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