Overcoming EPIC Learning Challenges: From Struggles To Success With Lois Letchford

Does your child struggle to learn? You are not alone on the path toward overcoming epic learning challenges! In this episode, Lois Letchford, the author of Reversed: A Memoir, reveals how her young son, despite his obvious potential, struggled in first grade. Labeled with a low IQ, Lois’ son faced constant discouragement, but she refused to give up. We also hear from host Zander Sprague, who shares his experience overcoming learning challenges. They highlight the importance of identifying learning styles, fostering curiosity, and celebrating each child’s unique brilliance. Join us as we explore their epic path to academic success.

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Overcoming EPIC Learning Challenges: From Struggles To Success With Lois Letchford

In this episode, I am so honored to be joined by Lois Letchford. Lois, tell us who you are and what you do. Thanks, Zander, for having me here. I am Lois Letchford. I’m an author, an educator, and a speaker. My book is Reversed: A Memoir, which tells the total journey of what happens when a son fails first grade.

Lois And Her Son’s Journey

I have you on for a few reasons. Your story is interesting and there’s a little that ties into me too. I’m always about, “Let me find some connection.” I am fascinated to hear about you and your son’s journey. It was 1994 when my son first went to school, and I knew there was a problem. I knew he was slow with language and he was afraid to go to school. On day one of school, we gave him a stick insect. We found one in the garden. We put it in a little box, put holes in it, and we sent him to school. He came home and I asked, “Did your teacher get to see it?” He just shook his head. On day six, I go to the teacher and say, “How’s he getting on?” She throws up her hands and says, “I don’t know how I’m going to teach him this year. We can’t do anything. He just stares into space all day.” What I knew as a mother was that he wet his pants and he bit his fingernails. He stared into space all day. At the end of that year, you do the normal thing. You get them tested. That’s the standard approach. The testing re reveals that he can read ten words. He has no strength and he has a low IQ. That’s a basket no one ever wants to be in. That IQ test can stay with a child in many unconscious ways for a long period of time.     My husband is a professor and he had the opportunity to take study leave in Oxford, England in the second half of 1995. We all go. I have three sons. One is 9.5, Nicholas is turning 7, and the youngest is 3. I send the eldest to school. I asked Nicholas if he wanted to go to school and his white face dropped to nothing to ghost-like. I said, “We’ll work at home.” The youngest, I sent to kindergarten. I have some opportunities to work with Nicholas one-on-one. The youngest is only in kindergarten three days a week but my parents-in-law would visit for a time so I have some support in childcare. I started working with him on a series of books called Success for All with single words on a page with no pictures. He gets to the end of the page, goes back to the first word, and has no clue what it is. My mother-in-law was with me and she said, “Lois, put away what’s not working and make learning fun.” That was my first step. “What can he do?” I looked at what he could do. He can rhyme words and he’s good at seeing patterns.

Put away what’s not working and make learning fun.

I write one little poem and take it to him the next day. Instead of his shoulders being up, he relaxes because I read it to him. He laughs. We say it again and again and again and again. What’s interesting here from the parent’s point of view is Nicholas is learning at this slope and my mind is going a million miles per hour trying to take one step at a time or one minute at a time with him. The poem worked and because one worked, I did the next. I wrote the next and the next. Every single day, these tiny steps, Nicholas is taking. One step forward one day at a time. My mind is continuing to go 100 miles an hour. Every day, I’m doing the writing because I can’t find things at his level that he’ll read easily. I write a poem about Captain Cook. He was the last of the great explorers. Captain Cook had a notion that there was a gap in the map of the great big ocean. He took a look without the help of any book hoping to find a quiet little nook. The beauty of poetry for children who struggle is that it’s very simple. The words are simple. The thoughts are simple. The ideas and what’s going on behind it are huge. Nicholas and I could walk with Captain Cook and talk without anything else. Also, because we are in Oxford, England at the time, you can go and see the things that we’re reading about. While we are doing this, Nicholas says to me, “Can I see Captain Cook’s original maps?” With that, my thinking is, “This child doesn’t have a low IQ.” That question doesn’t come from a child with a low IQ. He said to me, “Who came before Captain Cook.” I’m smarty pants here, “That’s Christopher Columbus.” He says to me, “Who came before Columbus?” Erik the Red was a Viking, and they think that he was one of the first people to hit the North American continent and Europe. I’m a History major, so I have a freakish memory. There’s one before that, and the problem with the Viking is that he didn’t leave records. That is true. That left a gap for Columbus to take credit because Columbus went there, came back, and recorded it. That’s what I’m teaching Nicholas, because when you study Columbus, do you want me to ask you questions or tell you? I don’t know. I’m a little nervous now. I feel like I’m having a test. I could search the web. What if I failed? Do I not get recess? How old was Columbus’s map when he set sail in 1492? What was his latest map? I don’t know. That’s a great answer. I love it. That’s one. The second was an incident in 1442 that changed the world very much like going from books to computers. What was that one? Do you know? It’s exactly the same impact as computers have now. I would say there was some kind of an astrological something that the world was round. They knew that a long time ago. It was printing, the Gutenberg Printing Press. We went to the British Museum and it had a map. 1442 I think is the date that Gutenberg started. Over the ten years that followed, it exploded. There were printing presses in every little town. Also, because they were looking for things to print, they found a map that was available in the Middle East. It was a Ptolemy map. He lived from 250 AD or around that time in Alexandria, Egypt. He was a polymath and he drew the world’s first map. In 350 AD, there was a guy called Eratosthenes who estimated the circumference of the world. He estimated it saying, “The world is like a grapefruit and every piece is like a segment so we measured a segment.” He said, “This is how big the world is.” He got it right. Eratosthenes got it right. Ptolemy comes along and says, “No, the world’s not that big. The world is as big as Europe and Asia. That’s it.” We drew the round map of Europe and Asia and left out America. When Columbus did his studies, this is the map that’s available. He says, “It’s not going to take me very long to go across the Atlantic Ocean.” He gets there and he bumps into this continent. It’s what is now known as America. This took us on a different journey. It was this study that I did with my son Nicholas because we go to the Bodleian Library in Oxford and say, “Where would we see a Ptolemy map?” We’re in the gift shop. The lady behind the counter picks up a book and says, “This is a book of Ptolemy maps. It’ll be £5, please.” My son Nicholas, who has this supposed low IQ, is drooling over the maps of Ptolemy. That’s the starting point and where I connect with you is how overwhelming this journey was with Nicholas because I’m writing and thinking. One day we’re on the bus and I’m telling my husband about what we are doing and he says to me, “Lois, you do have three sons.” I, at this time, expected the other two to survive. “Get on with it kid because I am flat out with this one.” It was overwhelming.  

Xander’s Story

I tie in that as much, but I was in school. I grew up outside of Boston. I was in second grade. I was just starting and my mom and dad got a note from the teacher that says, “Zander can’t read.” My mom’s like, “But it says he’s a fine young reader.” I read books and parsed them together. That began years and years of lots of work on my part. Tutors and stuff to help me be up to speed. I read slowly. I hate writing. Back in the day when we all had to hand write out stuff, my handwriting wasn’t good and I too went and got tested. They came out and said, “Your son is not retarded.” My mom’s like, “I didn’t think he was. I just wanted to know if there was a learning challenge.” I worked hard through college. A friend of mine in college said, “I don’t know why you don’t have As, Zander. You work so hard.” In my senior year, the best class I ever took, Lois was a class where I got to give a two-hour lecture. I look back and say, “It’s not that I didn’t know the stuff, but I’m a talker and not a typer.” If I’d been able to take my exams as oral exams, I probably would’ve had As or higher grades than I had. I did fine, but I probably would’ve had higher grades. I had people, as a freshman in college, juniors and seniors wanting to come study with me in history classes I was taking because I knew the stuff. It was just when I got into the exam, I hated writing so much that I wanted to get it over with and I couldn’t fully expand upon how I did that. I’ve written three books, which honestly, Lois, if you told me that in high school, I would’ve said that you’ve been drinking or it’s crazy. I did it because I wrote them how I work, which is to dictate to them to have something to work. I obviously can write. I’ve got a master’s degree. I can write. I just don’t like it as much and if I can talk, I’d much prefer to talk. That’s how when you’re telling your story, I’m like, “Yeah, I get that.” I spent years working hard and I look back and say, “Work smarter, not harder.” Had I been given the opportunity to say, “Writing isn’t his thing, but he can demonstrate.” I went to a school where we had to do oral presentations. It was a competition. I would do fairly well in those. Why? It was because I got to talk and I knew the stuff. I was enthusiastic and I could present. Also, you can engage an audience. That’s why I’m a podcast host and a motivational speaker because that is where my juice is. Continue with your journey here. I can connect to you. I went to school in the 60s and grew up reading words. I couldn’t comprehend and no one identified it. I worked incredibly hard. Listening to an oral lecture on anatomy or physiology, which is where I didn’t have the background was a total disaster. I’ve got a question for you. What’s your memory of tutoring? I’ll say this. It was a trail of tears. I cried a lot. When I was in fifth grade, I went to a new school. It was a great school. I love it. I still support it but I went from having two hours of homework a week to having two hours of homework a night. That first year, my parents referred to that as the year of tears because I cried a lot because it was so hard and I didn’t know how to study. I had great tutors who along the way helped me to be organized. They gave me things that honestly when I get stressed, people will see me doing this. I would think about my homework like Math, History, Science, and English. I was counting out what I had to do. Also, because of that experience Lois, I’m a licensed mental health professional. When I was doing my internship, I was working in a school-based thing with middle school and high school, in which a lot of my students had academic issues. Also, because of my own experience, the best way to come up with something, I had this thing that I would share with them and their parents is to say that structure is our friend and structure helps us feel comfortable with stuff. What I wanted them to do, and some of my clients did it and discovered that the homework got easier because I would say, “Start off with your least favorite subject and get it first and go to your most favorite subject.” Why? There are a couple of reasons. I know you’re with me, but I’m still going to share the thing that’s hardest, do it when you have the most energy. It is human nature to avoid the things that are unpleasant. However, if we work our way towards the thing that we like most, by the time we get there, that’s the thing that isn’t as hard. It comes naturally. You’re like, “If you love reading, you leave English because you got to read whatever book, it’s not as hard even though you don’t have as much energy.” The other thing is to look at the time that you have and map out how long you think, “Math will take me 45 minutes. I think my language will take me half an hour.” Put in breaks. We all have smartphones. All of my students had smartphones. I go, “There’s a timer on that. I bet you watch YouTube, TikTok, or whatever.” “Yes.” Put a timer and take a break for ten minutes. When that timer goes off, you get back to studying. Otherwise, you found an hour went by or they would say how tired they were. I’m like, “What time did you start homework?” I don’t go to bed until 1:30 in the morning, but I have to be up at 6:00 and I’m so tired. I’m like, “What time do you start homework?” “Probably 10:00.” You got out of school at 3:00. What did you do for seven hours? Some of them were athletes so I’m not coming down on them. They’re like, “I don’t get home until 8:00. I got to eat some breakfast or some dinner. I totally get it if you have a reason. Some had jobs but if you’re like, “I don’t know. I hung out with my friends. I watched YouTube. I played video games.” Don’t do that. Get all of your stuff done. You’re still going to have that time. It just comes later in the day and you can go to bed at 10:00. I know you’re nodding. You’re like, “Yeah, I’m right there with you,” but that was my own experience. That strict adherence to structure is what helped me get through it and helped me plan out and have breaks. Not just say, “I can’t sit down.” No one can sit down, Lois, and do three hours of homework straight on five subjects. You just can’t. I got so much to say and it’s where we want to take this conversation. You’re a mental health professional and that’s where I want to take this conversation because the story is Nicholas eventually graduates. He goes to a university. He took five and a half years to graduate with two honors degrees. He has an honors degree in Mathematics and an honors degree in Engineering. He also got a scholarship to do a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Oxford University.

Dealing With The Trauma

There’s a YouTube video clip that was taken on the day he graduated and it’s phenomenal because you see the growth. When he graduates, I have an opportunity to sit down and just chat with him. Now, you know this boy is confident. He’s articulate. He knows what’s going on in the world and I say to him, “Nicholas, can you tell me what happened in first grade?” My son cried and not a word came out of his mouth. He sat and his tongue went round and round. It was the first time I recognized the trauma that had occurred in first grade. What I didn’t tell you and what I forgot to tell you was the teacher shouted at him every single day that year. No teacher on that staff, no principal, and no administrator called me up and said, “There’s a problem here,” and it’s something that trauma remains unless we deal with it. I, as a parent, failed to help my son deal with it.     I, as a parent, failed to help my oldest and youngest child deal with a brother who was different. I didn’t have the resources. YouTube wasn’t available. The internet wasn’t available to get it and did I have the brain power to cope with it? Almost, we have the opposite problem. We are inundated with, “I can do it,” and how do you then choose? There is too much information. The other thing that I find, not only for myself but with people that I work with and talk to all the time, which is all too often, especially when it comes to parenting. For some reason, as great as we are as parents, we don’t think to ask, “I am stuck here. Ask our friends.” It’s because what I find is in a business thing, I may be trying to solve something and it finally dawns on my marble head here that I should put a question out and ask my friends. Someone inevitably has the answer that was a five-minute solution that I just wasted two hours trying to solve. I said to myself, “Why didn’t I ask?” Is it ego that as a parent you’re like, “I should know. I’m a parent,” but no. I’ve got two daughters and I don’t know everything. I don’t know what the right answer is. Frankly, I find every time I figure out where they are and how to help them, they go ahead and change. They started as babies. The moment you figured out why they were colicky at 6:00 at night, they go and change. You then are like, “I just spent three weeks trying to figure that one out and now, that’s out the window. Thanks a lot.” It’s a continuous challenge, isn’t it? Can I take the story one step further? Absolutely. I’m fascinated. After he cried I thought, “I can’t help him with this now,” and he eventually did get a therapist. He worked through that but I said, “Tell me what you remember about learning with me in Oxford.” Instead of crying, he’s laughing. He named the poems that I had written many years earlier and he said, “Learning about Captain Cook taught me to love learning and I never want to stop learning.” He then said, “You wrote a poem about a witch’s spell.” I said, “I did, Nicholas.” He was so calm and now he is laughing. He said, “I don’t remember what the poem was. We wrote the ingredients for the witch’s spell,” and now he’s laughing like a seven-year-old. The power of what I did many years earlier remained with him. When we go to literacy, what do we do? We give kids letters and sounds and we fail to look at, “Have I engaged the child or have I created an active learner,” which are the critical conditions of learning anything. Also, my own experience was there were subjects that I had to take in school that I had to battle my way through. I had to get through geometry. I took it twice. It never made sense to me. I was able to pass and then there were the other subjects that fascinated me so much. I was so engaged with it. I shared that with my daughters. I said, “There are the classes that you’re going to take that you literally have to slog your way through it. I’m sorry but that’s just the way that it is but there are the other things that it’s almost like answers are written on the page for you. You get it. I can’t tell you what it is, but there are subjects that you will take that fascinate you and you’re like, ‘I am thirsty for more knowledge on that.’” That’s how you start to figure out what you are interested in studying in university and if you go on to advanced degrees. I didn’t start my Master’s until I was 45. Why? It was because I didn’t need that degree and I was not about to spend time to get a degree in Medieval Literature to say I have a Master’s of Medieval Literature that I was never ever going to use. To me, education is so powerful, but you should be using it because it’s helping to further you and not just to have letters after your name or whatever.

The Way We Teach Impacts How Our Students Learn

I think we forget or we don’t know the way we teach impacts the way how students learn. To come up with a subject like Geometry, which was one of Nicholas’s favorites. The more physical hands-on stuff that we can do.

The way we teach impacts the way students learn.

Everyone is a different learner and as a parent, we can try and suss out what kind of a learner our kid is. For you, an oral lecture might as well have been in Greek. If it’s anatomy, some of it was, but that’s not the point. This is where I say where it changed because I did Anatomy the second time and then the next professor I brought in a box of bones. It was transformative learning for me. “I can do this.” He pointed them out. He’s touching them. Now, you got it. Also, understanding and being honest as a parent. The strengths and weaknesses of our children, where they’re strong. Hope that we can encourage that and have that be the part that they’re focusing on. They sit there and say, “Here’s how I learned. Here’s how I need to do it.” Also, to be their own advocates.

Understanding our children’s strengths and being honest with them about where they excel allows us to encourage them to focus on and develop those strengths.

I’ll give you an example. My older daughter was born with a partial unilateral hearing loss. She doesn’t hear as well out of her right ear. We knew this from birth. You would never know. She doesn’t have any speech impediment, but in school, from first grade on, she advocated for herself, which I’m very proud of. We had preferential treatment for her. We had what they call a 504, which is school-based. It’s not a whole individual educational plan because she didn’t qualify. She didn’t need that. They had an FM system. In first grade, we had this problem where the teacher was doing a spelling test and walking around the room and she was missing words. The teacher’s like, “I don’t get it. She seems so good.” My then-wife and I asked this question. We said, “Are you standing or are you walking around the room?” He goes, “I’m walking around the room.” We’re like, “It’s because Addie can’t hear when you’re on her right side. She can’t hear you. She can’t triangulate the sound.” It’s not that she doesn’t know how to spell the word. We know she knows how to spell the word. It’s just that she can’t hear some of these sounds so she’s guessing. However, she was great because she would say, “No, you need to be on my left side,” or, “I need some accommodation here.” They were FM systems and she had a hearing aid just in one ear and she’d put a little thing on and it would help amplify the sound in the classroom so that she could hear the teacher. The whole point is we can’t sit in class with our kids. If we make them confident in themselves, there is a thing I talk about in my book, which I call the 97/3 Rule, which is 97% of your day is good and up to 3% isn’t so good. Some days it is bigger and bad things happen. I get that but we seem to forget the 97% and focus on the 3%. It comes back to what I was saying. I came up with this when I was doing my internship where a lot of my clients had academic challenges. I’d asked them their least favorite subject. Lots of them said Math. I’d sit there and say, “Yeah, I agree with you. Math was my least favorite.” I said, “How would you feel if you got a 97 on your next test?” “I’d be so excited. My parents would be proud. I’d be telling everyone. I go, “Absolutely. Would you be complaining about the three points you didn’t get?” “Are you crazy? I got a 97.” I’m like, “There’s so much good going on in your day and you’re ignoring it and only complaining about 3% that didn’t go, “So and so didn’t talk to me,” or whatever. I said, “But there’s so much that you got right. Why are you forgetting?” With our kids who have learning challenges, let’s keep reminding them of all the success that they aren’t having because unfortunately the rest of the world tells them all the stuff and says, “Here’s what. You’re not the teachers.” I’m not coming down on teachers. I have friends who are teachers. They do a phenomenal job with what they’re given but the message is, “You didn’t get this right,” but what did I get right? Imagine if our kid said, “But what did I get right, Teacher.”

With kids who have learning challenges, let’s constantly remind them about their successes because, unfortunately, the rest of the world will remind them of all their shortcomings.

Let’s focus on, “Yes, you’re right. It’s important to know what you didn’t get right so maybe you can get it right the next time.” Let’s face it. Certainly, as parents, our success rate is like a Hall of Fame baseball player. You get into the Hall of Fame in baseball if you have a lifetime batting average of 300. We could be Hall of Fame parents, Lois if we only got parenting right one-third of the time. It’s a tough gig and you don’t have the knowledge. There’s a balance because when I was parenting my children and I didn’t do well with 1 and 3, I didn’t put enough time into it. Now, within the other extreme, we were overwhelmed with information but at least we have access to the information now. We do, and like anything, you’re right. Now, that there’s so much information, which one works? Here’s the whole key to the thing. Failure is part of the journey. None of us, no matter what we’re doing is going to get it right 100% of the time. We simply are not. If we sit there and say, “I found a way not to do this.”

No matter what we’re doing, we’re not going to get it right 100% of the time. We simply are not.

I know as an entrepreneur I have spent thousands of dollars on great software tools that are supposed to help me do this or do that and they just weren’t the tool for me. It’s not that they aren’t good, they’re just not the right ones for me. To make it a lot more accessible for people because you and I are talking on this high level and stuff. When you go buy clothes, sometimes the same size jeans from one manufacturer to another fit differently. You find the type of jeans that fit you and those are the ones that you buy. They’re sneakers. I used to run a lot. New Balance are the ones that fit my feet best. It doesn’t matter how great Nike, Asics, and Brooks are. They just didn’t fit my foot right. No one argued with me. No one said, “Why aren’t you doing it?” They don’t fit. People get that. It all ties in together, doesn’t it? Yeah, it does. In your situation, just to value the child in the moment and to value all the children and not blame them so much. We can understand what our children are capable of but I think the important message is I love you when you do your best. It doesn’t matter what that grade is. If you’re capable of A work, then yes, I expect that you are going to do your best to get A work but if the best you can do is a C+ because that’s just the subject, then yeah. I’m going to love you whatever you get. If you’re trying your best. You’ve got to get that best bit out of the way because that was my problem. What I’m saying is understanding your son, there could be a subject, I was going to say Math, but he obviously has a PhD in Applied Mathematics so it was certainly not Math but there may be things that he is not as strong at. It’s writing. No, that’s not true. Writing’s fine. It’s the language component. He’s extreme. When he talks to you if he’s not on your wavelength and you’re right, these extremes. It’s a lifelong challenge for him. We all figure out the coping skills and stuff. Lois, can you believe that you and I have been talking for 45 minutes now? I want to talk to you more, but for our readers, I’m going to bring us to a close here. If people want to get your book or they want to get ahold of you, how is that possible? Amazon for my book is the easiest. I have a website, I am on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram are the easy bits. Lois, I want to thank you so much for taking the time. It has been a blast. I would even say epic. Thank you so much. It’s been delightful to be here and share our journeys together. I want to remind everyone to go to EpicBegins.com and check out all the information that I have available about creating your epic life. As always, I want to remind people that epic choices lead to the epic life that you want.

Important Links

• Lois Letchford
• Reversed: A Memoir
• Amazon – Reversed: A Memoir
• LinkedIn – Lois Letchford
• Facebook – Lois Letchford: Literacy Problem Solver
• Instagram – Lois Letchford

 

About Lois Letchford

Lois Letchford’s dyslexia came to light at the age of 39, when she faced teaching her son, Nicholas. Examining her reading failure caused her to adapt and change lessons. The results were dramatic. Lois qualified as a reading specialist to use her non-traditional background, multi-continental experience and passion to assist other failing students. Lois received teaching degrees in Australia, Texas and her master’s degree from SUNY, NY. Her teaching and learning have equipped her with a unique skill set and perspective. Reversed: A Memoir is her first book. In this story, she details her dyslexia and the journey of her son’s dramatic failure in first grade. She tells of the twist and turns that promoted her passion and her son’s dramatic academic turn-a-round – as in 2018, he received his PhD in Applied Mathematics from Oxford University.