrated because his purpose for going to school wasn't for the education. It was to be with his friends, and he wouldn't have been.

Right now he's with his friends because his mom solved the problem in a little under six months. Yeah, so again, that website and description below, I encourage you to check it out. And just for all of those who don't have a child with dyslexia, don't know someone, uh, but you plan on having children in the future, just keep this in the back of your mind in case you, you know.

Your child is having struggles with dyslexia and you say, I, I remember there was some that, that, that one expert on that podcast and, and he, and he had like the, the method to take care of this. So I encourage y'all to check it out, save it somewhere if you want, but. Mr. Van Brolin, so great to have you here.

I really appreciate what you do. Serving, you know, a, a niche audience, you know, committing your life to serving, uh, small but meaningful, important population. I really respect that and I want to thank you for your time today as well. Thanks for having me.