Sustaining Creativity Podcast
Sustaining Creativity Podcast
The Process of Creativity with Russell Van Brocklen
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Creativity through the lens of a NY State Senate Funded Dyslexica Researcher
"Creativity means: How do you look at a problem and solve it."
Russell Van Brocklen is a severely dyslexic New York State Senate–funded dyslexia researcher and the founder of DyslexiaClasses.com. His speech-first methodology — developed by combining the brain research in Dr. Sally Shaywitz's Overcoming Dyslexia with the writing strategies in James Collins's Strategies for Struggling Writers — helped high school students with dyslexia improve their writing by seven to eight grade levels in a single academic year. Russell is the co-author of If You Write, You Will Read, has presented repeatedly at the Everyone Reading Conference in Manhattan, and has appeared on over 200 podcasts sharing his work with parents and educators.
Website: https://dyslexiaclasses.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/russell-van-brocklen-2007ab87/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dyslexiaclassesus/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dyslexiaclasses/
Free Parent Guide: https://mailchi.mp/dcacd9a6f9ae/3-reasons-ebook
Welcome to the Sustaining Creativity Podcast. I'm your host, Mari Reisberg. Over the past several years, I've combined my degrees in acting and somatic psychology to share my sustaining creativity techniques with performers. And now I've decided to share it with a bigger audience that includes you. I believe we are all creative, and this podcast is all about that. I'll be interviewing people from all backgrounds, ages, and creativity experiences to share just how creative we all are. Today I'll be chatting with Russell Van Brocklin, New York State Senate-funded dyslexia researcher. Please enjoy Russell Van Brocklin. Welcome to the Sustaining Creativity Podcast. Today I'm chatting with Russell Van Brocklin, New York State Senate-funded dyslexia researcher. Welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for having me.
MariI am thrilled to dig into creativity with you. Before we get there, why don't you let our listeners know a little bit more about who you are and what it is you do?
SPEAKER_00Well, as a dyslexic, I found I had to be incredibly creative because what started me on my path, it was the late 90s. I wanted to know how laws were created. So I signed up for the New York State Assembly internship. Showed up with the first grade reading and writing level documentation. They had to completely redesign it to accommodate me in an extraordinary way. Went back to the political science department of the State University of New York Center at Buffalo. They didn't like the accommodations. So they dropped my grade from 15 credits of A minus to 15 credits of F. So I decided to drop everything and to solve dyslexia. Figure out how to do that, my professors recommended that I went to law school because I like the politics to learn to read and write, which is walking into the belly of the beast. So I had to walk in, I had to solve, let's see, how do I read, and then how do I do things in class? Because the teachers will ask you with a Socratic method. If you don't know the answer, they will literally ask you questions that you can't answer to embarrass you publicly until you can uh figure out how to adapt. Well, the second day of contracts, the professor called on me. I didn't respond as a student. I responded as his equal. We argued for 15 minutes, he gave up. I went on to learn to read and write to read in a month, to write within a couple of years. Took me years to get funding for the New York State uh for the New York State Senate to fund me through the education department. Then I had to do the impossible. It takes four to five years to fix dyslexia in a private school at 75K a year. I took the most motivated, intelligent high school juniors and seniors of my own high school. They went from the middle school level to average range of entering grad students, one class period a day to the school year. Literally, yes, they scored average range of entering graduate students on the GRE writing assessment test under $900. My competition was over $100,000. We did it in one class period a day for the school year. That of the college took two to three years. We were three times as successful for less than 1% of the cost. That's how I got started. Yeah. My goodness. Why creativity all over the place there?
MariSo much creativity. Holy moly. My goodness.
SPEAKER_00And and determination and like drive, and it sounds like Yeah, you're you're you're talking about um you're talking about a period from when I went to to audit law class to presenting was nine years.
MariStill, that's that's that's in the in the scheme of life, I feel like nine years, that's you know, it is not insubstantial. And there's a lot that can happen. And it sounds like there a lot did happen for you in that time. Absolutely it did in that time.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
MariWell, seeing as how creativity just seems to just kind of flow through you, when you think of creativity, what does it mean to you to be creative?
SPEAKER_00What it means is how do you look at a problem and solve it? And people think, well, um, I I asked them when it comes to creativity, what's your way of triggering it? And they say, the predominantly, it's I'm going for a walk and I'm gonna try to figure it out there. To me, that there are systems that can try to help you become much more creative. And I want to go over the system that I found out the most helpful.
MariPlease take us, take us on the journey.
SPEAKER_00So, what I want you to think about is most people like they they they find to understand a concept and then an explanation is what they really need. They can grasp the concept, but they need the example to understand it. But a concept wasn't good enough. What I found worked best were universal things. Okay, and why did I come with that? Because here's a book called Overcoming Dyslexia by Dr. Saley Shewitz, and you can see the difference in the dyslexic brain. The back part of the dyslectic brain has nothing going on. Genet is going, the normal brain's crazy. The front part of the dyslexic brain is two and a half times overactive, and that deals with word analysis followed by articulation. So I was like, how do we do this? And the best way I found out to explain the concept is through a movie review. So I'm gonna run that by you.
SPEAKER_01Please.
SPEAKER_00So what I want you to do is I need you to tell me a movie that meets three criteria. Number one, you know it intimately. Number two, you think it's one of the best of all time. Number three, everybody's seen it. What's the name of that movie?
MariOh my gosh. That's such a great question. Because what I was thinking fits too, but the that everyone has seen.
SPEAKER_00Well, it's forget. The third one's not the most important. What's the one that came to mind?
MariStrictly ballroom.
SPEAKER_00Strictly ballroom. Okay. Now, I'm gonna ask you a very tough question. Everybody needs to understand this is a tough question.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00It's vastly easier for dyslexic because we got two and a half times of neuroactivity. We're gonna use word analysis. For strictly ballroom, I need you to reduce it to a one-word universal theme that best represents your unique point of view.
MariOne word universal theme.
SPEAKER_00Um it is one word.
MariDynamic.
SPEAKER_00Dynamic, okay. Just so people know, if you were dyslectic, that would happen instantaneously. That's one of the few advantages of being dyslectic. So dynamic. Now, if we were to do a movie review, which we're not, we would say how do the actors, the director, the screenwriter do with that universal thing. Here's the point I'm getting to broad brush. If we're going to try to figure out how to use how to be creative, we need to be very specific. If you notice when people are trying to be really creative for most things, it's not some big problem. It's something ultra specific. Okay. You'll notice when you when you advance in academic learning, especially at the grad level, it's a very specific problem. Okay, so your broad brush isn't going to work. So then I had to figure out. Well, now we got the broad brush. Now we need a framework to work with, because we we need a system. Yeah. So then I went to my professors and I said, who is the best person in English language writing history to communicate complex ideas through writing? And they all had one name, Shakespeare. So we're gonna traumatize part of your audience just for a moment. We're going back to high school English. Just for a moment. It's okay. You need to think of any Shakespeare play. You have a hero. Hero wants to do something based on a bunch of universal fames. Then you have an ultimate villain who's a character combined with concepts and some universal themes, trying to prevent the hero from accomplishing what they want to do. Then they have a conflict in Act One, it accelerates like crazy act two resolves act three. Sound familiar?
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_00So we're gonna simplify that. And now I'm going to show you if it's okay how to go through this process with the assistance of any AI model you want to use. Sure. But this is for adults, not students. My students do a more advanced, a more cumbersome version by hand. And this is also how I teach. This is how I teach dyslexic to read, but we're not gonna go quite into that part.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00So the first thing you're gonna do is we're gonna simplify that process. The first thing is whatever you want to do. So I'm gonna have you come up with an example for for me to work with. Okay? Let's just do it off the fly. What's something you want to be more creative with? What's a problem you want to solve?
MariOoh, I want to be more creative in the kitchen. Like being able to open the fridge and put something together.
SPEAKER_00So you're a hero. So we always well, let's go back and we're gonna kind of simplify Shakespeare. We have a hero, hero wants to do something.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_00It's a part of every story. Who's the hero and what does the hero want to do?
MariI'm the hero and I want to easily make dinner.
SPEAKER_00Okay, you need to be much more specific.
MariNot dinner.
SPEAKER_00What type what type of dinner do you want to make?
MariOkay. I want to make a French classic French meal that has fish and vegetables in it. Do I need to be more specific than that? Or is that enough?
SPEAKER_00No, no, that's fine. So then what you would do is you is you would go into the AI and say, This is what I want to do. Write out five to twenty paragraphs on it.
SPEAKER_01Oh.
SPEAKER_00Alright. Yes. No, remember, I have my kids do this by hand. Yeah, they love me. So it goes ahead and does that. Okay. Now, based on what you want to do, you tell it to for each sentence, pick the most important word and write it out with custom definitions. All right? And have it do it for all the sentences that it wrote out in those five to 20 paragraphs. It'll do that. Then you, as the human, will go through and pick the one that just feels right, the best one that's in your head. And it's more so on the definition than the word.
MariOh, okay.
SPEAKER_00That's that's your base universal thing. But the problem is like the one you came up with for your movie review, broad brush. We can't, as humans, we can't do it very well for most of us with a broad brush. So then what we do is that is our base universal theme. That's we're gonna take that and we're gonna come up, tell the AI to come up with a hundred synonyms and custom definitions. Then tell it based on what the hero wanted to do, pick the top 10 or pop top 20. Let's say it's the top 10.
MariOkay.
SPEAKER_00Then you as the human pick the one that best matches what's the definition that best matches what's in your head. If you're not happy, take the best one and start the process over again. Another hundred, uh, another hundred words and synonyms based on that until you get one that's really close. I had people go sometimes five or six times. With AI, it happens really fast.
SPEAKER_01Sure.
SPEAKER_00So then you then you find the definition that best matches what's in your head. It's not perfect, but it's close enough. We then use that as a lens for you to then say, this based on what I want to you want to do, use this as the lens. Give me one idea, give me three ideas, whatever one you want. Some people go up to five, pick the one that really figures what you're trying to do, and then expand on that. And there's your answer.
MariMy goodness, what a great way to spark and like dig into that creative mind in and dyslexic mind. It sounds like this is I mean, there it sounds like there's so much training and teaching through this lens that allows a dyslexic brain to view things in a way that makes total sense.
SPEAKER_00Well, actually, what I force my kids to do is to type everything out, look up the definitions by hand, type everything out. So over a year, year and a half, their vocabulary expands like crazy. Yeah. And then they process information in this part somewhat like two and a half times, like so much faster than you can, because that's the part of our brain that works well.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And that's that's where the creativity becomes incredible. Um yeah, but that but that'll give your listeners a very specific way to start off with. Now, if you want to go a bit further, sure. Once you find what your universal fame is, if it's a more complex problem, you can then define your ultimate villain. The villain is there to try to stop you. Okay. And I typically start off with people and eventually I move on to concepts. So whatever it is that's stopping you, yeah. All right, so then what I would do is pick your ultimate villain and then come up with three really good reasons. Okay. So if you're looking for the reasons, um if you want to go on into discussing this into uh something further, that's where you can go. But what most people, when they're just trying to come up with ideas, what I would then do is tell them to flip the script. Look through the villain's eyes. You already know who what the universal fame is, you already know what the hero is.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But you want to get the villain's universal fame. So you go through that, the same process you use that came up with a universal theme for the hero, and you come up with a villain's universal thing. Now you have a 360-degree understanding, and you can now get into a discussion with other people, knowing what their universal fame is, what your universal fame is, and now you can because you come up with that, and you can use that universal fame as a lens to push forward what the hero or the villain wants to do. You can then pick like one to three points. Some people go as far as far as five. Pick the main one you want to go into and develop that. You now have a way of discussing this at a very high level.
MariMy goodness, yes, you do. I love all of those pieces and the 360 view, and how thank you so much for walking us through it. I'm curious, having worked with so many individuals through this lens, what does that look like in your own life? Like, how do you use that?
SPEAKER_00Do you use this in everyday life, or is it like oh, this is this is a very crude version of what I did. Where did I come up with this? Remember when I told you my second day of contracts and I was called on?
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_00This all lined up in my brain organized for the first time, and I could just argue with the professor as an equal, and he was the professor longer than I was alive at that point.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00So what it means for me is most people in an academic career to come up with a major breakthrough. They're lucky if it happens once, twice, maybe three times. I have to do it several times a year.
SPEAKER_01Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_00So I'm constantly needing to evolve, make things simple. Because I took those original super kids.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And I took things for dyslexic. I now train parents to teach their kids. And I'm talking to parents who, you know, have a high school diploma who never went to college.
MariRight.
SPEAKER_00And they're not spending, you know, they're not getting a four-year degree and then the requisite two years of intense training for $11,000 on the Orton approach that millionaires use. I have I have to keep making it simple, more powerful, better, faster, cheaper, getting the kids more interested. I have to keep evolving this and a lot of times and several times a month.
MariMy goodness.
SPEAKER_00It doesn't stop for me.
MariYeah. How do you? I mean, before we started, you were showing me the book that you use. I'm curious, how do you keep, you know, interest sparked in the current generation of students that it's all about instant gratification?
SPEAKER_00Oh no, it's no, it's all it's really simple. You first of all teach what's in their specialty, their area, extreme interest and ability. Their second one is we don't teach general to the specific, we teach from the specific to the general. So for example, this is the most popular book that I teach. This is Walt Disney, The Triumph of the American Imagination. Oh, 1,000 pages of it.
MariMy goodness. Okay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Are you a have you ever been to Disney, Disneyland, or Disney World?
MariI have. A really long time ago, but yes.
SPEAKER_00Okay, for a lot of the kids, this is what they they are mesmerized by what makes this place so magical. So they'll go there, then they'll go to Universal, they say Universal is fun, Disney's magic. And I said, Yes, there are two universal things that make up the Disney magic. And if you by the time you go through this freaking book, all right, and you spot those two, you can read. Okay. All right, and and that's the mission. Now, every time I've done this, typically we're talking minimum 12 months, typically more pushing 18 to two years.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00On this one book. That one question. And then the parents won, and then their kid says, usually I'll have them start around this at 10. In one case, I'll just call her Susie. Susie finished at 12 and said, Mom, I can read. Mom's like, well, we haven't tested you. She's like, No, mom, I can read. And I said, Okay, her mom had a master's degree. I said, Your daughter can read better than you can. You go and find those two universal things. I said, the first one any half-wick can find. The second one, good luck. She found the first one in about five minutes. The second one she couldn't find. I said, Well, is it time for your 12-year-old to tell you what it is? And then she told her and pointed out where it was. The mom was shocked. And I said, In this case, because her daughter wanted me to slam her, and her mom said it was okay. I said, comparatively now, you're functionally illiterate. Your 12-year-old can read better than you can. And she's like, I can't believe I missed it. I said, You missed it because you weren't dyslexic. You think dyslexia is a reading problem. It's not.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00It's an organizational problem because the front part of her brain is too active and there's no organization. That's the underlying reasoning. But I said, Did I do my job? And she's like, Yeah, because then Susie brought this into her teacher, and the teacher looked at it and said, Yeah, you should absolutely be able to read this at 17. And Susie's 12.
MariAh, I love it. I love, I love these stories. Thank you for sharing this. And just, you know, I the amount of you know, creative spark and desire, and the it sounds fun too. Like that's the piece that I think is so important.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yes, but that's I just showed you the really basic stuff.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00The really advanced stuff. Um, is there's something called a problem statement. All right. So just to know where it comes in. People want to develop this on a really evolved level. What you need to do is you need to go to a book called The Craft of Research from the University of Chicago. Again, the Craft of Research, University of Chicago Press. It's sold over a million copies in the past 31 years, and it teaches PhD students how to come up with their doctoral dissertation. Now, the problem statement is how to ask the right question where if you answer it properly, which is really hard to do, then you're gonna have a huge step forward.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Google, the guy ahead of Google. Google AI said a couple months ago in a podcast their biggest problems they can't teach their people how to do a proper problem statement. Here's the reason. Stop big picture, top down. All right. What I did is if you look at the dyslexic brain, the front part is two and a half times overactive. It deals with word analysis.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I've and followed by articulation. I've started that from the bottom up.
unknownMm-hmm.
SPEAKER_00Okay. So we do word anal. What I just showed you was an advanced form of word analysis.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00With the art, and then we've we we add some articulation. We go up and then we combine it. And I've actually programmed an AI process where I come up with, here's what I think the problem statement is. So I came up with the AI to help me and it looked at it and said, Russell, that's not right. According to your sheet, here's what the actual problem statement should be. And is it a perfect problem statement that's going to allow you to go and make major solutions? No, but it's really good at the basic stuff that I run into all the time. What I find is I have a I break things down into a lot of different problem statements until I can connect it all into one big picture, then I just make the connection. But then when I get done with that, I'll have, because I use uh Claude Fable 5 for this, I'll then say, go and get me a 7,000 word, turn the research mode on, you know, go and get me a 7,000-word report. And then I work with Fable 5 to work through it in Claude Co work. And I send out a bunch of uh sonic agents to do the actual work just to make it a hell of a lot cheaper. And that's how I come up with a lot of creative stuff. And then I put it together, and then what I notice, what AI sucks at is it can't make the connections. Once you make the connection, it's brilliant at doing all the grunt work. It just can't put the two things together. And that's what I found I'm really good at. And that's how I'm able to do like so many new innovations each month.
MariI love it. Yeah, the innovation that it's the generation of ideas and then the action of putting it out, putting it together. Because I think sometimes people get stuck in that we're just generating a lot of ideas, and then the that next step of taking them into actionable things is well.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but the big issue people miss is you got to come up with a decent problem statement. So that's what I can then work with the AI. Say, here's my process, and I find I work best with Fable Five to that's that new super eight model they have, where I can just go back and forth and say, okay, really what it is. And it's good once I make the connection to doing all the grunt work really quickly. And then, as I said, I'll have it do a 7,000-word report. I'll come back to it and say, how do we then take this and move it forward with all this? And it's really good at doing that. I mean, it's brilliant. It just can't help you come up with a problem statement, but you have to lead it until you do.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And then once you do that with a number of problem statements, with a number of research things, and then you put it together, that's where you get the big aha idea.
MariFantastic. Thank you for walking us through all of those pieces, the complexities and how you're connecting it and utilizing AI in the work that you do. And curious, in your life, what are the creative problems or the creative opportunities that you are most excited about?
SPEAKER_00Well, I'll just give you a little example. We had a New York State Center. This is, I'm not giving anything away. His name is Briat Voyle and Segal. He's now the president of the borough of Manhattan. He's a road scholar from Oxford, uh, Harvard Law School grad. Found out his daughter was dyslexic in fourth grade. Sent her to a private school called the Windward School in fifth. Uh, she stayed there through eighth, graduated. She's fine. $75,000 a year. Her neurosec was $8,000. He his family can afford that, most can't. So he had the top people in the state, 49 of them, try to figure out how to reframe kindergarten through fifth grade with the best current research, and they failed miserably because their solution was something even New York State can't pass, can't afford. And we spend 32 grand per kid on average. Nobody spends more than we do. So I looked at that. I worked with Evelyn Whitebeck. She's one of the three teachers on the panel. And we're coming out with a book called If You Write, You Can Read. Mine is about Kimberly, homeschooling mom, very religious, uh few college classes, nothing close to associate's degree. Um, she had the state of Ohio test her kids for We're Reading Brilliantly, who are Gen Ed. Her dyslexic son, Reed, was reading at the 11th percentile, writing at the fifth. I worked with her for half an hour a week for eight months. She worked with Reed for an hour and a half a week for eight months. Most parents do 10 to 15 minute sessions. At the end of that, Reed's friends wanted him in school for social reasons. He took a test in a public school eight and a half months later. He scored his 11th percentile, went up to the 64th, his fifth percentile went up to the 65th, finished the year in a public school, got A's and B's for most classes. English was C. She's very happy. Now, Evelyn is a master teacher in less time her student jumped 6.6 grade levels.
MariWow.
SPEAKER_00Well, yeah, she's a master teacher. She, out of all the teachers in New York State, she was one of the three invited onto the task force. So her she's the Michael Jordan of teachers. So her her thing is completely outsized due to her super ability. But that just gives you an example of how powerful this process is.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So where the state couldn't figure out how to do it, we can now go and train the entire district in how to do this in under six hours.
MariIncredible. Well, I hope there are many districts who are utilizing this for their student.
SPEAKER_00Oh, we're we've taught it the last two years at the Everyone Reading Conference in New York City, but you have no idea how much fun it is to get into school districts.
MariI can only imagine.
SPEAKER_00Here's a little thing about creativity. Have you ever watched Shark Tank?
MariI have seen it, yes.
SPEAKER_00Five to ten percent of the population is dyslectic. There are six sharks. How many of them do you think are dyslectic?
MariFour?
SPEAKER_00Three. Barbara Damien and Mr. Wonderful the Ball Guy, 50%. We are literally at five to ten times our representation on that show.
SPEAKER_01Wow.
SPEAKER_00The creativity, I'll give you a little hint. We get into grad school, it's really unfair to everybody else having able to select in grad school. We own the place day one. It's really on that's that's where our creativity comes out because it's in our narrow speciality. I'll give you a little hint. If you're going to grad school to be in physics, they don't care if you can do Shakespeare. They don't care at all. If you're going for English, they don't care if you can do math. They don't care at all. I've had dyslectic kids go on to get their PhD in the social sciences, and they literally thought two plus two to seven. And I had one girl crying in front of her advisor saying, I can't do this because I can't do the math. She said, Here's a calculator. Use AI. I don't care about the math. We have we have secretaries who can do the math. She's shown that she could go ahead and publish. That's what they care about. They want to, they they don't care about the other stuff. And that's where the selections excel.
MariI love it. Well, thank you so much for breaking this all down and sharing all of your knowledge and tips and tools. I have one last question. What does it feel like in your body to be creative?
SPEAKER_00It just feels like every year I'm expected to come up with new massive improvements, and it's just expected. Because in my field, what is available is like the space shuttle used to be so outrageously expensive, so outrageously uh not useful. And I gotta bring it down so everybody can use it. And uh Elon Musk and SpaceX has dropped things by 95 cents on the dollar. It's like now it cost a nickel of what it used to cost a buck. Well, I have to get it down to a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a penny. And I have to improve it all the time because that's what the parents want.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00They literally, I'm not joking. Parents will spend time with their kids, 10 to 15 minutes a session. And I gotta teach them how to do really complex stuff and make it so simple. And it's never ending.
MariAnd it sounds like you really enjoy it.
SPEAKER_00I I you know what at this point, I enjoy helping the kids, enjoy helping the parents. I really don't like going through and having to create new stuff all the freaking time. Because now I mean, just to show you how ridiculous it is, the most advanced kid I'm working with, you can guess his age. His name is Grayson. He's in the 99th percentile for math and science. He's not dyslexic in the least. He's just a super kid. Um, he wants to go get his PhD to work at NASA to Terraform Mars. So I'm distilling peer-reviewed PhD articles to the 10th grade. I'm sorry, to the 12th grade, the 12th grade level, the contents at the third-year college level. And we're gonna take Grayson through to coming up with a problem statement and hook him up with a professor. How old do you think Grayson is? He's on the young side.
Mari11?
SPEAKER_00He's 10.
Mari10. Okay.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Yeah, his dad's showing a version of the advanced paragraph I showed you earlier.
MariYeah.
SPEAKER_00So this does not work just for dyslectics.
MariOkay. I love it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Now the next thing I have to do for Grayson is I have to jump the reading level up to first year college and the content to fourth year college.
MariOkay.
SPEAKER_00Because we have to get, I told him, I know you're 10, but you know, we've got to get you to read, you know, journal articles, like actually read them.
MariRight.
SPEAKER_00It's a lot of pressure. But you know, that is a lot of pressure, but well, yeah, his parents took him out of school because he told me, and I had to laugh at this, he was worried about his finals. He got the presidential award. I'm like, Grayson, uh you're really operating at the college level and you're worried about fifth grade finals. I said, This is amusing.
MariWell, we it shows we got to worry about something, right?
SPEAKER_00Right. So so when you're talking about creativity, this process works really well for everybody. Because the the key thing about dyslectics, with the overactive front part of the brain, it deals with word analysis first. So my kids, I have them type it because until they unless they know in their brain exactly what the definition is, I mean they know it cold. If you don't know that, you can't apply word analysis, which means I can't open them up to all the marvelous potential they have.
MariMakes so much sense. Well, Russell, thank you so much for joining me. If people want to learn more about the work you have out in the world, how could they go about doing that?
SPEAKER_00Best thing to do is just go to dyslexiaclasses.com. That's with an S, dyslexiaclasses.com. And if you would need to contact me individually, just there's a contact me form there and we can set up the time to talk.
MariPerfect. Well, I will put that link in show notes so people have very easy access. And thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. This has been such a fantastic experience.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for having me.
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