PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anita Rao 0:03
I am a bookworm, through and through and reading has shaped so many parts of my identity since I was a kid. It's given me a portal to explore the ways that other people live, from the boxcar children's Riverside home to Octavia Butler's apocalyptic futurescapes for so many of us, reading shapes who we are, what we know and how we connect with the world around us. But what comes so naturally to some of us isn't the case for others, including for the grandfather of our own embodied producer. Kaia Findlay,
Gilbert Findlay 0:39
I was a painfully slow reader. And we initially thought it was slow intellect, but my mother had me tested by a school psychologist, and my intellect was 140 which is way up there. So then I was sent to another specialist, and he photographed my eyes, and my eyes, didn't go all the way to the far left hand margin. They took three or four words, and then they had to go back and pick up two of those words. My mother, a very fast reader, would open a book, and she would read a whole line at a time. So then the conclusion was that I was dyslexic. I read backwards. Essentially.
Anita Rao 1:32
Gilbert Findlay is 89 and spent three decades of his life as an English professor. According to Kaia, he's read more books than anyone she knows. So how does living with dyslexia shape our relationship with reading and, in turn, our relationship with ourselves? This is embodied. I'm Anita Rao. Symptoms of dyslexia affect up to 20% of the US population. It's a lifelong neurological learning disability defined by challenges with various aspects of reading, and it looks different person to person. We're going to learn all about why dyslexia happens, how we can identify it, and why better understanding dyslexia matters for all readers. But before we get into these big questions, we're going to explore dyslexia from one man's perspective, someone whose experience with Dyslexia as a kid meant that he fell through the cracks of the education system and didn't learn how to read until he was 18. Dr. Shawn Robinson is an entrepreneur and a consultant. He has a PhD in literacy and language and is the author of the graphic novel series, Dr. Dyslexia Dude! Hey, Shawn, welcome to embodied.
Dr. Shawn Robinson 2:45
Hello. Thank you for having me.
Anita Rao 2:47
So I would love to start by having you help us visualize what it is like to read with Dyslexia as a kid, before you developed any of the tools that you have today, what did it look like when you opened a book? What did you see? Fear,
Dr. Shawn Robinson 3:01
Fear, negative emotions, and just written transcriptions on paper, knowing that there were letters and words, but not having the ability to read them effectively, and decoding, encoding and also being fluent too, more of just having the fear, the psychological warfare in my mind, of being just scared, really, and finding ways to avoid reading any way possible.
Anita Rao 3:35
Kaia's grandfather used the phrase I read backwards to describe his reading. What is the metaphor that comes to mind for you to describe what the experience of trying to read was like?
Dr. Shawn Robinson 3:46
An emotional roller coaster. I did switch my letters around when I was younger, but really it was just the emotional roller coaster to swing back and forth of just fear, really knowing that I want to read and speak what's in front of me, but not having the ability to effectively communicate what was on the paper was frustrating, because my mind like I think I noticed, I think I noticed, but then when it came I just froze. And so it was just again for me, it was an emotional roller coaster ride with many mixed emotions, but more on the negative side than the positive.
Anita Rao 4:29
There are signs of dyslexia that can start really early, like preschool, even kids struggling to name familiar objects or having difficulty remembering a sequence, like the alphabet. Is there an early memory that you have of first noticing your difficulties with reading.
Dr. Shawn Robinson 4:46
I had a hard time spelling my name and then just with alphabetic principle, those are some of the things I remember when I was a young kid. Then when, you know, I got older in terms of middle school or elementary school, even. In when teachers asked me to spell my name, I still had trouble, and when I was asked to read out loud, I avoided it as much as possible. So the earliest things I can remember is basically phonetically spelling my name and also the alphabetic principle too.
Anita Rao 5:16
You described that experience of fear and this roller coaster of emotions that would come up for you when you were confronted with needing to read. What was it like for you to be in a school setting like what was school like for you as a young kid?
Dr. Shawn Robinson 5:33
It was just the institutional setting where I went. I didn't really feel like I had an identity, particularly academically, because I had struggled for so many years academically that I just kind of gave up on myself. And so just my body was there, but my mind wasn't so me walking through the hallways, you know, as a young adolescent and doing what adolescents do when they're scared, act up, be immature, do things to get removed from class or school. That was easiest thing for me to do, and they didn't take much effort, because reading took effort. They had to, you know, really focus, be disciplined. And I didn't have those things at the time, so it was really just survival.
Anita Rao 6:21
How did teachers explain to you what was going on, or did you have any explanation as a kid for the struggles that you were experiencing in class?
Dr. Shawn Robinson 6:29
Not so much academically. Some teachers knew that I had struggled. I love them to death. They're some of the greatest teachers I had. They just didn't know how to properly help me in terms of my reading, but they helped me in other aspects of my life. Very grateful for those teachers that took time to pour love into me and nurtured me, even though they may not have been equipped with the the strategies and tools to help me become a reader, somebody who loves books now and so they just really helped me learn to love myself. And I think that was the most important lesson in life, is I have to learn how to love myself before I can able to really listen and move forward.
Anita Rao 7:12
So your mom has always been a fierce advocate for your education. She tried to find alternate pathways for you, even when there were counselors and teachers kind of telling her over and over that this wasn't going to work. You weren't going to be able to read, like maybe you should try something else. And there was one day that she was at a hair salon and she heard about a program for adult learners with dyslexia, something sparked her interest, and she ended up driving you through a snowstorm to meet the head of this program, Dr Nash. So tell me about that day and what Dr Nash said to you when you met him.
Dr. Shawn Robinson 7:49
So sorry. Pause there for a second. You're a little emotional about this. Yeah. So when we were driving to the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh to me. Dr Robert T Nash, when I was a junior in high school, I was scared I was saying inappropriate things to my mother, foul language, because that's all I knew how to communicate. And so when we got here, he pulled me into his office, and he gave me some assessments off the Woodcock Johnson. And so he came across the word came, and he's like, I want you to spell the word came. I'm like, easy, K, A, M, phonetically, that's how it sounds. And so he came back and asked me to spell some other words and read some passages, and then came back to the word came again and asked me spell it again. And he could see the frustration in my eyes. And basically just said, not only do you have dyslexia, but you are one of the most illiterate kids I've ever met in my life. He said, You've been failed by the system, but you have a gift. I'm gonna teach you how to read, but it's not gonna be easy thing. And so at that point in my life, I think for my mother and myself, we got clarification, but more importantly, I had an angel looking over me, and I've been blessed ever since he taught me how to phonetically read at 18, when I graduated high school with an elementary level, helped me crack the code, and I never looked back. I took the baton and I ran, and I wasn't going to stop until I got what was mine in terms of my education, and being a scholar of the dictionary and just being somebody who is passionate about this area of education, because without it, I don't know where I would be. I wouldn't be here.
Anita Rao 9:38
Can you explain that, like cracking of the code that you described like after having gone from 18 years of not being able to read, what were some of the tools that clicked with you that helped you crack that code?
Dr. Shawn Robinson 9:53
I know Dr Wolf's gonna speak on this more for me, it was the phonetic principles, the pronunciation. Symbols of the Webster's Merriam Collegiate Dictionary of connecting the sounds to written print and the syllable division, all based on the dictionary. And so once he taught me how to understand the code in terms of the sound structure of our language and how it's broken up by sounds to print. I just took off. I was like, Wait, this makes complete sense, and the very first word he he taught me how to decode, ENCODE, was monochromatism. I'm an 18 year old. I'm reading at an elementary level. What am I doing with the word monochromatism, but it taught me how to appreciate not just the structure of the word, but it taught me understand prefix suffixes, root words. And so for 28 years, I've been studying the Webster's Dictionary. It's my only book that I really read, and I love it because it taught me everything I need to know about the structure of language, not just phonemic awareness, phonics, but fluency, reading comprehension, it really helped me understand vocabulary, and so it allowed me to be competitive in this space, this world, allowed me to write my own narrative, and it allowed me to not just be a professional, but also be a better husband, better father, better practitioner, better advocate. It's all because of the dictionary really helped me become knowledgeable about the field of reading.
Anita Rao 11:32
After Shawn gained the literacy skills he needed through Dr Nash's program, he went on to college and then grad school, taking every opportunity to use writing centers and mentorship help. These interventions are key for dyslexic learners. There's no treatment or getting rid of it. What's happening in brains like Shawn's is a disruption of the complex pathways between parts of the brain that allow us to connect sounds, shapes and meaning, and it's something that our brains were actually never designed to do in the first place. We're going to hear more about the science behind reading and what that tells us about dyslexia in just a moment.
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao. The human brain was never meant to read. There's no genetic code for it. No one place in the brain that reading comes from. What gives us that ability, instead, is the brain's capacity to create new circuits from existing cognitive and linguistic structures, and when something in that circuit goes wrong, that's when learning difficulties, often classified as dyslexia, occur. Someone who's extensively studied the reading brain and dyslexia is Dr. Maryanne Wolf. She's a human development and psychology scholar and the director of the Center for dyslexia, diverse learners and social justice at UCLA. Hey. Maryanne, welcome to the show.
Dr. Maryanne Wolf 13:11
Wonderful. It's great to be with a book lover. Anita.
Anita Rao 13:15
Well, as a book lover, I will have to tell you that it really blew my mind to learn that my brain and other human brains were not designed to read. So I need you to break this down a little bit more for me, like, what is our brain doing when we're reading?
Dr. Maryanne Wolf 13:32
Many people believe that reading should be considered natural, the way oral language or vision develops, and in fact, it's anything but the case which has implications for how children read, whether they read easily, or whether they struggle, or whether they have a more neurologically based organization for their brain, as in dyslexia. But let me break it down just a little bit when we are born, we are born with centers for language, for cognition, for affect, even social emotional development. All of these things have their areas in the brain that we might want to call either networks or circuits. But with reading, there's no circuit there. And what we have, just as you intimated Anita, is this beautiful design principle, and the brain is unlike other species in that it not only has the programmed areas like language and vision that just unfold, but we have the capacity to learn new things, and literacy and numeracy are inventions. They don't exist within the brain. What we do is make new connections among the. Those original parts. So what reading is really, if you want to think about like the circuit inside a house, it's a new circuit that connects the existing circuits in a totally new way. And when we talk about a reading circuit with the first part of that circuit is the cognitive it's not just connecting, it's understanding the concept that words are made of sounds, and letters stand for those sounds. When we look at how writing originated four and five and 6000 years ago, it came out of a concept. And the concept is that words are made of sounds, and you can make visual symbols for those sounds. That's a conceptual leap that took 2000 years between the Sumerians and the Greeks for us to learn, and we give kids 2000 days to make that conceptual understanding.
Anita Rao 16:09
For sure, and because it is a complex circuitry and under the best the best condition, yes, so when someone has dyslexia, why is that happening, given what we know about this circuit that the brain creates in order to read. Great.
Dr. Maryanne Wolf 16:28
Now I'm going to make it kind of simple, but related to what Sean said, that circuit has a visual system, and the visual system has to be connected to the language system. Now the language system has a very important set of linguistic systems. If you talk about the dictionary, you're not just talking about the sound. You're talking about the meanings you're talking about these little, tiny morphings. I just love that the first word he was fcking out was monochromatism. That's a word full of little parts called morphemes. English language is connecting the sounds. Those are the phonemes, the meanings. That's what the Dictionary gives you in semantics, the way the word is used, that could be a noun or verb, the syntax and those little parts, those morphemes. So when the brain is making a reading circuit, it has to connect all those visual parts with all those language parts with all those cognitive parts, and even over time, the emotional parts, the affective parts in dyslexia, many, many of our individuals, have difficulties with what is called the phoning system, not understanding that those words that we have have these sounds, the smallest of which are called phonemes. They can also have difficulties in the fluency or the speed with which those parts have to come together. That's when we have different forms of dyslexia. Sean actually said that he reversed letters or reversed parts of words for a while. We all do that. What is different is that Dyslexics take a longer time with those reversals.
Anita Rao 18:37
I want to pause you there, because you're setting up this complex kind of landscape of understanding that dyslexia can manifest in a variety of different ways. It's caused by a variety of different things. There's no one way that it presents. You were doing this research, you were well into kind of understanding these things, and then you became a mother, and your son has dyslexia, and I'm curious about what it was like to notice his symptoms emerge, and what were some of the first things that flagged to you that this might be happening for him.
Dr. Maryanne Wolf 19:12
I really want to say that it was one of the great moments in my life when I realized that my three and four year old son was on his way to having a dyslexic profile, even though, at the time, my clinical psychologist husband said, Oh, don't pathologize, aren't you. I said, Oh my gosh, If only that were the problem here. And what you're asking is, did I notice things? And yes, I did. And one of the first things is that, unlike the grandfather or the 89 year old dyslexic, it wasn't about vision, it was about the language system. And. He made one of the most beautiful sets of what we call circumlocutions, talking around the word because he couldn't retrieve the word. We were looking and teaching him a little bit about stars. We were on Cape Cod, and we were telling him about the Little Dipper and the Big Dipper. And then, by chance, were at a drive in with a John Wayne movie where they had these 10 cups. And we asked Ben whether or not he could recognize the Little Dipper, and he said, Oh, that's that cowboy cup full of stars. I thought, oh my gosh, that is so beautiful, but it is so indicative of the way that our system, when it tries to retrieve a word, is actually in some instances of our of our children, unable to get right to the exact word. Now where that goes Anita is into an area of research called naming, speed naming being a more common word for the retrieval process of words that we have to name. And so I began research on what is called ran rapid automatized naming with my neurologist colleague, Martha Denckla, and what we found was that, and this is how I tested my child at five, that if you look at a series of letters, very common letters, or very common numbers, or very common objects or colors, the speed with which they can retrieve that word is indicative of whether or not the visual and language systems in that circuit are able to get connected in time. So when we talk about what goes wrong or what goes in my opinion, differently in the reading circuit for dyslexic is that some, in fact, I'd say 75% of our kids aren't making that, that connection between letters and sounds, but they aren't making it also rapidly enough when it comes to retrieving words. So we know that about 75% of our kids have more than one area of weakness in the system. How that system connects?
Anita Rao 22:40
I want to pause you there, bring Shawn back into the conversation here, we have been setting up what it's like to experience dyslexia, kind of why it happens in the brain. And Dr Shawn Robinson, I would love to put to you starting the conversation about interventions. You had your own experience of an intervention when you were 18. It was a multi sensory approach to reading, and that's the kind of approach that is often used today. Can you talk about the engaging of various senses and how that helped you grasp reading in a different way?
Dr. Shawn Robinson 23:20
It was the whole multi sensory instruction, see it, say it, write it, sequential, explicit, direct, not any room for any errors, and it just that process itself really allowed me to appreciate not just the learning process, but it also allowed me to appreciate language and how it would deliver to me in that way. And so having that type of instruction that was multi sensory, explicit, direct, systematic, sequential, no room for any errors, really allowed me to understand the process of learning, and also carried over to my writing and my mathematics too, because mathematics is sequential, left to right, top down. And so the things I had learned with decoding and encoding were transferable to a lot of other learning skills, but also life skills itself too. And so it really set the stage for my my growth, not just as a student, but also as a as a human too.
Anita Rao 24:25
So you were an adult when you got your diagnosis, when you experienced this intervention, and now you spend time in classrooms working with other adults. What does carrying out interventions look like when you're working specifically with older teens or with adults who have for years not been able to read,
Dr. Shawn Robinson 24:45
success, give them opportunity. I do it with my two boys. My oldest is 10 and my youngest is seven, and neither of them have dyslexia, and when they were in my wife's womb, she laughed at me because I read the dictionary to them when they were in the womb, still. And when they came out, instead of reading nursing rhymes to them, I read the dictionary and the sound structure of our language. And so now my sons use a dictionary look up words themselves phonetically. They spell it. They've received more 100% on their spelling test than I ever did in my entire career. And even with other students, it just gives them a sense of confidence, independence and self empowerment. And that's what Dr Nash gave me, was the tools to learn how to fish myself. And so once I teach the students how to do it themselves, it's a home run. From there, they take off and they run. And that's what I want them to do, is become independent in their own language acquisition and appreciating language. And as Doc said, too, you know, understanding not just the sound structure, but morphemes and pre physics, suffixes, root words, the structure of language, the etymology, the root, the adjective, also part of speech. So there's so many things that go into it, then the whole process, the multi sensory procedure, it was a lifesaver. It just really just helped me appreciate language, and so I do the same thing that Doc taught me, and I just try to carry on the message of hope and try to give adolescents or adults the tools that I had learned to try to help them as they navigate through their own academic and social journeys of life.
Anita Rao 26:19
Interventions for older readers involve everything from the technical, like figuring out how to approach multi syllabic words to the emotional, like making sure readers can find books that fit their interest and their reading level so they can get excited about reading these multifaceted approaches that are geared towards not just reading tools, but comprehension and engagement are just as important for younger kids. Maryanne actually created one of the leading multi component interventions for dyslexia. It's called RAVE-O.
Teacher 26:54
Okay, so first thing you're going to do in your word workbook is you're going to trace the rhyme pattern with your pencil, just the rhyme pattern right now. Okay, so go ahead and trace now, as you're doing that, imagine the sounds that it make. So trace the rhyme pattern at...
Anita Rao 27:13
the RAVE-O program has been updated since Maryanne started her work on it in the mid 90s, but at its core, it gives teachers and instructors a concrete lesson structure to build fluency.
Dr. Maryanne Wolf 27:28
So for the younger children, we are talking about putting together phonemes and letters. We're putting that together with meaning. We're putting that with syntax, grammar, and we're putting that with morphemes, so that five year old, six year old, seven year old, eight year olds, they are learning how to connect the decoding to meaning and how a word works. Now I know this will sound too abstract, so I want to give a tiny example of what we do with kids in order for the kids to understand how English language works, which is really what Sean is doing for the older individuals, is that we teach them things with little character strategies. We use a spider named Ms Mim. Ms MIM stands for many interesting meanings. Now, your teachers, your parents, even you Anita, probably aren't familiar with the term polysemy, but if you would, but you would figure it out. It either and it means Polly, many sim meanings, almost 40% of the first words that kids learn are polysimus. And nobody tells the teacher that. Nobody tells the kids that, but Ms min tells the kids that Pat or bat, those are mem words. And so then what we do, we teach the brain how to move from one meaning to the next by figuring it out in a sentence. So a bat, flying bat, a bat, bats, the verb, bats, the bat the wooden instrument over. Anyway, you get the picture. So to speak, we use a multi component approach, and then we apply it to little stories, minute stories, so that within 24 to 48 hours, they are learning the words, how to decode them, what they mean, how they can be used. And then we put them in little stories. There are rainbow minute stories, and we can give them to anybody, but what they do is they teach us that's what kids are really wanting without knowing what they are wanting. They want to know how English language works. How do you read English language? Because English language is different from Spanish and German and Italian. It has all these morphemes in it. Right, and we can, in a very beautifully simple way, teach them how to read and how to think.
Anita Rao 30:08
I'm curious to continue the conversation about being a parent and being an advocate for your children's language and reading abilities. What are some of the things that you would encourage parents to do to help their child with reading after they've been able to get a dyslexia diagnosis.
Dr. Maryanne Wolf 30:27
Well, reading is not just about decoding, it's about thinking what it means. And so we have a whole emphasis on what we call deep reading, and what we want parents to do and teachers is to always be reading stories to our children. And we actually, we have a character for everything. We have a character called T Lex. And T Lex stands for try thinkasaurus Lex at me. You have to think three different ways. When you read, you think ahead, and then afterwards you think back, and always, you think for yourself. And so we go anyway. We want parents to be helping their children with their reading, by reading to the children, and also, of course, reading with their children.
Anita Rao 31:23
When I was in elementary school, along with memories that I have of reading with my parents, I remember all the big posters with happy kids and celebrities with books on them and the capital letters read in a no nonsense font. But as a kid who read a lot, I never connected these reading campaigns promoted on posters to something more serious, this idea of deep reading that Maryanne brought up, that encouraging kids to read wasn't just about making sure they got the chance to enjoy the Babysitter's Club as much as I did, but that we all had access to deepening our understanding of the world and ourselves through The act of reading, because when that access is limited, like for those with dyslexia, there are consequences for whole communities, which means that dyslexia interventions and rethinking how we read can help all learners. We're gonna dive into that just after this break.
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao. You didn't learn it here first, but we'll say it. Reading is Fundamental, but what does it mean to read, and how can expanding that definition shape the futures of dyslexic students and others with learning differences? Former teacher and learning specialist Eso Romero has thought a lot about these questions during her time teaching in independent schools. She worked with a dyslexic student who changed her view of what it meant to read.
Eso Romero 32:59
I imagine that most people remember having to read every night for 30 minutes and fill in a reading log of what you read. And you think about this assignment, how it may have felt for struggling readers, and perhaps what battles resulted at home between children and parents because of this assignment, when we think about reading and the purposes behind it is to gather information, to learn, to be entertained. It's often a means to an end. And so I think when, when I was working with this student, she helped me learn that reading doesn't have to happen in the way that you know, neurotypical learners read. So for reading log, they could read in the traditional way. They can learn to listen to audiobooks, they could read in a way where they're just reading picture books. It was something that was more flexible in a way that also works for their family. And giving them a choice actually helped own their experience of learning, as well as include the family members and making it more of a, you know, a family setting for reading.
Anita Rao 34:09
With me still are two other folks who've dedicated their careers to thinking deeply about why meeting the needs of dyslexic readers is so important, and what's at stake for our communities if we don't scholar, Dr. Maryanne Wolf and Author, Dr. Shawn Robinson, So Shawn, you set up the experience of being a little kid struggling in the classroom with frustration and confusion, and this is a common experience for kids with dyslexia and then shame kind of enters the conversation and can develop really early. What have you learned specifically in your research about young black boys, about how shame and feelings around dyslexia tend to manifest for them?
Dr. Shawn Robinson 34:54
You know, without generalizing, I just think that, you know, we talk about black boys in general. So there's always a negative stigma to them about their capabilities in school learning. They're defined by things that may keep them from moving forward, limited resources, lack of resources in school, in terms of teacher preparation, and so when I started my dissertation, I was really focused on the intersectionality of race and dyslexia, given my own experiences, I wanted to try to shed light on black boys with dyslexia, and reading the literature on dyslexia really opened my eyes to my experiences and then the depths of thinking about what we can and cannot accomplish in life. And that's where I actually got connected with Dr wolf was in my my doc program, reading her work, and it really inspired me to dive deeper into it and also just really understand the implications of literacy and black voice. And that's where I kind of pivot to after I finished and started to write graphic novels with my wife, because I wanted to make sure that the graphic novels that we wrote were empowering, not just news with dyslexia, but black and brown students who can see themselves in a positive light and reflective of accomplishing great things in Life, regardless of where they come from, where the environment they're living. They're a single parent, two parent, whatever the case may be, that they are capable of achieving greatness, and that's the message we want to deliver in our graphic novel series. And we're intentional about making it the characters black and of color to represent diverse population of students.
Anita Rao 36:42
You're talking about your doctor, dyslexia. Graphic novels that are loosely based on your own experience are a bit autobiographical, and one of the things that strikes me about them is that they are kind of getting to breaking down one of the core myths that lingers around dyslexia that kind of links reading difficulties to intelligence. Can you break down that myth for me and how you try to get at that with Dr dyslexia? Dude,
Dr. Shawn Robinson 37:14
I tell kids, you know, even in the message of the book, you could you could do anything you want to do, just got to get the right opportunities, and you got to work for it. That's the kind of message that we want to deliver to kids, is that, you know, life is not going to be easy, but with the right attitude. And you know, just keep moving forward like little Train Choo choo. You just got to believe in yourself. And I think that's the first step for anybody, is that you have to believe in yourself. And if you don't believe in yourself, you've already taken yourself out of the game. It's all a mindset. If you tell yourself, you speak it and you speak those things into existence, it's going to happen. So we want to help students understand that they are capable of doing great things, not just in the class, but outside of class. And that starts with the mind. It starts with how you see yourselves when you wake up in the morning and if you're getting beat down so many times academically, well, the odds that you're going to feel that way, you're going to speak that. And so we just trying to change the narrative of the intellectual ability and allow students to feel empowered to take control of their own lives and really not be fearful of reading and fearful of failure, because I wouldn't be here today if I didn't fail. Everything I've done is because of failure. I failed, and I'm not a failure. So I try to bring that message to students, to really increase their self confidence and their understanding of who they are, what they can become in life.
Anita Rao 38:34
You bring up a really good point that I want to bring to you, Mary Ann, which is that, you know, there is a surface level of reading that we've talked about, which is kind of the ability to decode things and make sense of things. But then there's also what reading allows us to do more broadly. For kids reading Dr dyslexia do like imagine the possibility of who they could be. Connect to feelings about empowerment and let go feelings of shame. So talk to me more about kind of that second piece of why reading is so important, and how that motivates your research into dyslexia.
Dr. Maryanne Wolf 39:16
Anita, you set this up both now and a little earlier. Reading is hardly only decoding. Reading is giving us the chance to delve into what we know and what we don't know and what we will have as an insight into the lives of others. And when Sean is talking about making sure that our children and our adolescents have a sense of what their potential is, what they could do, deep reading gives us the opportunity to try on, the chance to be a. Better than who we are, or more than what we know. But Sean said something else, and I'm using his his words, because they're so powerful. When he talks about failure is important. This is really a piece of what we want our especially our young children who are diagnosed with dyslexia, to realize that when you don't know something, that's an opportunity to figure out why and what you can do better, instead of looking at failure as something just negative, but transform it. Before I entered the field of reading, I had two degrees in English and went on a Peace Corps, like volunteer program, in which I would thought I was going to teach reading, but no one had prepared me, and I was, in a way, like the first whole language teachers. I believe that literature was enough to have children learn No, that's what is the goal, but it's not the beginning. And so what I learned as a failure is that so many of our children need to have those foundational skills, those multiple components, they need to learn to connect them so that they can connect that to the story aspect. The beauty of deep reading is that it is connecting those early decoding processes to ever more sophisticated cognitive processes like perspective, taking and empathy, feeling what it is to be with another person's identity or feeling and then inferring, understanding that what we're reading has things below the surface that we can figure out and check with what we know. Does that fit what we know or does it not? And to have us learn to analyze. We need to have our children able to be critically analyzing what they're reading so they understand whether it is the truth or misinformation or worst of all, intentional disinformation. That's what connecting decoding and deep reading can give our youngsters.
Anita Rao 42:23
Shawn, let me bring you in here and ask you about your relationship with reading and deep reading today, dyslexia is a lifelong learning disability, which means that even though you have the tools and the skill set to decode. It doesn't mean that reading is without challenges. So what is your relationship now to opening up a book and to being able to find that place of deep reading?
Dr. Shawn Robinson 42:53
My wife always laughs at me because there's only one book I read is the dictionary. I literally read it when my kids were in school, when they go to sleep on the weekends, she was like, can't you pick up like, a fiction book, or not fictional book? And can't you, like, join a book club? And I think for me, the pure joy of reading a dictionary is or anything related to linguistics or anything related to Noah Webster's historical writings and things from the 18th, 19th century. I love to read. It's fascinating. It allows me to tap into my creativity, and it was all sparked from my understanding of monochromatism and the principles that go into reading. And so it taps into my, you know, intellectual abilities and just critical thinking and all those things that Dr wolf talked about. It just really fascinating to me. And I was blessed to be able to present in London at a lexicographer conference. And I'm not a lexicographer. I'm not in linguistics, but I know the dictionary, and so anything related to that brings me joy, and I guess I'm a dictionary nerd.
Anita Rao 44:03
You have two kids that you've referenced throughout this conversation. They're in elementary school. I'm curious about what kind of approach you take to advocating for their literacy experiences. Given your own background,
Dr. Shawn Robinson 44:19
both of my sons read novels. They love to read, and so I've never really had any problems my wife and I, because we've been as Dr wolf said, we are always read to our kids and had them read to us. My oldest, at seven, became a narrator for our doctor. Such a dude audio book. So he got, I love that he got the experience to be in the studio, worked with a voice coach. So I don't have any concerns about my two boys. It's the other kids that I worry about, too that don't get the advocacy at home or, you know, even at school. And no one's not going to teach our kids in school because we teach them at home. And. There was a problem, both my wife and I be there that day, you know. So that's in the story. But I guess, as Dr wolf said, you know, it's the other kids that don't get the experiences that my sons get, either at home or at school. And so that's the ones that I also care about and worry about too, because the playing field is not leveled for many students, urban, suburban, rural, uh, even on the reservations. And so it's my job to leave this earth better than than I arrived. And so anything I could do to try to inspire kids to love to read and quickly think about reading and ask deep questions about reading what they're reading. And I've done my job, but it starts for me at home with my own two boys. First,
Anita Rao 45:41
Dr. Wolf, we have to wrap up here, but I have one final question for you, which is that there has been a call for more research on the strengths that the Dyslexic brain has. There is some interesting anecdotal evidence that folks with dyslexia have more ability to visually perceive the spatial relationship of objects. There are other things, and I'd love for you to tell us about what strengths of the Dyslexic brain you have seen in your own son.
Dr. Maryanne Wolf 46:13
I am very, very fortunate to have a case study, a lifelong case study in my house, my son, Ben, is an artist, and this is by no means, because we took him to every museum after we knew he was dyslexic. In fact, he hated museums. We took him to too many. We did not know our son was an artist until about junior year of high school, and I want to say this to parents that we don't always know what those strengths are. And so what I'm determined to do in our early intervention for children with dyslexia and other struggles in the ravel program is to give opportunities across the board for areas that we know show strength in some but not all. And so we give opportunities to draw, we give opportunities for music, for drama, and if you look at the groups of people that we know who have been successful Dyslexics, you really see several very important themes. One is this visual propensity, and I'll say that Leonardo da Vinci and Picasso and so many, many artists and architects in the last century have a history of dyslexia that's very well known, but we also know that many an entrepreneur in so many different fields have histories of dyslexia. Why? And that's where I come to my own son. It's not just that. He's an artist. He sees differently, he thinks differently, he makes connections that are normal. And I want to encourage our children who are dyslexic, to think for themselves, because they have wonderful insights that often are so different from other kids. And I want to encourage that, certainly that 10 to 20% of those who are struggling readers, we need to have them understand their potential will contribute to society, and that's what we want. Our interventions, whether it's Ravel or any multi component or multi sensory program, those are giving us the bottom rungs of the ladder for our children to find whatever that top rung for them is
Anita Rao 48:47
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Until next time I'm Anita Rao taking on the taboo with you.