Solving Dyslexia: A Revolutionary Approach with Russell Van Brocklen

What if everything we thought we knew about dyslexia was backward? Russell Van Brocklen, who is the self-described "Dyslexic Professor," turns conventional wisdom on its head with a revolutionary approach that's changing lives and saving families thousands of dollars in specialized education costs.

Russell's methodology produced remarkable results in a New York State Senate-funded program. His three-part approach starts with students' special interests (whether Disney, Theodore Roosevelt, or Ford trucks), teaches from specific to general rather than the reverse, and builds writing skills through simple, effective sentence structures that grow in complexity.

The approach is particularly relevant in today's AI-driven world, where dyslexic individuals can leverage technology to handle mechanical aspects of writing while their unique cognitive strengths – often superior to neurotypical peers in analysis and creativity – shine through. It's not about fixing what's broken, but harnessing what's extraordinary.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to the Dyslexic Professor
• 8:03 Discovering Remarkable Dyslexic Abilities
• 16:55 A New Model for Teaching Dyslexia
• 32:52 Simple Sentence Structure Teaching Method
• 44:12 The Oxford Comma and Building Skills
• 52:43 Full Brain Reading and Career Advantages
• 1:01:28 Organization and Professional Success Strategies

Transcript

Jackie Pelegrin: 0:01

Hello and welcome to the Designing with Love podcast. I am your host, Jackie Pelegrin, where my goal is to bring you information, tips and tricks as an instructional designer. Hello, GCU students, alumni and fellow educators, welcome to episode 45 of the Designing with Love podcast. Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Russell Van Brocklin, who is the dyslexic professor. Welcome, russell.

Russell Van Brocklen: 0:28

Thanks for having me.

Jackie Pelegrin: 0:29

Yes, thank you for coming. I appreciate it. You have such insight, and so I'm really looking forward to our interview today. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do as the dyslexic professor?

Russell Van Brocklen: 0:41

Well, as I tell people I solve dyslexia, and a lot of them look at me and they roll their eyes like how can you do that? It's still so complicated. Well, I have the worst case of dyslexia people have ever seen. People say, well, prove it, Okay.

Russell Van Brocklen: 0:58

When I wanted to apply to grad school, I needed new documentation and that required a senior psychologist to do the standard test. Problem was none were available there, just so happened to be one 400 feet from the south campus of SUNY Center at Buffalo. Her name was Dr Halichka. What I failed to grasp at the time was that she was one of the two SUNY State University of New York Distinguished Professors in Psychology in Western New York at the time. So that's SUNY's highest rank. So I went and she gave me the testing and half of it, and then she had a teacher, a special ed high school person who does that to the other half, and what they found is my base reading and writing skills was at first grade.

Russell Van Brocklen: 1:47

So then I decided to go to law school. I wanted to audit two classes to see if I could do it. Going into law school in the first grade reading and writing skill, even to audit two classes yeah, that was kind of ambitious. So I walk into property. I'm sorry, I walk into a contract. It's my second day. It's Professor Warner. He's a dyslexic professor and I went specifically to that university to see him. Professor Warner called on me the second class in contracts and are you familiar with the Socratic method in law school?

Jackie Pelegrin: 2:20

Yes, yes, I was actually going to go to law school myself at one time, so yeah, and then I decided to go a different direction and get an MBA and yeah, the rest is history.

Russell Van Brocklen: 2:31

So what?

Russell Van Brocklen: 2:32

Just so your audience knows what they do, is they? If you don't know the answer? They keep asking you questions to purposely embarrass you, to train you as fast as possible to argue any point anywhere, anytime. Train you as fast as possible to argue any point anywhere, anytime. So he calls on me and then everything changed. Everything slowed down. I knew exactly where he was going, four or five questions ahead of time. He knew where I was going. We battled together for 15 minutes. He said at the end Russell, you couldn't be any more correct, I have to move on to the next case for reason of time. Everybody looked at me in awe and fear because they're like they can't do that.

Russell Van Brocklen: 3:12

After the first semester I didn't keep going because, well, I couldn't keep up with the legal research and writing. The ones who I kept in contact with, who graduated, said even when they graduated, they couldn't come anywhere close to that. Then, a few weeks later, I started taking tests I'm sorry, little quizzes in property. Now what they do in law school is they try to fool you. So you're supposed to read it carefully. Then you're supposed to think for three to five minutes and then answer the question. I would read it very slowly. Then I wouldn't take three to five minutes, I didn't even take three to five seconds Within a second or two. I just marked it down. And then every time I got perfect hundreds first one every time to turn in the quiz. I could now read. So I wanted to show that to everybody else, but I had a lot more research to do. It took years longer.

Russell Van Brocklen: 4:03

That was the fall of 97. It wasn't until the fall of 2001 when I was finally sent to explain this to Connected to Current Research. And how that happened is I went to the New York State Senate and I said I want you to pay for my research, and at the time, the majority leader of the Senate his name was Senator Joe Bruno was the majority leader. He was my representative. So he said go over to the education department. So I went over there. I said, yeah, joe Bruno sent me. Well, they took me seriously, but they wanted to get rid of me. So what they did is they said we want a SUNY, distinguished professor in psychology to support this. And he said we want a SUNY, distinguished professor in psychology to support this. And he said, yeah, it's coming out of Buffalo. Okay, so I go out there there's two. One is Dr Hawichka, and she said, yeah, she would do it. So the state paid for the evaluation. 20 hours over three days.

Russell Van Brocklen: 4:58

The smartest woman I've ever met beat the living daylights out of me with questions to make sure this was real. At the end she said it was a five-page report. She said my brain, her thing, divided in five areas. Mine was severely abnormal in all five and she said what happened is that I could go from first grade to grad level or above or above average grad level, and back down again and back up again. And that happened because I was moving from a part of my brain that wasn't working to a part of my brain that was working. So at that point I needed to go over and to connect it with current research, and that was only one real choice.

Russell Van Brocklen: 5:42

Professor James Collins, author of Strategies for Struggling Writers. He got over a million dollars from federal grants and I went in and I started going through his book. I said this is exactly right. So at that point people say it's going to take me years to get his approval. I did in less than two weeks. Then I entered a university-wide competition, got $15,000, and we tested the program out on our first student. Her name was Michaela, I can use her name. She went from eighth grade writing. On a pre-test. There was a zero on the GRE. We used the graduate records exam writing assessment for these kids. That's the test for going into grad school.

Jackie Pelegrin: 6:26

Right.

Russell Van Brocklen: 6:27

So she scored in the zero percentile. She was the smartest, most motivated student of her class who's dyslexic? And then after we worked with her for about five months she ended up scoring in about the 50th percentile. Spelling and grammar was clean at the graduate level, right. We worked with another student and then at that point the Senate said we will fund this for multiple years. But they sent the check to Averill Park Central School District. They ran.

Russell Van Brocklen: 6:56

It Took me less than four hours to train their best teacher. Her name was Susan Ford and again I want everybody to know I kind of cheated. We picked only the most motivated, the most intelligent, excellent family support, college bound. We wanted to see what we could do with the best and brightest amongst that generation and we had their best teacher. So what happened? One class period a day for the school year. They all went through. It Cost the state less than $900. They went from the zero percentile to the 30th to 50th percentile, or six percentile to about the 70th. They all went on to college. They all graduated, no accommodations, 2.5 to 3.6 GPA under 900 a student Wow, yes.

Russell Van Brocklen: 7:44

2.5 to 3.6 GPA Under 900 a student.

Russell Van Brocklen: 7:45

Wow, yes, okay. No other program ever worked like that. I presented the results in New York City in 2006. I thought I was done. I thought I did something amazing. I was wrong.

Russell Van Brocklen: 7:59

What I was asked was what happens if we apply this to typical students? And I would say it would be an abject failure, because typical students can't take GRE, throwing graduate level stuff at them. They just can't take it. So I said, okay, two things. Number one, I had to move this over so that everybody can use it. And number two, the professors came to me and said I don't care about your results in the GRE. You got the 70th percentile, so what, we can work with that. We're used to the 95th percentile, we don't care. And I was like what do you want? And they said they wanted the craft of research. What's a craft of research? It's a book that came out from the University of Chicago in 1995 because their PhD students didn't know how to write advanced research papers. It's like, okay, in its current version, it's down to the most elite high school students before they even attempt it. And, as you'll see as we progress, I dropped it to fourth grade.

Jackie Pelegrin: 9:16

Wow.

Russell Van Brocklen: 9:17

Amazing. So what is the craft of research? It's based on three areas context, problem and solution. Context get everybody on the same page, state the problem and then come up with a solution. And if your solution doesn't give the reader something substantially new, they don't learn something substantive. Then they say don't write the paper, which pretty much eliminates virtually every paper written in high school and college and probably even a lot of graduate programs across the country. That's how high the standard is. Okay. But first thing what I had to do was to come up with a new model to work with dyslexic kids.

Russell Van Brocklen: 9:59

If you're going to go and say Dr Orton, who's the Einstein, the Copernicus? To go and say Dr Orton, who's the Einstein, the Copernicus? He is the top guy in the field of dyslexia. He passed away in 1948. And this is what all the wealthy schools use. If you're going to say he's wrong, you have to use the best science. I'm going to use this book, which is from Yale, dr Sally Shaywitz. What she did is she did brain scans. So now we know what's actually going on. So what I'm going to point to is I'm going to turn to this edition, which is page 78.

Jackie Pelegrin: 10:34

And that's overcoming dyslexia. Yep, there's the brain, yep.

Russell Van Brocklen: 10:38

Okay, now do you see, in the back part of the brain, I'm not going to use the word non-impaired, I'm going to use the word non-impaired, I'm going to use the word gen ed student. So do you see, in the back part, the gen ed brain has a lot of neuroactivity and the dyslexic brain is virtually zero. Yes, If you look at it from a different angle there's a little bit, but you see how the front part's about two and a half times over active.

Jackie Pelegrin: 10:59

Yep.

Russell Van Brocklen: 10:59

Okay. So I looked at that and said let's draw a simple analogy. I want you to imagine we have Arnold Schwarzenegger at 16. He never weightlifted. And then we have the proverbial 98-pound weakling and we put them on a weight training program. Who's going to develop faster?

Jackie Pelegrin: 11:17

Probably Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Russell Van Brocklen: 11:19

His body is predisposed genetically to accelerate much more than a 98-pound weakling. Okay, so I looked at that and, just using that as an analogy, the front part of the brain is about two and a half times overactive. Why don't we use that? So what I'm about to do is I'm really going to oversimplify really complex neuroscience so that we can draw some learning points from it. Complex neuroscience so that we can draw some learning points from it. So what we're going to do is the front part of the brain deals with articulation first, followed by word analysis. That's what I did with the GRE Okay, Articulated first and a little bit of word analysis. So, to make this available to everybody, I flipped it Word analysis first, flip it Word analysis first, followed by articulation. But I found that that was step three of the model, Because if you're going to work with typical dyslexic students and I'm also going to throw in ADD and ADHD and mild dyslexia so the model is ADD, ADHD, mild dyslexia.

Russell Van Brocklen: 12:20

So the model is ADD, ADHD, mild dyslexia. Next level, severe dyslexia. Final level, severe dyslexia with a genius student who's highly motivated. So that's the three levels. Okay, All right, Because at the first level ADD, ADHD and mild dyslexia the treatment's pretty much the same, All right. So when we're looking at that, have you ever worked with ADHD students before Ever?

Jackie Pelegrin: 13:24

No, I've just I've had friends that have been in high school and, yeah, high school grade school that were, that were dyslexic, yeah.

Russell Van Brocklen: 13:33

What you're going to. Does it make sense that most teachers say I can't get this kid to concentrate on anything?

Jackie Pelegrin: 13:39

Yes, yeah, I would hear that quite a bit from the teachers.

Russell Van Brocklen: 13:42

Yeah, Okay, first step of the model we are going to permanently get rid of that and make these kids hyper-focused, and where they will work for hours on an academic task. Are you ready for the big secret?

Jackie Pelegrin: 13:55

Yes, absolutely.

Russell Van Brocklen: 13:57

Their speciality, their interest, their area of extreme interest and ability. So what I do is I'll say it's a Saturday morning, you have nothing that you have to do. What do you want to do all day? And that is their speciality. I have kids who have said they want to learn about famous people. One said she was interested in 1970s Ford F-150s, miss people. One said she was interested in 1970s Ford F-150s. I've had a lot of elementary school girls say they want to learn about Hermione from Harry Potter because she's smart, all right, whatever it is football, soccer, it doesn't matter. That's what you're going to teach them.

Jackie Pelegrin: 14:38

You tap into that?

Russell Van Brocklen: 14:39

Does that make sense?

Jackie Pelegrin: 14:39

Mm-hmm, tap into that, you tap into that.

Russell Van Brocklen: 14:41

You step outside of that. The most motivated kid in the world. You're down 50%. Yeah Right, typical student. You're down 75, 80% and you wonder why you're putting all these resources in and getting very little back.

Jackie Pelegrin: 14:54

That makes sense Right.

Russell Van Brocklen: 14:56

So next thing, we find their speciality. I tell them we're going to get a book on that and an audio book. By far the most famous, the most popular one that I do, is Walt Disney.

Jackie Pelegrin: 15:09

Walt Disney yeah.

Russell Van Brocklen: 15:11

Okay, 1,000 pages 11th, 12th grade. I give that to 10-year-olds, all right. So I want you to imagine this have you ever been to Disney World?

Jackie Pelegrin: 15:20

No, but I've been to Disneyland plenty of times You've been to Disney.

Russell Van Brocklen: 15:23

Okay, have you noticed that they say it's the most magical place on earth? Does that make sense?

Jackie Pelegrin: 15:28

Yes.

Russell Van Brocklen: 15:29

Yeah, it does. The magic is defined by two universal things. One is 90% of it. The first one's easy to find. The second one forget it. I've had parents with master's degrees, phds, lawyers, doctors. They couldn't figure it out. I always had to tell them. Actually, I had their kid tell them. You know that second universal thing you're trying to find. Well, your 13-year-old dyslexic daughter just told you what it is. Did I do my job?

Jackie Pelegrin: 16:01

Right yeah you did.

Russell Van Brocklen: 16:03

So, once you have those universal themes. I then had some people go on to Disney to intern and what they could do is they would say in this situation, classic Walt Disney, this is how he probably would have solved it. All right, it's that powerful. Yes, all right. To give you an example of my I never saw this before, I will never see it again. Her name was Casey, ten years old, fifth year, the end of fifth grade, second grade reading level, crazy about Theodore Roosevelt.

Jackie Pelegrin: 16:31

So I assigned her this oh, theodore Roosevelt's book, yeah.

Russell Van Brocklen: 16:37

That's the first of three. First of three.

Russell Van Brocklen: 16:39

All right, that's the series on him. Tenth grade to first year college level, depending who you ask won the Pulitzer. All right, so I gave that to Casey and within six months I said I'll never see this again. She wanted to learn reading first instead of writing. So I said okay, casey. Here's a modified version. She was in her room two to three hours a night, six, seven nights a week, most of the day in the summertime, up there, going through this simple but powerful process. At the end of six months she knew every word in that book, the dictionary definition of every word.

Jackie Pelegrin: 17:19

Wow, my goodness of every word.

Russell Van Brocklen: 17:22

Wow, my goodness, okay, every word. So now she, six months later, she's in middle school. They're doing silent reading and her classmates are reading Harry Potter, twilight or whatever it was at the time and they came over and they took her book. They said what's this? Well, this is a book I'm reading for an outside reading program. None of the kids could get past the first paragraph. They called her mom and they said I thought that your daughter had a reading problem. She's supposed to be reading at the second grade level. She's the best reader in the class by grade levels. What's going on? And her mom asked me what's going on. I said what do you think she's been doing in her room hours a night for the past six months? Normally it takes me at least 12, generally 18 to 24 months to get those results. All right, casey dropped it to six months and I worked with her for 15 minutes a week.

Jackie Pelegrin: 18:15

Wow, that's amazing.

Russell Van Brocklen: 18:16

Okay, wow so when people say they can't read. Well, casey figured it out Right. So that brings us to our second point. All right, remember, we start off with the student's area of extreme interest, their speciality. So what I noticed, and where did I get that from? I went back and I started talking to successful dyslexic professors both professors dyslexia major research universities and they went to a typical school K-12, not the specialized dyslexic schools and I noticed that there was a pattern they did horrible K through college a little better the last two years. They walked into grad school top of their class day one. So, as you know, when you're in grad school, you went through it and they didn't care about anything but that specific area.

Jackie Pelegrin: 19:08

Right.

Russell Van Brocklen: 19:09

Okay, that was a key thing. Now, second thing that I found is when they're undergraduate this is the second point I said, this is weird A lot of them were STEM science, technology, engineering, math. They were taking art history classes, philosophy classes, music classes and they had no interest in those areas. Right, what is going on? Does that make any sense to you whatsoever?

Jackie Pelegrin: 19:34

No, especially if they're studying STEM. Yeah, they shouldn't be taking philosophy and history.

Russell Van Brocklen: 19:40

No, I mean they don't care about philosophy.

Jackie Pelegrin: 19:43

Right.

Russell Van Brocklen: 19:44

So what happened is those professors were teaching not the general to the specific, but from the specific to the general.

Jackie Pelegrin: 19:52

Okay.

Russell Van Brocklen: 19:54

So what I extracted from that for a very long time is, if you ask the dyslectic this question or ADD or ADHD, it's one of the three In your speciality, do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed Key question with little to no organization? Again, so in your speciality, do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed, but with a little bit or no organization? And they say yes or they say no. Did that happen in the past? And then they say yes virtually 100% of the time. And I say what we're going to do because I have to get the kids by it is we're going to force your brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output. So, again, we're going to force your brain to organize itself. And how we're going to judge that is we're going to see how well you're doing with writing as a measurable output and you go okay, yeah, that makes sense. Now, that's most kids. Now, if we're going to get down to severe dyslexia and this is again a minority fingers, keyboard, fingers, keyboard, keyboard. The idea is in your head, you want to write about it, you're going to type. Fingers, keyboard, you take. You take your fingers, you put them on the keyboard, the idea flies out your head, leaving you with an empty brain. And I ask them if that's them, most will say no. The ones that say yes, congratulations.

Russell Van Brocklen: 21:20

Now you're dealing with severe dyslexia. What's the difference? The severe dyslexic is going to go deeper generally, much deeper than mild dyslexia, add or ADHD. They also take much longer to learn. All right, so all the same process, but they're going to have to practice a lot more. The repetition will surprise you how much you have to get. You make it very simple and then you give them the repetition until they mastered it. Then you go on to the next step. The final one gets very dangerous. I'm just letting people know about it. So if they run across this, they recognize it. But I don't want them to follow and do what I'm telling them, because if you don't know exactly what you're doing, it's something that can get quite mentally dangerous. All right, here's the background. You're dealing with a most likely severely dyslexic student, but somehow they're getting around 85, 86. They're barely making low end honor roll. Or they're getting like 82, 83. They're doing well enough, low to mid 80s. People say, oh, they're fine, there's not a problem.

Jackie Pelegrin: 22:34

They think they're passing, so no big deal, right?

Russell Van Brocklen: 22:36

Well, they're not just passing Low to mid 80s. Even they're like, hey, they're on the low honor roll they're doing fine right right typically their brothers and sisters will be fighting to become valedictorians or are valedictorians academics. In this, in this house, I mean their brothers and sisters, they get a b plus. It's like the end of the world.

Russell Van Brocklen: 22:55

This is horrible right, okay the parents tend to be very educated, doing very academically oriented work, and what I've noticed with these kids is and I make sure that this is a completely private conversation that parents literally never know. I'll say I know your secret and they freak out what do you mean? How do you know? And I say it started in elementary school, maybe it was early second grade, probably third or fourth. What happened is you had to accomplish some academic task. Nobody could help you and if you failed it, they were going to hold you back. You were going to lose your friends especially devastating for girls at that age. So what happened is they became clinically depressed. They would say things to themselves like if I don't do this, my parents won't love me anymore.

Russell Van Brocklen: 23:57

My friends will hate me, friends will hate me and they put so much pressure on themselves that in time the answer that they had to overcome presents itself and then, over time, by the time they reach high school it's happened so many times it's just like breathing, but they don't want their family to know. When I did that original study group at Averill Park, I talked to some of the really, really advanced kids and they're like yeah, that's us. How did you know? Wow, and they didn't want anybody else to know. I said well, you think you're the only one. If you're dealing with a hyper, maybe you don't have the kid tested. But as a teacher, as an instructor, you know, sometimes this student is just an Einstein. They're brilliant, but you can't explain it. Make sense.

Jackie Pelegrin: 24:49

Right, yeah, makes sense.

Russell Van Brocklen: 24:51

But if you're running into that, okay, especially if the kid's in elementary school, this is what they're going through. What you're going to want to do is to say talk to them in private, get parental permission first, talk to them in private. If that's the case, you're going to want them to speak to a qualified mental health professional and not send the kid through that hell.

Jackie Pelegrin: 25:16

There's no reason for it, absolutely.

Russell Van Brocklen: 25:20

But for those kids who have built it up, when I did the GRE course, how did I get such phenomenal results? Well, I kind of what these kids essentially did were doing PhD level work. In elementary school. I tapped into that. That's why they accelerated so fast. There's never been any other study with any type results like that.

Russell Van Brocklen: 25:43

All right, so those are some things to look at. And now that's going back to step two. So what we do is we start teaching the kids from the specific to the general, because now they've got something to latch on to and it forces them to go step by step. If we start from the specific to the general, you start off with an anchor point. Then you can force your brain to think linearly for the next several steps.

Russell Van Brocklen: 26:13

And that's the problem with dyslexia. It's kind of like I'm going to use an analogy of a cold Dyslexics. It's not a reading problem, it presents as a reading problem. It's kind of like a stuffy nose, the cold medicine you take. It masks the symptoms, but the problem is an issue, some things in your chest. I go right to the chest. I go right to what the underlying issue is. It's the lack of organization. So, for example, in the original program, susan Ford spent almost no time on spelling and grammar, and they went from horrendous to clean at the graduate level. Every last one of them All right. So would you like to learn how we can do that for elementary school kids?

Jackie Pelegrin: 27:00

Yes, that would be great, come on.

Russell Van Brocklen: 27:02

Okay. So typically when I present every year at Everyone Reading in New York City to train New York State special ed teachers, they come into me and I'm going to rip off one teacher what she said, her idea. I'm going to use it. She said she has in elementary school so many dyslexic kids who are writing, apparently randomly placed, misspelled words she doesn't know what to do. So now I'm going to show you how we're going to get them to write a basic three-word sentence to start off with Love it. Okay, let's just say some of the students you've worked with that you knew in high school. I would like you to pick one of them, change their name and tell me is it John Doe or Jane Doe? Who are we talking about here?

Jackie Pelegrin: 27:50

Jane Doe.

Russell Van Brocklen: 27:52

Okay, what did Jane really love to do? What was her speciality?

Jackie Pelegrin: 27:56

She loved horses, riding horses, horses, yeah.

Russell Van Brocklen: 27:59

Okay. So imagine Jane is in elementary school. She's writing randomly placed misspelled words, that's what they appear to be. So what we're going to do is we're going to start off with Dr James Collins' default writing strategy of copying strategies for struggling writers, and you're going to type out hero plus sign. What are we talking about Then? Jane's going to retype that, then she's going to shift from hero to Jane, jane plus sign. What are we talking about Then? Jane plus sign horses. See how we got there All right. Now I'm going to ask you some very specific questions. If you don't get it exactly right, if you don't answer them exactly correct, it's not going to work. 90% of special ed teachers don't get, don't answer it, don't do exactly as I tell them. Are you ready to follow my instructions exactly?

Jackie Pelegrin: 28:49

Yes.

Russell Van Brocklen: 28:50

Okay, here we go. Here's my question we have Jane plus sign horses. Here's my question we have Jane plus sign horses. We need to replace the plus sign. So here's my question Remember it has to be exactly precise. Does Jane like or dislike horses? Go ahead and replace that with a plus sign.

Jackie Pelegrin: 29:12

What's the sentence?

Russell Van Brocklen: 29:14

Jane likes horses. You got it the first time, but not the second.

Jackie Pelegrin: 29:17

Oh, All right.

Russell Van Brocklen: 29:18

This is, but not the second. Oh, all right, this is now going to show you, oh, I see what I did wrong. What did you?

Jackie Pelegrin: 29:23

do what? Did you do. I should have replaced the likes with the plus Jane, plus sources, right.

Russell Van Brocklen: 29:30

No.

Jackie Pelegrin: 29:31

No, nope.

Russell Van Brocklen: 29:33

Okay, so we're now going to go over to the heart of writing problems for dyslexia in elementary school. All right, I still have you pretty confused now, don't I?

Jackie Pelegrin: 29:43

Yeah, because I'm wondering I thought I did it right and then I was like no, I did it wrong.

Russell Van Brocklen: 29:47

You did it right and then you did it wrong.

Jackie Pelegrin: 29:49

How funny.

Russell Van Brocklen: 29:50

Are you nice and confused? Yeah, yeah, a little bit Okay so I asked you does Jane like or dislike horses? You said a little bit okay. So I asked you does jane like or dislike horses? You said like, like. Then I asked you to put into a sentence and you add, you automatically added the s jane likes horses. Oh, jane doesn't know how to add the s oh, okay yeah, so now it may not seem like a big deal.

Russell Van Brocklen: 30:12

Just tell the kid to add the s, j, james dyslexic. Okay, and this is what I'm going to try to drive this home. Look at the brain image again.

Jackie Pelegrin: 30:25

Right.

Russell Van Brocklen: 30:25

Look at the brain activity in the back part of your brain. It's going nuts. That's where this is supposed to be. We got very little going on there. So how do we fix this? Well, orton-gillingham, it'sillingham, the Orton Academy is two years to become certified, $11,000, not-for-profit. It's like a master's degree, like your MBA, see, touch, hear every sentence imaginable and it takes a while to learn how to get the kid to add the letter S and it's complicated, but it works All right. We need it a better way.

Russell Van Brocklen: 30:59

Here's my presumption the child can speak proper English. That's the presumption I had to put in there to make this work. So what I would do is I'd ask Jane to read what she wrote out loud, because I asked her do you like or dislike? And the answer is like that's what I asked her. Jane like horses. How do we get her to add the S? I asked her to read it out loud. Does that sound generally correct? No, so what does Jane? Do I tell her to fix it? Jane likes horses. Right Now we practice that 20 times A list of 10 likes and 10. Dislikes. Now, if you don't like the negatives, you can do 20 likes. So here's one of the fun things that I like to do. Sometimes the kid just doesn't want to do the work. Sound familiar.

Jackie Pelegrin: 31:51

Yes, Even in graduate school they don't want to do the work. Yeah.

Russell Van Brocklen: 31:56

So one of my kids I'm just going to use John or Jane Doe to protect his identity. He was the elder brother. He had a younger sister, but he was the older brother, so he was in charge when he wouldn't do his work. The one thing he hated above all others was his younger sister considerably younger telling him what to do. So he, I said did you do your homework? No, did your mom or dad give you permission not to do it? No, why didn't you do it? I didn't feel like it. I said okay, remember what I said was going to happen.

Russell Van Brocklen: 32:30

And he goes my younger sister's going to mess up my room and tell me how to clean it. So that's what happened. And then his parents said you know what, john, I don't think you learned your lesson. They had her do it again. So you messed it up and telling him exactly how to clean it up. And he came back and said I am never going to miss homework again. Or a kid oh, it works great. Or a kid says I hate cleaning the cat pan, it's disgusting. They missed their homework. Mom and dad didn't give them permission. What happens when I gotta clean the cat pan? Never had another problem.

Jackie Pelegrin: 33:06

Yeah.

Russell Van Brocklen: 33:07

So that's why I like dealing with the negatives.

Jackie Pelegrin: 33:10

Right.

Russell Van Brocklen: 33:11

I like that. So what we do is now we have them practice that. Now here's remember what I said about the spelling and grammar getting that to be autocorrected. I can explain the theory here. First thing that we do is we tell them not to put a period down no period. They can ask any question. Until as long as the period's not there. They can ask any question like did I spell horses right? And you can say no, you didn't. So what they'll then do is they'll just have to retype horses. Okay. But once they put the period down, if there's a spelling mistake or a major and I mean major grammatical mistake, don't do the medium or the little stuff, because you'll just crash the kid out of frustration. All right. But major grammar mistakes, they have that and they drop the period. Now they have to retype it until they get it correct.

Jackie Pelegrin: 34:07

Okay, that makes sense, okay yeah.

Russell Van Brocklen: 34:09

So what happens? Here's what I tell them. This is the least offensive word I've ever found. You made a silly mistake or a silly error, one of those two teacher's parent's choice, all right. So again, silly mistake or silly error. So they're like you got to retype it, okay. So then they keep making the same mistake. So then they hyper-focus I'm not going to make that mistake. And they make it again Seven times down. They're still making that mistake. And then they truly hyper-focus. You can see sweat coming down their face sometimes and eventually they get it right. And when they're hyper-focusing I'm not going to make that mistake that's where the magic happens. That's where a lot of this self-corrects.

Jackie Pelegrin: 34:56

Right, that makes sense.

Russell Van Brocklen: 34:58

Yeah, okay. So we do that for reason. I call it wheelchair crutches walking. If you broke your leg, you start off typing everything. They copy it. All right, maybe you do 20 of those, and then what you do is you say I'm not going to copy it anymore, you have to do it yourself, and we go through what we just discussed. All right, once they run out of things that they like or dislike, I have them go to their book. So, like, for example, with Casey, what does Theodore Roosevelt like or dislike? What I tell them to do is they're going to read the book, while listening to it and trying to answer a specific question what does the hero like? What is the hero dislike? The craziness, the disorganization in their head drops about 70 to 80% at that point.

Jackie Pelegrin: 35:47

Wow.

Russell Van Brocklen: 35:48

Okay, and yes, casey did this book. We were on this book with her for three years.

Jackie Pelegrin: 35:53

Three years Until she could learn to write.

Russell Van Brocklen: 35:55

Yes, Context problem solution for three years, All right. At the end of eighth grade, she was ready to go into college. Wow, my goodness. Last I spoke to her she said that she was in college and she was applying for her big girl job. I don't know what that is, but that's what I spoke to her.

Jackie Pelegrin: 36:12

I like that Big girl job. That's great yeah.

Russell Van Brocklen: 36:16

I love that. So then what we do is, once we get done with those 20, you got them right. If they don't get them right, keep going back. You have to. You do not go on to the next step until it's mastered. Then we'll say reason one and they'll type it out. I tend to have that done separately. We put them together Sarah likes swimming because it's fun Then we do another 20, reason one and reason two, and then it's the Oxford comma. Are you a one comma person or a two comma person?

Jackie Pelegrin: 36:45

One comma For three reasons.

Russell Van Brocklen: 36:46

Okay, whatever that is, usually it's the mom who teaches this. Okay, whatever it is. Is this a one comma kid or two comma kid? Put it in their IEP. It's in stone forever. All right, then we have reason one, reason two and reason three. Sarah likes swimming because it's fun, she likes the water and she likes being with her friends. That may not sound like a lot, but we took a kid who was doing randomly placed misspelled words and now they're writing at the end of second or beginning third grade level. Sometimes I get that done in 100 sentences, sometimes I go to four or 500 sentences, but that's it. Here's the other thing. When you're doing Orton-Gillingham, the older you are, the longer it takes, because you have to go back and rerun everything else plus what you're supposed to be learning now With what I'm teaching. The older you are, the faster you pick it up.

Jackie Pelegrin: 37:41

So it's just the opposite of what you would think it would be Wow.

Russell Van Brocklen: 37:45

Exactly and then, once we get done with the basic sentences, we eventually the next thing I do is I show students how to read using what I like to call a half-circle hero, universal-themed villain, and then, for context, I show them how to do a basic. I focus on three-body paragraphs because generally sometimes when I present, they want to know how do I do the thesis and the conclusion. Most teachers say you know what I can do a thesis statement and conclusion. You get the three-body paragraphs, I can do the rest. So I focus on the three body. So in context, we focus on that, then we focus on a more evolved way for doing the problem and then for the solution.

Russell Van Brocklen: 38:28

I want you to imagine this an English teacher teaching AP in advanced placement high school kids for 20 years on Shakespeare, all right, and they get the same papers that have been written for the past 50, past 100 years. Smart kids write the same stuff over and over again, generation to generation. How often do you think a teacher teaching Shakespeare for AP English kids for 20 years? How often does a student write them a paper where they actually learned something?

Jackie Pelegrin: 38:55

Probably not very often. No student write them a paper where they actually learned something?

Russell Van Brocklen: 38:59

Probably not very often. No, I can show you, so, as they do, that they learn how every paper to teach you learn something substantive every time.

Jackie Pelegrin: 39:07

That's a, that's breakthrough, right yeah.

Russell Van Brocklen: 39:09

You want that. That's called the craft of research. I just found a way to simplify context. For example, from advanced middle school because that's we're in the fifth edition now started off at the PhD level. I dropped that to fourth grade, to nine-year-olds Okay, and here's why that is important.

Russell Van Brocklen: 39:27

I'm starting to see it now. What's going on? And I'm not looking at the politics from one party or the other. This is just what's going on, at the politics from one party or the other. This is just what's going on. We're doing this in the summer of 2025. Tariffs are causing companies to say there's a lot of uncertainty, so we're not investing until we get the certainty back. Step two is they're also seeing how much can we get away with the current artificial intelligence and a lot of kids that I'm seeing that are out of college this year million students finding getting a job really difficult. The CEO of Anthropic, one of the top AI firms out there, has said he thinks in the next five years, up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs are going to disappear. Wow, okay. So what I'm saying is, if you know the craft of research, all right. You don't need to every time there's a new AI model. You don't need to relearn prompt engineering.

Jackie Pelegrin: 40:32

Right.

Russell Van Brocklen: 40:32

You're trained concept problem solution Okay, you're trained how to do that. I've had students that I've worked with. I call it prompt engineering your brain. They would finish up and graduate and they'd be given this job. They're like I have to now produce something where they learn something. I think I'll lose my job and I'm like you've been trained in this. Go back to the AI, put down the context. They come back oh, that was hard. Yeah, you got it done. Now go do the problem, now go do the solution. And they are complaining left, right and down the center. I said I trained you in this years ago. Then they turn in their paper. Then their boss goes I can use this. And the ones that aren't writing at the craft of research standard. They're like no, I don't need this, I don't need this, I don't need this. Guess who kept their job.

Jackie Pelegrin: 41:25

The ones that did the research right.

Russell Van Brocklen: 41:28

Who can write at the craft of research level. Just to show you how powerful this is. Right. She doesn't want me to use her name so I'm just going to call her Jane. Jane went on my advice to this specific university to take this specific professor. So I had her look at her undergrad just like a PhD. People would go from Harvard undergrad to CUNY because what they want to study that's where the professor was. So she goes into his class and after the first class she goes up to him and says I'm really not that good with the craft of research. Can we set up an office hour so I can discuss, you can tell me what I need to do so I can actually write a good paper? So they do that. He calls me. He said what is a college freshman doing with the craft of research? I can't get my PhD students to do this.

Russell Van Brocklen: 42:19

I said well, she started doing it in seventh grade. We're a lot more efficient now. And he said what I said well, she's pretty good. Here's where she's good at, here's where the problems are, but this is where she needs your help. He's just completely confused. I said there are advantages to being dyslexic. So after she turned in her paper, he really enjoyed working with her. He learned something actually learned something from an undergrad. He said this is next to impossible. And then he started working with her. He wanted to work with her because of her ideas and her writing skills. Not wanting to not have anything to do with her because of her writing skills, we flipped it.

Jackie Pelegrin: 43:02

Right Wow.

Russell Van Brocklen: 43:04

Turn that negative into a positive.

Jackie Pelegrin: 43:06

Yeah, turn that negative into a positive yeah Wow.

Russell Van Brocklen: 43:09

So think about what you do with what you teach. Instructional design is incredibly important. I can recall I'm working with these elementary school kids and they're coming home and they're in fifth grade and they're crying I can't do this, I'm stupid. I said let me look at it. I said I can't do this. I've been to grad school. Don't call yourself stupid, I can't do this. Their parents have grad degrees. They can't understand it. Okay, and this got this crying 10-year-old. So what you're doing, the experimental design, is so important. What I'm just trying to help people understand is when you're dealing with dyslexia, the model that I just gave you their speciality, their own book. Find their audio book that they like and then you can get a real. Then you can follow with the real book in their intervention period. Just use that book. Or, if you need to move on, start off at harry potter and two or three books later doing this and do with that yeah okay and specific to the general word analysis followed by articulation, you follow that.

Russell Van Brocklen: 44:17

it'll be so much easier.

Jackie Pelegrin: 44:20

Yeah, and you don't have the students fighting it. You know they want to do it.

Russell Van Brocklen: 44:26

They're literally in their room doing things, and if they ever don't want to do their homework, what is it that you dislike? Yeah, works so well.

Jackie Pelegrin: 44:36

Yeah, I love it.

Russell Van Brocklen: 44:37

Yep, because it motivates them and and yeah, then they want to do it well, what happens is in the first lesson I say what do I do if you're not going to do your work? And we come to an agreement. They're like, yeah, I agree to this. It's all permission based right.

Jackie Pelegrin: 44:54

Yeah, you're not forcing them to do it. Yeah, Wow, and yeah, they want to do it more because they're. Yeah, they're not being forced to do it, they're, they have that interest and you said, like you said, you start with that. It's like their why? Why am I? What's the why am I doing this? Yeah, you get to that because they, they want to know.

Russell Van Brocklen: 45:15

So, like with Disney, I have them go into the Magic Kingdom, Main Street, USA. You've been to Disneyland? That's Marceline, Missouri. That's like 3,500 words. I have them. I've had fifth graders on those 3,500 words for 11 months, but then they're reading those 3,500 words at like the 10th, 11th grade level. Then the next section might take six months and then we're down to three and then by the time they're done with four to five chapters they're reading at home.

Russell Van Brocklen: 45:45

Right At home Not spending $70,000 on a private Orton school. Just to show you what the difference is, there's a school in Upper East Side called Windward where the New York State just had a dyslexia task force to redo its K-5 education. So we met there. They have a 98% success rate. Send your kid there in fourth grade. Four to five years later they will send your child back to their same school and they will be absolutely prepared. Costs about $7,500 a year for four to five years and their teachers get paid, nothing compared to public school teachers. It's because it's four to one. Five to one.

Jackie Pelegrin: 46:26

Okay, yeah.

Russell Van Brocklen: 46:27

Okay, or you could do this and I can have parents train their kids at home.

Jackie Pelegrin: 46:33

Yeah, wow, yeah, you can't compare to that Absolutely. Especially when they're at home right and they're not distracted with other students around them, they can have that one-on-one time right.

Russell Van Brocklen: 46:47

That makes a difference, moms will say and not to be sexist, but this was data that I got from Facebook, when they would just give us all the data we shouldn't have had. It was over 90%. Moms, okay, okay, and so it just happens to generally be that way. And moms will say well, I'm not the best one at this. I said I know it'd be great if you could afford to have a specialist come in. I could train your specialist and they can come in and do this, but that's going to cost. You know it's for most people. It's just it's too expensive.

Jackie Pelegrin: 47:19

Right, it's out of reach. Yeah.

Russell Van Brocklen: 47:22

It's out of reach. Or if they go and do it, then they're driving, you know, $500 cars and the rest of their kids get nothing Right. Yeah, no camps, christmas presents I mean, I've seen families do that to send their kids to special schools.

Jackie Pelegrin: 47:36

Right yeah.

Russell Van Brocklen: 47:37

But you know. So I try to make this as economically functional as possible.

Jackie Pelegrin: 47:42

Right, because you want to reach all socioeconomic levels. You don't want to just have the the ones that are wealthy and can can afford it, but you want to have the the ones that can't either, and you don't want them to be in a disadvantage. You want it to be inclusive. So that's creative and I love that because I'm a creative person. So whenever I hear something that we do and we flip it on its head, then that's great. It's innovative.

Russell Van Brocklen: 48:30

Well, let me show you something really scary. When you were in grad school, did you ever look around at some of your peers and say grad school?

Jackie Pelegrin: 48:41

did you ever look around at some of your peers and say, how the heck did they get in here? Yes, oh, most often, because I went to University of Phoenix for my MBA and they required learning teams. So all of our projects we would work in groups and yeah, I would say, probably it had to be every class. I would say there were like one or two students that I was like, how did they get here? I don't understand how they even got a bachelor's degree.

Russell Van Brocklen: 49:01

Yeah, so let me kind of explain that to you very briefly. This is a book called Post-War Japanese History. All right, this first article was written by Professor Dower. Can you go ahead and just go ahead and read the title in the first paragraph?

Jackie Pelegrin: 49:21

Okay, peace and Democracy in Two Systems. I can't read the rest, though.

Russell Van Brocklen: 49:27

Can you read that?

Jackie Pelegrin: 49:28

A little bit Something about policy and internal conflict, but it's hard to read the rest of it.

Russell Van Brocklen: 49:35

It's hard to read that, yeah, so here's the thing you could read that. And then I would ask you it's hard to read that, yeah. So here's the thing you could read that. And then I would ask you, remember, this guy won the Pulitzer, he won the National Book Award. I'm assuming you have little or no knowledge about post-war Japanese history, but the guy's the top writer in his field. So you read that first paragraph and I'm just going to tell you what happened. I would ask would you, you know, jackie, what's it about?

Russell Van Brocklen: 49:59

And you would tell me Okay, right, you would be shocked at how many certified reading teachers can't tell me what happened in that paragraph? Wow, half the kids at undergrad at Harvard can't do that. According to Professor Dower, 10th grade to second year in college you should absolutely be able to do that, or he gets very upset. So this is so important to understand. I'm going to go back to science here, to this picture, right, all right. I want you to imagine you're what I call a full brain. Take that massive overactivity in the front part of the dyslexic brain. Move it over to the gen ed brain. That's you. Okay, the dyslectics. I can train to read that easily enough. The people in your graduate school who can't, you're like, what are they doing here? They would read that and because it's so dense with information, they go off the tracks.

Jackie Pelegrin: 50:58

Right.

Russell Van Brocklen: 50:59

Okay, I can tell which students are going to be the ones who are like that and which ones are like you by if they can read that or not. I've actually had people in high-end consulting companies try that and they said the people that could read that made excellent employees. The ones that couldn't, they had to let go Right. And I said, okay, that's what I call a full brain person. But the dyslectics, once we train them properly, can read that with ease. And now you have all that massive neuroactivity in the creative areas.

Russell Van Brocklen: 51:34

Right, absolutely Now with artificial intelligence that could take care of the writing for them, right, absolutely. Now, with artificial intelligence that could take care of the writing for them, all right. Now you have all these huge advantages, especially for dyslectics who have been through a master's degree. It's a huge, huge, huge help. That program I was telling you about with Professor Collins Okay, remember, I did that in less than two weeks. I'm not the only one. The Selectics excel in grad school and that's why artificial intelligence was designed for us. Few things to think about.

Jackie Pelegrin: 52:08

Yeah, absolutely. I don't think anybody would have thought that that's what it was designed for, but it makes sense. Absolutely yeah. And instructional design makes such a huge difference too. Absolutely yeah, and instructional design makes such a huge difference too.

Russell Van Brocklen: 52:32

Like you said, if they don't understand what it is saying or what, yeah, what's there, it just yeah. It's not going to reach anybody. So instructional design is so important. Yes, and what I just showed you there, if you could go ahead and read that, you're a full brain, you can do instructional design. If you can't, you're going to find doing that, I would say, near impossible. And they're saying wait a second, are you telling me that dyslectics can be more productive than students? A lot of these kids, like some of them, were even valedictorians in high school. I'm sure you've seen this Valedictorian in high school, 4.0 in college. They get to grad school and do what you're teaching and they could pass any regurgitation test, but they can't apply it very well, Right, Absolutely Yep.

Russell Van Brocklen: 53:15

There's the test to decide can they apply it or not. All right, and I said dyslexia is not a reading program. It's not a reading program. I can show dyslexics to read better than most gen ed people. Okay, they're like. It's just how it presents itself. It's a symptom. It's a lack of organization in the front part of the brain.

Jackie Pelegrin: 53:33

Right, yeah, and I think the reason why I'm good at instructional design and all those different things is because I've been very organized from a very young age. So my room was always organized. I didn't have clothes on the floor. You know, my mom didn't have to come into my room and say clean your room. I actually have, I still have this door hanger and it says don't move anything, Don't touch anything. I like my room this way and I still have it, and that's from second grade. I still have it. So yeah it just I. I like things in order, I like things clean, and I'll say I probably have OCD in a sense. So that's probably true, but it just helps me when I things aren't disorganized.

Jackie Pelegrin: 54:14

So when I'm so much for what you do Right, exactly, yeah, if it wasn't for keeping things organized, I wouldn't. I would just be all over the place. It'd be scatterbrained. So yeah, it really helps.

Russell Van Brocklen: 54:37

Let me ask you the first question in your speciality?

Jackie Pelegrin: 54:38

Do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed but with little to no organization ever in your life, or is that just no? I would say no because I have good tools in place that help me to keep things organized. So I use Trello, which is a good project management tool, but I use that for my podcast, for my teaching and for work, and I have boards for each thing that I'm working on. And when I first started my podcast, I only had a Word document with all my ideas of episodes that I wanted to do, yeah, and all my people that I wanted to interview, and I would highlight it like yellow meant I needed to get it done, green meant I got it and I'm thinking and I did this for nine months, I think, and I thought, wait a minute, there's got to be a better way. And I was like I use Trello every day at work, why don't I use it for that? And it changed the game big time, and so I went from a Word document to now organized cards and checklists and everything.

Russell Van Brocklen: 55:27

So yeah, it made such a difference. Oh, and I'm absolutely horrible at all of that. So what happens is I found this out is that CEOs that run major companies who are dyslectic. They have assistants that are the most detailed person ever. My assistant just finished her qualifying exams for her PhD in education. Now it's just a big project and write-up, but every day she emails me in the morning. You have podcasts for this. Here's your meetings for this. I was like, oh, thank you.

Jackie Pelegrin: 55:57

Wow, she's your lifesaver. Oh yeah, and I pay her appropriately for this.

Russell Van Brocklen: 55:58

I was like oh, thank you Wow.

Jackie Pelegrin: 55:58

She's your life saver.

Russell Van Brocklen: 56:00

Oh yeah, and I pay her appropriately for it. But it just gives you an example that I made myself economically valuable enough so that I can have an assistant. I run my own business, so I'm able to do that for myself. All right, and yeah, it's a huge, huge. I don't know what I'd do without her. And then I have a backup at her. Uh, she has a master's degree in teaching English. So I, I, oh, I have, I have backups for everything.

Jackie Pelegrin: 56:32

Yeah, yeah, and especially if you're like me, doing multiple things, yeah, if you don't have the organization, because I work full-time as an instructional designer in higher education, then I teach classes part-time, run this podcast, and then I also do consulting on the side. So a lot of balls in the air, right, and it's like whoa, it's a lot. So I mean, even just with my full-time job at any one time in any week, I probably have 60 meetings that are on my calendar and then I have to do projects and work in between that and yeah, so it's, how many hours a day are you putting in? I'm doing the 40 hours a week with the full-time job, and then teaching is about 10 to 15 hours a week. It's not too bad.

Jackie Pelegrin: 57:16

If I'm teaching multiple classes it's a little bit more, but I would say probably about 10 hours a week, because I've found a way to have a good system for grading and utilize a little bit of AI with that. But it's just that first draft and I've got all my different areas that I've automated, so it makes it a lot easier. So, yeah, so it really helps. And then same thing with the podcast. You just AI with that too.

Russell Van Brocklen: 57:41

Wow, I, yeah, I, I, uh, I can't put in those hours I. I'm running through and I'm like, oh, here's a task Zoom. Like right now I'm working with um Evelyn White Bay. She's on the dyslexia task force, is one of the few teachers and they came up with a solution for the state after a year, but then they can't afford it, so we're trying to do an affordable version, kind of like what I was talking about. Right, and she was like four X more effective than your average special ed teacher. She's also dyslexic. So she's like well, we have the school we're going to to make our first pitch. And she said, oh, I need to get all this stuff done. I said, okay, my primary assistant, here you go, send it to my other employees. I'm going through PodMatch. Oh, I got to do this. Okay, email it off. Please do this. It's a lot of fun to give the work to somebody else.

Jackie Pelegrin: 58:34

Finally, yeah, it's nice to be able to delegate that Absolutely. I love that. Yeah, and as a to be able to delegate that Absolutely, I love that.

Russell Van Brocklen: 58:39

Yeah, and as a dyslexic as I try to tell them, make yourself economically valuable enough so you can have an assistant to take care of all this stuff for you.

Jackie Pelegrin: 58:48

Right. Exactly that's what I'm working towards. I'm working towards that. It's hard, though Sometimes if you have, like me, I've been perfectionist for so have that perfectionist mindset, but I have to learn to. Yeah, I have to learn to let things go and delegate, and but I did, I've, I've learned to do that. You know, when I was younger, yeah, it was hard to do that, and sometimes with with my work, because it's so specialized and I work with counseling and social work, which are there's accreditation involved, so it's very complex. But, you know, I try to teach somebody else what's in my brain, right, and so that's important because if I Well, here's how you do it.

Russell Van Brocklen: 59:26

Yeah, here's how you do it, briefly, the consulting you're doing.

Jackie Pelegrin: 59:30

Mm-hmm.

Russell Van Brocklen: 59:31

Okay, now I want you to imagine as you grow, do you do this? Uh, do you do that much consulting now, or is it just something very minor?

Jackie Pelegrin: 59:45

it's very minor, kind of on the side. Yeah, okay all right.

Russell Van Brocklen: 59:49

Well, if you start doing that and start charging with, you'd be amazed at how much you're actually worth like giving, uh, professional keynote speeches and that sort of thing.

Jackie Pelegrin: 59:58

Right.

Russell Van Brocklen: 59:58

All right, once you work your way up, then you can afford an assistant. Here's what you do you go and find out one of your students, or one of the undergrads that recommended by one of your peers, who is somebody who is OCD who is? A perfectionist and really good, and you hire them. Right, yeah, you'll, you hire them.

Jackie Pelegrin: 1:00:19

Right yeah.

Russell Van Brocklen: 1:00:20

You'll get along fantastic.

Jackie Pelegrin: 1:00:22

Right, it'll be just like two peas in a pod.

Russell Van Brocklen: 1:00:26

Yes, but that's how you do it. It's not somebody you know. Go to one of your peers, somebody that you really trust. What people don't understand is the last thing you want to do is hire somebody off a resume. If I don't know the person, then I go to somebody I know and trust and they give me a recommendation, or I don't hire.

Jackie Pelegrin: 1:00:44

Yeah, that's important, absolutely yeah, I love it.

Russell Van Brocklen: 1:00:48

I've had people approach me. Here's my resume. I said I don't hire off resumes, Huh.

Jackie Pelegrin: 1:00:53

Because you never know if they wrote it or not, right, yeah?

Russell Van Brocklen: 1:00:59

Well, you know what happens. I had one bad hire in my entire career and I went back to the person who recommended it and he said I am so sorry. I don't know what happened. The kid's life just went off the cliff. And I said I don't ever want to have that happen again. And it never has.

Jackie Pelegrin: 1:01:18

Yeah, once you learn that lesson, you're like, yeah, I'm not going to do that anymore.

Russell Van Brocklen: 1:01:22

It was just that the kid went through. I don't know what happened, but their life fell apart. They got the appropriate support, but I couldn't keep working with them. But every other time I get these fantastic ones and the problem is they would hang. You know, they'd worked for me for several years and it's like, well, I need a big rate. You know they're worth a lot more money than I can afford to pay them. And then they move on to, you know, the next day.

Jackie Pelegrin: 1:01:44

Right, yeah, that's true. Wow, this was great, russell, thank you so much for coming on the show today and giving your insight, and, of course, I'll have you back on and we'll dive deeper into all of this, and so I want everyone to stay tuned, because you're going to be back on a few more times, so I'm looking forward to it.

Russell Van Brocklen: 1:02:03

Yes, and if anybody wants to contact me in between times, I'm going to send you a customized link that'll bring over what we were discussed today. I call it the three reasons why your child's having trouble in school due to dyslexia and how to get past it. So you can go in and fill that out and we can set up a free 15 minute conversation. Or if that doesn't work, you can just visit me at dyslexiaclassescom plural against dyslexiaclassescom and just the contact one.

Jackie Pelegrin: 1:02:28

Great, wonderful, and I'll make sure to put the links in the show notes too, so that everyone has that readily available as well.

Russell Van Brocklen: 1:02:36

Okay, well, thanks for having me on, it was great.

Jackie Pelegrin: 1:02:42

Thank you, Russell. I appreciate it. Thank you for taking some time to listen to this podcast episode today. Your support means the world to me. If you'd like to help keep the podcast going, you can share it with a friend or colleague, leave a heartfelt review or offer a monetary contribution. Every act of support, big or small, makes a difference, and I