Can Montessori Schools Work for Dyslexic Kids? Ft. Dyslexic Montessori Teacher Rebecca Hamel

The other thing we need to remember is dyslexia is lifelong and it's going to look different at each stage of your life, no matter if you're a three to six-year-old or if you have your first job in the workplace, right? We need to understand that.

Hey everyone, we are Sonja and Nick and this is Dyslexia Journey. And today we are excited to welcome Rebecca Hamill to the show. Rebecca is a certified elementary Montessori teacher for ages 6 through 12. She has taught in private, public, and charter Montessori schools in five different states and she has 20 plus years of teaching experience. Her journey is deeply personal. Diagnosed with dyslexia in kindergarten in the early 1980s, she struggled with reading until fifth grade and her grandmother, a retired teacher, took on the challenge of teaching her to read.

This transformative experience not only changed her life but also inspired her career path. Rebecca completed Orton-Gillingham training at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2004 and holds a Montessori Lifestyle Basic Certification for Montessori and Dementia Care. She says her favorite part of teaching is watching the children teach and complement each other. The joy never fades. Rebecca believes this blend of personal experience and professional expertise brings a unique and valuable perspective to teaching the neurodiverse learner.

Rebecca, welcome to Dyslexia Journey. Thank you. I'm excited to be here today. Yeah, and I'm so excited to hear, you know, about some of your expertise and some of how that can be brought into alternative, slightly more alternative education areas. But let's start first, you know, we do our Dyslexic Voices series. So you have that perspective as well. And it's always so helpful for everyone to hear, you know, different nuances and different ways that it can go for people.

I think it's really helpful for people to hear. So, yeah, let's just talk about like a way back to childhood and tell us a little more about that journey. And I know that family influences are a piece of that. So I'm sure that's going to come up as well. So let's go back to kindergarten. My mother went into a parent-teacher conference, so a teacher conference, and the teacher was very aware of something wasn't quite right.

Something was going on. So she encouraged my mother to go down to the University of Michigan and do some psychoeducational testing. And I don't think this really bothered my mother at all in any way. Like some parents might think, oh, this is a huge red flag. But I was a preemie. I was two and a half pounds. And I think ever since birth, there were things that weren't quite going on correctly within my body and growing.

And so she just thought this was another piece of the puzzle. So we went down to Michigan, the University of Michigan, and did a whole bunch of battery of tests. And of course, it came back that I was dyslexic. So my kindergarten teacher was spot on. She knew what to look for. And I think since she had been teaching for so long, she just naturally had those instincts. And so I'm so thankful for that.

Then I go into school. I have an IEP, but I don't really enter the special education classroom until first or second grade. And at that point, I knew I was different in my learning. I could see that I wasn't reading like the other peers in my classroom. And I would often think, well, how do they know that word? How do they know how to even read? It was a mystery to me.

And I would look at them and be like, well, I want to do that. I want to I want to be reading those books, too. So I'm in special education. They're not really using any techniques because this was the whole language area. And they thought, oh, you'll you'll get the reading. You just need to try to memorize these books and you'll understand and read. Well, that wasn't happening. So my grandmother finally stepped in by the time I was in fifth grade.

She said, this isn't right. I need to do something. So she took it in her own hands to go down to the Michigan Dyslexia Institute. And she just did the training. And right away, it started making sense. The phonemes, the phonemes, the phonemes, the sound symbol association and doing things in a multisensory way. I remember reading the word like all and looking at it, A-L-L, I would be think, oh, my goodness, I don't know what this word is.

And my grandmother would say, why don't you try doing tapping on your arm? And I would tap on the arm and it would come to me instantly. And then I would write it in the sand tray and I would write it in the air. And it just made sense. It was like that long-term memory information was in there. And all I had to do was pull it out by doing something in a multisensory way.

And it always, it still amazes me, like to this day when I do that kind of information. So then my mother came in and she noticed that, okay, the school isn't really helping you. I need to advocate more for you. I need to be an advocate for you. So she, when I was in fourth grade, she was doing a doctorate in education at the time. And her primary focus was non-traditional students and the implications for recruitment and retention.

And I recently went back and read her dissertation because I was interested in seeing that, especially because I'm working on a master's degree right now and always reading these dissertations. But during that time, even though she knew that adults that were non-traditional students, so that meaning students who were older entering the academic world, she saw that there were direct parallels for students with learning disabilities, right? Because that was the term they used back in the 80s.

And for special education students, and that there were specific needs. And she noticed that I had these needs too. The first need was there needed to be a special interest in a topic to learn to go deep and wide with that topic and really resonated with your learning. And the other one was that students preferred to learn at their own pace, right? His or her own pace. So I just think those are two things that I take with me that are also key hallmark to Montessori education, learning at your own pace, and knowing that this evolution of learning will happen, but it might not be at the specific target point that regular educators wanted to happen.

So that was really important. The other thing that was important to me was to see that my family was always growing professionally and personally, and they were always getting advanced degrees and networking with people. And that is really important to me because I think that is now one of my strengths as a dyslexic adult is trying to do those things too.

My mother and grandmother always reminded me that I'm dyslexic. And that is going to follow me through from when I'm young to when I'm an adult. It's going to be with me all throughout my life. And what I need to be aware of is first how I learn, how I share that information with others, how I figure out the area that when I'm working, how it's going to fit into my career.

And that is a step I think schools need to figure out or other areas around us need to figure out how that's going to be incorporated more. And that's the last social justice piece I really feel that needs to happen and evolve within our society.

Do you want me to talk through some key memories of things throughout elementary and high school? Would that be helpful? That would be really interesting, yeah. And I thought it was interesting because I saw the note that you really insisted on being in your IEP meeting. So I'd love to have that as part of it. And one thing that I'm curious about also is it sounds like obviously your family was very supportive.

And do you think that that helped you avoid some of the sort of low self-esteem and feeling dumb in school that a lot of dyslexic kids, unfortunately, experience? Yes. So I would like to talk about all those things. So the first thing is that I did attend my IEP meetings when I was a young child starting in elementary school because I thought the adults were talking about me behind my back, right?

And I would often, before I went to the IEP meetings, I would say to my mom, well, did you talk about this? Did you talk about that I like sewing right now? Did you talk about how I liked nature and going and exploring and looking at bugs and looking at the clouds? And my mom was like, no. So I was like, okay, I would like to tell the adults that are talking about me that I like those things.

So she said, okay, you can start coming in. So they would invite me in. I wouldn't stay for the entire meeting. But they would invite me in and let me sit down to express what was going on with my learning, my activities, my passions. And now I've noticed that there are certain areas written into the IEP that have that information about the student, but they don't always invite the student in. If you're lucky enough to have a teacher that will say, especially a gen ed teacher, that will say, oh, come in to the IEP meeting and share with everyone, including your parents, how you feel.

So that was a really important piece into advocating for myself. So my mother was still advocating for myself. Sometimes my grandmother would come in to give information on how I was doing with reading and my reading development, which I thought was really important. And knowing that first and foremost, I have the most knowledge about myself than anyone else in that room. They all have pieces to evidence like a GORT test or some kind of testing.

But who knows themselves best in their learning if you're doing a true self-assessment? So I thought that was important to remember to invite your child into an IEP meeting if they want to. But I would always encourage it. Having books on tape was so powerful to me. So at that time, it was called Reading for the Blind and Dyslexic. And I've been moving and I actually found my little tape recorder that would make it go faster or slower.

And I could modify how quickly the reader was reading and giving me the information, which I loved. But now on Audible, you can get so much more like in detail if it's going too slowly or too fast. But I love that key feature. And I love your reading. Now, Reading for the Blind and Dyslexic is called Learning Ally. Are you familiar with that? Yeah, we've heard of that. So I love Learning Ally because they put the words right on the screen.

So if you want to read along with the physical book or look on the screen and do it, your reading is such a great multi-sensory way to incorporate into reading a physical book or a book on the screen. And then in second and third grade, I so badly wanted to read that I would carry around my Little House on the Prairie book or my American Girl doll books. And I loved biographies, especially about strong, powerful women that overcame different things.

And just holding that book, I thought I would somehow absorb that information into my brains. If I looked at the words in the pictures, but that's where my mom would encourage me, have you gone and used the tape and listened to it on tape? And I would say no. And she would say, okay, now is the time to go listen to it on tape. And I would try to follow along the best I could with the book and listening.

It just wasn't always so great. In fourth grade, I learned how to touch type. And I went to a class during the summer. And it was hard for me to learn where the different letters were. But I had someone sitting next to me. And she was so kind and helped me if it was going too fast alongside me. This was at the university that my mom worked at. And this was an education requirement for one of their classes.

So I really liked having that individualized attention and noticing, okay, am I doing the finger strokes correctly? It also made a huge impact on not having to form the words correctly. And my typing was much faster than my handwriting at that time. So it gave me a new tool and empowerment that I hadn't had before. In fourth grade, also, it was really hard for me to use the textbook and look things up in the back for the definition and then go back to the text on the specific page.

Because I was still having trouble with numbers and knowing what 104 looked like and 140 looked like. So I just needed to take that time and slow down and know, okay, there's multiple things going on here when you're reading a physical book. And you just need to take time and sometimes write things down on the side. And often I remember my teacher coming over because she saw I was probably struggling with finding the correct page and just flipping the book quickly to the correct page for me, which was helpful.

In middle school, I think this is when a scaffolding piece started happening with advocacy and learning, I started having to change classrooms. So I had multiple teachers during the day. And my teachers all knew, I'm sure, that I was dyslexic because they were probably given that information at the beginning of the term. But what my mother did to try to get me outside my box and go and start talking to those teachers and having that conversation was at the beginning of the semester.

She would ask me every day, have you talked to your new teacher? Have you told them you're dyslexic? Have you told them that you need to sit in the front of the room? Did you tell them that sometimes on your math assignments, you might know how to do the process of the problem, but you might write down the number, get the numbers out of order, right? So that was, it always seemed extremely embarrassing to me, but it was helpful.

And it made me so that I was being more in control of sharing that information with them and knowing that this is not something to be ashamed of or bashful about. So that this is just another piece to who you are and how you learn. And some of those teachers might be extra smart and be going four times the speed you are in processing that information, but it doesn't mean you're not as smart as them.

And you just need to share what strategies and tools work best for you to do your best learning within their environment. So I thought that was a really helpful thing that they started to have me do. Also, when I had to do those handwritten papers, she gave me, my mother bought a Franklin speller for me. And that opened up my world because not only could I type in the word and see if I had it spelled correctly, and it gave me multiple options.

If I hadn't spelled it correctly, but I was close enough, it gave me multiple options for the word, then I could hear the word, I could see the definition, and the Franklin speller would read me the definition, right? Which was such a powerful tool back then, especially because we didn't have iPhones in the late, early, early to late 90s, right? So using tools to help bridge that gap between what you know and what you can showcase you know was really important and powerful to me.

Memorizing long things was very hard for me. spelling words, if I had to memorize a long speech in choir, dance, or drama, or for English class. But what I figured out is that I needed to do a multi-sensory way of getting that information into my long-term memory. So often I would handwrite it out, right? But that would be a painstaking event for me. But then I would go over the top of the handwritten information and make little illustrations and color code it.

And then I would stop and move through it and talk through it. And I would do it multiple times to commit it to long-term memory. So maybe during my test, when I had to handwrite something, I could put up my hand and remember, oh, yes, this is the next thing I wanted to write down in this paragraph. Or if I had to remember a certain date, I would close my eyes and I would color code that date so I could remember it and write it down for my test.

All of those things made me really aware of my learning and the learning style and the learning process I had to go through. So that was a huge development. I figured out from elementary to high school. But then another component that you're talking about is the social-emotional component. And they didn't really talk about that in the 90s at all. But I think my mother and grandmother would ask me, what are some things that you are truly passionate about?

And that was dance, choir, gymnastics. I was never really a star in those things. But it filled my soul to do those extra activities. And it made me feel grounded in what I was doing. And it kept encouraging me that there is hope, that some things might be a struggle. But there's other things that can give you that hope, inspiration, groundedness, just by taking a walk in nature. It helps me always stay grounded and focused.

So those are the things that, in my life, really helped to keep my positive attitude up. The other thing I really want to stress, too, is it's okay that if you need to take a break from the school system. Like, in high school, I took about a year and a half off just to reset and ground myself. I was always working on academics. My mother had, like, friends from the university that would come teach me math or social studies, science.

But I always made sure that I had my peer connections in high school through that time of taking a pause from being in the academic public school system. She made sure that I went in for science and choir. And both of those things I really loved. And I love those teachers, and especially my choir teacher. She was with me from 6th grade to 12th grade. And I just think, wow, that's such a gift.

And I was fortunate to have that experience, to have that teacher that long. But she really knew me. And even if sight reading, reading the notes on paper, was hard for me, she would quickly play it on the piano so I could hear it. And then I could repeat it back. So those little tools, like, if you have a teacher you've worked with for a long time, I think it's easier to go after class, too, and say, I'm really struggling with this.

Could you help me? Or tell me which class may I have that can help me with this more. And that was really important.

Learning to drive was a real struggle because I had to quickly think what was right and left. And my mother came up with a strategy. If I was hugging the road, I was going to the right. And if I was squeezing, I was going to the left and trying to, like, go towards the other car. So she helped me with figuring out tips, tools, and strategies. Now I love the GPS because it says in 1,000 feet, turn right, and it will have a little arrow.

So those kind of accommodations we have with technology now, the speech to text, the dictation on your computer, chat GPT to read over a letter you wrote to make sure there's not a lot of grammatical errors, all of those things are really helpful to my life. And we are blessed to be in this advancement of technology and how it's going to help us in the future, especially making that playing field more even, right?

Because we know there's biases towards people if they're not spelling things correctly, if there's grammatical errors all the time. We know that as a society, and that's how you're going to even the playing field for people. So I'm really happy with all these things. There's also, you agree? Yeah, definitely. Technology has been really helpful. Yeah, I really want more educators to start researching it more, adopting, and embracing it, right? Because we just need that in our lives.

Everyone needs it. And it makes your workload go down, too. And then if you want to have face-to-face conversations with people, they'll know if you really understand it or not. They'll understand how you're taking that information and utilizing it. So I really hope that more and more educators start embracing that.

The other thing we need to remember is dyslexia is lifelong. And it's going to look different at each stage of your life, no matter if you're a three- to six-year-old or if you have your first job in the workplace, right? We need to understand that. And there might be tools that you have to buy yourself that your employer isn't going to have readily available, even though they probably should because it would be good for everyone in their company.

But if you go and take a specific exam, like the teacher test, if I go and take the teacher test, and if I move to a different state, usually you have to go and take that state's certification to teach in that state. So if your psychoeducational evaluation is more than five years old, even though I've been diagnosed dyslexic since I was in kindergarten, and it's a lifelong thing, it's not like I outgrow it, I'm still going to be flagged as dyslexic.

You still have to pay $2,000 or more to go sit down for maybe five hours, maybe longer, depending on how many sessions it takes, to take that evaluation test again, and to prove to Pearson or whoever is the test writer that you need these accommodations, you would benefit from them to take and pass that test. So that blows my mind to think of all of those hurdles, all of those extra hoops, dyslexic people have to do in order to do something that might be a requirement to have that specific job.

Yeah, I agree. That's, it's, it's just doesn't make sense, but yeah. And just like you need often extra tutoring and extra support there, it just doesn't make sense that your insurance companies aren't helping more with that because in the long term, it's really going to have benefits society, right? In the short term, it just adds extra pressure and burden on families. And even sometimes thinking about colleges, colleges, which is something that goes into my next area that I'd like to talk about.

But colleges, you need to sit down and figure out, okay, what college would best suit you as a learner, as a person? And sometimes those colleges cost extra money, right? It's not going always to a state school. Maybe some state schools would be fine for individuals, but I knew and my mother knew that a state school might be too big for me. It would be too hard for me to navigate the campus.

I would probably be stressed out for a long time on figuring how many minutes did it take me to get from point A to point B. And you just have to think about those kinds of things. Have you been thinking about that with your own daughter? Yeah, she's right in that process right now. And interestingly, we also had an interview with someone who the focus was around the college process because it is its own thing.

And there's a lot of factors to consider, really. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great interview that we can link to. Yeah. Published a couple of weeks ago. I would love to hear actually your personal, because you went to a more unusual school in terms of what it offered and its approach, which I didn't realize that one was out there. So it's interesting. It might be interesting to hear a little bit about that and your experience there.

Yeah, so when my mother, when I was in middle school, my mother went to this Alverno College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, because she was on a committee at the university to figure out something about outcomes assessment and what assessments look like. So she was sent to this college and she came back and she said, Rebecca, when we start looking at colleges for you, I think you need to look at this college too.

So, of course, my junior year, when we started to explore different college options and where I was going to go, we went to Alverno and I was amazed. First of all, I love that it was a woman's college and it had a religious affiliation, which was not as important to me, but they had a strongly social justice grassroots movement to them. So that's what I loved about that component of the religious aspect of it.

The other thing was it was abilities-based. So you weren't getting grades. However, you were getting like check marks on their eight abilities. And the eight abilities are aesthetic engagement, analysis, communication, developing a global perspective, which is really important to me, effective citizenship, problem solving, social interaction, and valuing and decision-making. So during that time, you would have to do the, like it was a project-based assignment. So if it was on reading, you needed to have checked off if you were meeting levels one through four, and four being the highest.

So when you were a junior and senior, you were working in levels three and four, and freshmen and sophomores were levels one and two. And you would do the assignment. You would often afterwards do a presentation in front of your peers. And then they would check off if you were meeting the rubric or if you have not met it. Then afterwards, you did a self-assessment over it and said, okay, did I show this to my peers?

And if I was going to do it again, how would I have changed it? So that was really important to me. That self-assessment piece. And then making sure that you could accurately show that to your peers and professors. That was another, like, really cool grading piece to me. And during that time, I learned so much about myself, so much about my peers because of their whole diversity at that school. And often it was first-generation college students attending the university.

And then Alverno got its name in the community because of this empowerment of women, how well they did on their first jobs. And they had this great networking opportunity and areas where you could do internships with different companies. So that was really valuable to me and just made me feel inspired and empowered after I left there. But after I left there, I thought, I want to go teach in a school like this.

I don't want to go back to a traditional public school. I want to be in a divergent school that is doing project-based learning and giving different assessments. And if you need to have a grade, well, the grade isn't the end goal. What you actually are learning and contributing to society is the end goal. So that kind of made me question, okay, why do I want to go to a regular public school and teach from a textbook or things?

And I think many educators and schools are now catching up to those ideas and building those practices into their school. But still, they're often missing key components that aren't happening.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think this would be a great time to kind of shift to your career as a teacher and particularly how you were particularly interested to talk about your experience with the Montessori approach and bridging that with that kind of science of reading, Orton-Gillingham stuff that is so important for dyslexic kids. Well, and I think just to add a personal note here, it's something that I've sort of wondered how can, I mean, I've thought of it more broadly, like in Waldorf too and all these different approaches, but when there are different approaches and then they are quite specific themselves, I haven't even thought that it's possible to bridge them.

So I'm really curious to hear your perspective. Yeah. So first of all, Dr. Maria Montessori was, lived from 1870 to 1952, right? So during her time, she was one of the first physicians in Italy, which I think that background of observation that she had and her scientific thinking really helped drive and create for her Montessori method for children and learning. She was one of the first people that understood the multi-sensory aspect of teaching reading.

And she had these things called the sandpaper letters. Now you see so many places using sandpaper letters, but she was one of the people that started this whole multi-sensory movement. And Grace Fernald and Helen Keller also were in that time frame that were exploring multi-sensory ways of teaching, right? Because Helen Keller learned to speak by the vibrations, feeling vibrations on people's bodies, on their throat, to learn to speak. And I just think that's amazing that many of these people overlapped and were talking about similar things.

And this was in the 1920s, 1930s. And Maria Montessori was, I think her method grew exponentially because unfortunately it was during World War II and Mussolini was like, we need you to leave Italy because you're too advanced in your thinking and you're spreading your message and people are resonating with it. And we don't want that here. So then she had to go to the Netherlands. She went to India, right? And that helps spread her Montessori method in so many ways.

But let me, sorry, that's a tangent. That's all right. I hadn't heard all that. I think that's really interesting as background though, because it is relevant, right? Because of unique approaches and all of it. Yeah. All of it. So back to Montessori. Montessori is this great thing, just like Orton-Gillingham. You always start from concrete to abstract. So when you're teaching in a concrete manner, you're giving the child something physical or something to do.

And that also engages in a multi-sensory manner of how the child is learning without even the child understanding it. And I think if we go back to, even when we talk to babies, we are always stretching out sounds. We're stretching out words. We're singing songs. We are playing hand clapping games. People don't understand. But you are constantly, even when you get older, to when I studied Montessori and dementia care, there is this bridge of multi-sensory applications that are happening in your daily life that we just do automatically now.

But when you are a young child, you are explicitly being taught this and you don't even realize it. And that's the bridge between Montessori and Orton-Gillingham. And when I did my Orton-Gillingham training at Massachusetts General Hospital, they constantly were saying, okay, you need to do this simultaneously. So let's say you were doing spelling. When you are doing a spelling word, you are saying, so let's say I'm writing the word cat, you are saying cat, and then you write with your pencil, C-A-T, cat.

And you have to do it at the same time so you're physically doing it and hearing it. So that's using your auditory, visual, and tactile. You have three components to doing that one word and hearing and just locking it into your long-term memory. So if you need to bring up something quickly and automatic, you could remember to do it using SOS, the simultaneous oral spelling, or doing a hand motion, or when you're dancing and learning a combination at first.

Maybe you say and do the dance combination at the same time so it gets locked into your long-term memory. So after a while, when you hear the music, you just automatically know how to do that routine. So that's the beauty of Montessori and Orton-Gillingham. They make sure that they're using systematic, sequential, structured, and it's accumulating off of each other, right? You're not just doing one thing at a time. So it sounds like you think they're really complementary, the two approaches.

Yes. So now that we have this science of reading body, which is awesome because Dr. Samuel Orton was a neurologist, Maria Montessori was a doctor, and then Anna Gillingham that worked with Samuel Orton was a psychologist and educator. She made, like, with Betsy Stillman, this Gillingham manual, right, that I use to this day. I'm still, like, looking at the research and seeing, okay, how does this apply to Montessori? How does the science of reading and the brain mapping and the neuroscience apply to reading now today?

It just amazes me that all of these people in the early 1900s understood these things, and now we are embracing it and we can actually map it out in the brain and see where it's coming from now. It's just amazing to me. So this, what I'm trying to figure out right now in this master's class is my research question is, how does Montessori align with the science of reading, multisensory education, and orthographic mapping?

Seeing how the word is constructed and doing that in a multisensory way, too. So all of these things really complement each other and go together, but not enough teachers, even Montessori teachers, realize, okay, these are some scaffolding pieces. If a child isn't retaining the information and putting it in their long-term memory, these are some of the scaffolding pieces you can do and show the child to get that into their long-term memory and help them, like, be at that same level as their peers and hopefully faster.

So that's why I'm so excited about that. Yeah, that was exciting. I mean, I think that all sounds amazing. I guess, do you want to talk a little bit about sort of the current practices in Montessori education in terms of if, you know, if our listeners were to go out and look at, you know, find a Montessori school in their town, and obviously you are not familiar with every Montessori school in the country, but how sort of, I guess, what's your general sense of how good a place that would be for a dyslexic kid?

So, it depends on the school. You hit it on the head. But a parent should go in, if you're thinking about attending a Montessori school, you should go in, sit, and observe. See what kind of classroom, or if you don't know exactly what teacher, go in multiple classrooms and sit for five to ten minutes. You're going to get that information. You're going to see if there are, they are using Montessori math materials and language materials, which are all color-coded.

And no matter what Montessori school you go to, they're going to have those materials on the shelf. No matter, what Montessori school you go to, there's going to be a similar scope and sequence in how you teach reading and math and language and cultural studies. And the great thing about a Montessori school is those materials are consistent, no matter if you go to a school in Europe or if you go to a school in the United States.

They're going to have those concrete materials and the child will be able to write in a notebook things that are important to them. They're going to be learning consistent color coding for math materials. And they're going to see the units place, the tens place, and the thousands place all color-coded. And that will help them be grounded in just knowing certain math concepts. And color coding is so important because you can close your eyes after a while and see that color.

Like even with sight words. Like I always remembered my dolch or fry words in red. And even when I close my eyes today and I see the word once, I see it in red. And that's the great thing about Montessori is that it's color-coded. And that there's a visual component and often a tactile component. But often Montessori schools are lacking in, because it's part of their teacher education. It's not yet read all the scientific research about the brain development, which Maria Montessori did a great job, but she didn't have MRIs that we do today to help with this information.

But she was able to see, she observed students and their need for touching, feeling. And that's a hallmark of both Wharton-Gillingham and Montessori that could be strengthened in their approaching curriculum.

So I don't know if that answered the question, but. Yeah, well, I guess my only follow-up would be, are there any areas that you feel like a parent either could ask for or that you're hoping to just see brought even just a little more in of a piece? You know, because you were speaking about with Orton-Gillingham, you know, where you actually say, say the word and write the word. And, you know, would you want something like that brought in as well?

Yes, definitely. Saying and writing the word. So making sure that the teacher or even if the school has a literacy specialist in the school, sometimes they have a literacy coach. But if the literacy coach is using Wilson, which is an offshoot of Orton-Gillingham, right? If the person knows about Orton-Gillingham, there are these beautiful multicolored boxes in usually Montessori classrooms. It's color-coded in the same order as the rainbow. So they make sure it's the Waseka box, and it goes from basic phoneme, grapheme, sounds, symbol, association to reading complex sentences, words, paragraphs.

All of that is really important to notice and just asking, well, what do you do in this classroom that makes learning to read multisensory and asking them if there is that component? Just making sure that you're taking the time to talk to that teacher and seeing if that teacher feels educated enough in helping your neurodivergent learner. Yeah, I know that's very helpful. Yeah.

So, yeah, I was going to actually, unless there's anything you think of that you'd like to add on that piece, I was going to move along also to, because I know you have some ideas just more generally for dyslexic adults. You've started to cover some of that when you're speaking about the workplace already, you know, and kind of the sort of grander vision. Maybe perhaps we could call it more from the social justice perspective as you started to speak to earlier.

So, yeah, I know one thing, we could start here maybe, and then you can expand from there to anywhere you want to go. One thing that you've mentioned is how you, and we've talked about this before on this channel as well, you know, find that term neurodiverse really important and that movement towards thinking of things as neurodiversity as opposed to disability. Right, because there's nothing wrong with how a neurodivergent brain works.

So, I really don't like that term, reading disability, learning disability. That's such an outdated term, right? Because we all have these big, beautiful brains that make it so we want to learn, right? We are, that's just who we are as humans, right? We want to evolve, learn, and learn as much as we can. So, I really feel like that needs to change. Our society and our language needs to change in that way.

Sorry, I have written down some notes on this because it's really important to me. Please, go ahead and use them. That way you can address it, you know, just the way you'd like, which I think will be important for everyone to hear. Okay. So, I really feel like society should shift towards using the term neurodiverse instead of a disability because just the language and reverence behind terms and words, I think, really seep into someone who is neurodiverse and how they think about themselves.

And I don't think I have a disability. I always feel like I have abilities and great things to share. It's important to recognize and celebrate the natural variations in everyone's brain because we all have these human cognitive brains. We're thinking, we're learning at all times. And this promotes a more inclusive way of thinking and valuing our different ways of thinking and processing information rather than viewing them as deficits. And that's really important to me.

Let's not view things as deficits. Let's make sure that we are always thinking in positive ways and terms. And then the next social justice piece I think we need to bring towards dyslexia is in our workplace. And despite many strengths and talents, individuals with dyslexia often face unnecessary barriers such as that paper ceiling, right? If you don't have a bachelor's degree, when you go to apply for jobs, sometimes you're not even brought into the interview process.

And I think that's wrong because many people are out there that might not have bachelor's degrees because number one, they don't have the time. They don't have the money or someone that might help them sit down and go through that paperwork either for financial aid or filling out that form because those forms are daunting. And when you get to a certain app, sometimes application, sometimes you think, oh my gosh, do I really want to fill all this out before even getting in for a job?

No, I wish someone would streamline some of those things. So, and they might encounter discrimination at work. Sometimes it's very hard to see how discrimination is happening or actually pinpoint it, but there might be discrimination happening and we can't always prove or deny what's going on. By providing a workplace accommodations and raising awareness and creating a inclusive workplace would be helpful within cultures of workplace and in society. We can empower these individuals who are dyslexic to fully contribute their unique skills and perspectives.

I think that often individuals that might be dyslexic might be not willing to come out and forthright and say, listen, I'm dyslexic, even in the hiring process. When I've said I'm dyslexic to certain bosses, they don't always understand it or they don't say, well, do you need help? Would you like someone to proofread your progress report comments? How could we best help you so you're not burdened with things that might be really hard for you so you don't go through burnout?

Because dyslexia burnout is real. It can happen all through your life and you might have to take a hard reset, right? A couple of months ago, I thought, wow, am I feeling sad right now? Am I, what's going on here? I don't quite get it. And when I started working with this dyslexia life coach, she was like, did you ever think you might be experiencing dyslexia burnout right now? I was like, oh, yeah, I forgot about that.

That is true. So supporting neurodiversity in the workplace is both an ethical imperative and a strategic advantage in our increasingly complex world, right? I think if we brought dyslexic minds into the whole conversation about AI and how this could be helping them or helping employers, if I have to craft an email, I can put my typed letter that I previously typed into AI and say, can you help me with the tone?

Or can you help me with making sure this is grammatically correct? It does it. And then I don't have to waste that brain power on doing something that's going to take me three hours maybe to craft. And it took me a few minutes and then put it into AI and I feel comfortable with it. So just making sure that we're having those conversations and bringing dyslexics to the table is really important.

Have either one of you done the Richard Branson dyslexia U trainings? No, but I haven't seen it. Yeah, we're aware of it, but we haven't done it. Yeah. Do you recommend it? So I really like the videos and I loved how the videos made it in a multi-sensory way because you could have, they had the closed captioning underneath it while you were listening to the presenter speak. And they had phenomenal people.

It wasn't just artists. It wasn't just artists. Singers, things like that, or movie stars that they often highlight as being dyslexic because Richard Branson is none of those things, right? He had the Virgin Airlines and things like that. So I love the scope of the dyslexic individuals. And I'm sorry, I keep not saying the person and then dyslexia. I've done it throughout this entire presentation, but just know I always think the person comes first.

Okay. So they had those great things. Then you went on to take their test to see how you did through listening and digesting the information. The test made me so annoyed because I passed them and you can redo certain questions and get the correct score to pass. But they didn't read you the question, right? That they just had it in written form. And then you went through and did the multiple choice.

Well, the ones I kept getting wrong were double negatives, or I would not read the word not. I would skip over that not, and I would choose the thing that was right instead of the thing that was wrong, right? Every time I do these things during standardized tests, and I get so annoyed by myself, you would think that I would be better at taking a test by now, but I'm still working through that process.

But that's the only fault I had with that coursework, but I enjoyed seeing and I enjoyed them promoting dyslexic thinking and the hashtag dyslexic thinking on LinkedIn now. All of those are very empowering things that we need to promote more within our society. So, yes, and they could improve on their test format. Yes. Yeah. That's a lot of sense. Well, I'm wondering, I know you encourage people connecting, including with you. If you have any final words you want to offer us, but also just, yeah, like how can people get a hold of you?

We can always put that in the description box as well. Sure. They can get a hold of me at, on Instagram, if they like that, as worldly dyslexic, because I like to travel and take pictures. So I often put things there so they can direct message me there, or they can find me on LinkedIn as Rebecca Hamill. Perfect. Thank you. This has been so great. I just, I love hearing your perspective, you know, partly influenced by your own journey, of course.

And then just like, I love, I love these interviews. A lot of our ones lately, you know, it's important to talk about challenges too, but that have been so hopeful for, yes, we can integrate this. Yes, this is the next horizon. You know, I think that's so important and helpful to have that feeling, especially, you know, for, as we're out there and in the challenges, it's like helpful to hear about that.

Because sometimes when you're in the weeds of the IEPs and all that, it can not feel that way. It's daunting, isn't it?

All right. Well, thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you so much.