Unleashing Lynchpin Innovators

[Music]

what if

many of our greatest minds who have a

unique superpower for linchpin

innovations

spanning many fields are today

wasting away behind bars

and what if one of the main

culprits were our very schools

who are today ignoring the science of

reading

and are therefore preparing the next

generation of

children with this unique superpower of

innovation

for a life of shame and incarceration

dr maya angelou said that the

elimination

of illiteracy is as serious an issue to

our history

as the abolition of slavery

many years ago while living in thailand

i heard the most beautiful proverb

that said a heart can only be one with

another heart

i offer mine my courage

was not truly measured by the intense

confusion

and rage i had when a grown man burned a

cigarette on my knee when i was just

six years old no

my courage was not measured

the day that i had to throw a butcher

knife at my mother’s boyfriend to

protect her from being hurt by him

no the day by which all days

would test my bravery was a day in first

grade

when my teacher mrs wilson with her red

bouffant hair

and freckles dotted across her cheeks

told us all to get out a piece of paper

and write one to ten to prepare for a

spelling test

for starters not clearly understanding

her directions i i numbered my paper

laterally side by side instead of

horizontally

as one would do to prepare for a

spelling test with my numbers and my

letters all very backwards

two common features of dyslexia

but my teacher mrs wilson was not

trained to see it

and when she began to walk around and

check all of our work she finally

approached me

and she looked at my paper and with a

tone

of disgust and a scowl on her face that

i can still see in my mind

our eyes met and she said are you stupid

not another one of you

and mrs wilson’s words came true

i could not learn to read as the other

kids

no matter how hard i tried year after

year after year

even in special education classrooms

so it continues in our schools with many

of our dyslexic children who go

unscreened and undiagnosed

therefore never receiving even the

possibility

of proper reading remediation

brene brown says that stories are data

with a soul

about one in five of us

have dyslexia it is a neurobiological

difference of the brain

that affects reading and other areas of

learning

it doesn’t go away it is not corrected

by glasses

but the real tragedy here the real story

is that among those who have dyslexia 65

of us never graduate from high school

and half of the youth in drug and

alcohol rehabilitation programs

have dyslexia and 60

and some research shows it could be up

to 70 of youth and corrections

have dyslexia we know where too many of

these children end up

a study out of texas revealed that 80 of

their whole prison population were

functionally illiterate but watch this

they screened one prison in particular

just for dyslexia

almost half of the whole prison had it

is that a fluke or would we find similar

numbers to all those incarcerated

and is it any doubt as to why

the vast majority of suicide notes

almost 90 percent

have dyslexic type spellings on them

the data is compelling

the first benchmark of intelligence is

reading and when that becomes a space

of systemic despair the emotional

consequences

often result in a lifetime of shame

gershon kaufman a psychologist and shame

researcher

said that people who cannot read or

cannot read well

experience the same levels of shame as

those

who’ve engaged in incest

but allow me to frame it in a different

way i was i was about nine

my father bought a brand new computer

and a small desk and as soon as he

set it all up he said chas do not play

by the computer as he headed to work the

next day i walked straight into the

computer room to play on that fun new

spinning chair

my arms are flailing resulting in me

clobbering the little desk in the

monitor until it came crashing down on

the floor

hours later he would return home from

work and now he’s sitting in that

computer room

and i’m sitting on an old ugly brown

couch

with my clammy hands looking at my feet

now whoever raised you probably had a

special name for you

perhaps your name is sarah but your

mother called you sweetie

my dad used to call me

kiddo and i’m on the couch

and i hear those final footsteps walk

out to me now i’m looking at his feet

and my feet

do you know what my dad did to me

he picked me up and held me tight

and said don’t worry about it kiddo

i can buy another computer

what does that story have to do with

dyslexia

absolutely everything what is proven by

the shame researchers

you know perhaps intuitively you cannot

reach any potential in hiding

it’s a safe space or a grace in real

time

plus bravery that removes shame and

our current school systems have sent

and are sending millions yes

millions of our children into a lifetime

of shame

and hiding by not teaching them to read

the way they learn

this epidemic is a mass production of

non-readers

and low achievers and the economics data

revealed the filthy truth

that is that we are more willing to

spend money to put illiterate americans

in prison

than we are teaching children to read

the way they learn

and what is most disturbing of all of

this is that for many decades there has

been research-based curriculum that can

move

almost all dyslexic children forward in

their reading

most dynamic called the now program by

dr tim

developed by dr tim conway but schools

refused to use it

due to old or outdated policies and with

little to no mandatory training

on dyslexia in the teacher accreditation

process who can blame the teachers

you see it’s not that children are

suffering from dyslexia

no it’s that teachers are suffering from

this teacher

as a leader in the field likes to put it

and there are very expensive

private learning centers in every major

city that have a virtual hundred percent

success rate in remediating children

with dyslexia using a research-based

multi-sensory method

these methods and dr conway’s must be

used in the public schools

now children are suffering while adults

are fumbling and deciding what to do and

and we should not be shocked to find

that among

our communities of color children with

learning disabilities

experience much higher rates of school

disciplinary action

and even higher rates of school dropout

who in our society is suffering from

extreme

disproportionate incarceration rates you

know the answer

there’s simply a deep relationship to

getting your child’s reading needs met

and your income george bush the first

was right when he said

that reading is the new civil right

because if you cannot read you cannot be

educated if you cannot be educated

you will not succeed

how many schools are really prepping

kids for a lifetime of shame

crime and yes incarceration

reading is the new civil right and

dyslexia needs to be

intertwined with our national

conversations on race

inequality in the school to prison

pipeline

and what’s so peculiar is that schools

screen for hearing problems

they screen for vision problems they

screen for lice

but they don’t screen for dyslexia an

issue that affects

one about one in five kids

how many children have been passed

through the system

unscreened undiagnosed past as

behaviorally untreatable

believing that they are not smart

unfit for a dream when one of the main

pieces in this equation that’s not smart

are the policies on dyslexia that are in

place

and the belief by any teacher parent or

principal

that would suggest that dyslexia is only

a weakness maybe it’s our very beliefs

that need to change because dyslexia

can be a superpower

now when you see me do you see a man

with

originality or do you see a man with a

disability

according to a study out of the uk 97

percent of people see dyslexia to be

purely a disability

when there is no correlation to iq and

dr sally shaywitz

a leader in the field out of yale says

that it’s actually like an island of

weakness and a sea of strengths

let us focus just on innovation our

wheelhouse is

out of the box thinking because we

ourselves were never in the box

seeing things that neurotypicals often

cannot see

noticing connections and patterns which

often translates

to an uncanny ability to seeing outcomes

while having only partial data

i’ve heard some researchers refer to

this as fortune telling

this was the gifting of steve jobs henry

ford walt disney michael faraday the

scientists

who are all dyslexic in other words we

often have the genius of seeing the tree

in the seed

is that not the magic of living in

unseen possibilities

that we all covet we dyslexics

are responsible for the light bulb the

movie camera

flight the telephone the iphone

ikea instruction manuals

the the general theory of relativity and

many more iconic inventions but my

favorite

is mickey mouse now that’s

what empowered dyslexic can do now does

every single dyslexic child have the

aptitude for such levels of innovation

absolutely not but does every single

dyslexic child have immense potential

for much higher levels of success than

we ever give them

opportunity today absolutely yes because

on that same side of the coin

we dyslexics are the lynch pin

innovators of history and all evidence

suggests that those innovators genius

were not in spite of their dyslexia but

because of it

because dyslexia can be a superpower

now imagine if my teacher mrs wilson was

trained

and understood what dyslexia was and

when she saw my paper

she would have said oh chaz you’re going

to have to work so hard

but there’s gifts and greatness in you

imagine if i and the millions of other

dyslexic children were exposed to our

strengths

as early as formal education began

and we’re taught to read wow

everything right in the world began with

a single person’s idea

that’s why we’re here imagine if the one

who could unlock the mysteries of global

warming definitively

for both sides

is sitting behind bars imagine if the

one who would

find a cure to cancer is serving a life

sentence

imagine if the one who would write a

book that would become a talisman

for millions is sitting in a cell in

isolation

with no pen

each of us must tell our story to

complete our journey

but what is wound in this woundedness

when it begins to target certain groups

over others

do we not call that discrimination or

oppression

but we are talking about a category of

people

children no less who are systematically

told

that their story doesn’t matter that

their ability

is a disability and that recovery is not

possible

my hope is to put a new and different

image in your mind of oppression

one that is affecting all of our schools

your life

and the future innovations that will

heal our world

this is a repression of innovators of

brilliant

children incarcerated and the tragedy of

wasted talent

and one of the keys is this and we say

it dyslexia

all the time that if a child cannot

learn to read the way we teach

it’s time we teach the child to read the

way they learn

some would ask what about me

all i can tell you is that one day

somebody showed me a grace in my reading

my dad would sit with me for hours

letting me labor through books well

below my grade level

until one day many years later i caught

up read my first book

cover to cover with true comprehension

in seventh grade i was blessed

my dyslexic dad had the genius

to see the tree and the seed

and since then the kindness of another

mentor

had been paying it forward i spent years

overseas

loving the poorest of the poor doing

abolitionist work in asia

serving muslim immigrants in europe and

working in special education classrooms

but most recently i founded a non-profit

that helps children with learning

differences

find new narratives about themselves

because dyslexia can be a superpower

and my gift of innovation is with words

i paint those words on the hearts of men

women and children

but today i am talking

to you listen

what shame are you on the cusp

of breaking out of don’t worry about it

kiddo

there’s a tree in the seed thank you

you