The Dyslexia Professor: Why It's Not a Reading Problem — with Russell Van Brooklyn

Russell: What you need to understand about dyslexia is that it's not a reading problem. If you ask a dyslectic In their specialty, do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed but with little to no no organization? These answers yes. So what we need to do is

Sabine Kvenberg: My guest today, Russell Van Brooklyn, the dyslexia professor shifting daily reading frustrations into confident academic wins for students facing dyslexia. Welcome, Russell.

Russell: Thanks for having me.

Sabine Kvenberg: I can't wait to pick your brain. So you're also known as the dyslexia professor. So tell our audience, what does that mean? Who is Russell?

Russell: Well, what got most people is this is the last thing I was supposed to be doing with my life. All right. So what happened was it was the late nineties. I needed I wanted to figure out how laws were made, not some class I wanted to know. So I did this insanely crazy thing. I actually went to the New York State Assembly internship program where I was accepted, and I showed up and I said, Here's my neuropsychological evaluation. I have a first grade reading and writing ability, which means I can't do the internship. So it went up to the speaker's office. His name was Sheldon Silver, and his office said, We don't care what it costs. We're going to accommodate the living heck out of this kid. So they got a senior team together and they came up with an interesting solution. They literally pulled me out of the legislative office building, brought me over to the state capitol, which means I wasn't near my peers, so I'm like, I'm like no time, which is a big pr issue. And I walk into the Majority Leaders Program and Council's office that runs the assembly day to day. And I see why they did it. There are three administrative assistants that could help me take my cruddy writing so I can turn into things each week. They just had no idea what to do with an undergrad, which is, you know, answer the phone and go get the coffee sort of thing. So they treated me like a graduate student, which was a real internship. So it was fantastic. For the academic portion, they I gave hours long presentation to QA sessions instead of the big paper. So they wrapped all that up, recommended fifteen credits of A minus. Then that goes back to the Political Science Department of the State University of New York, Center of Buffalo, and this is where the wheels fell off. They looked at the insane accommodations the state assembly itself came up with and said, We don't like this. So we're lowering your grade from fifteen credits of A minus. Guess what they lowered it to?

Sabine Kvenberg: You tell us!

Russell: Fifteen credits of F.

Sabine Kvenberg: What?

Russell: They flunked me.

Sabine Kvenberg: Why?

Russell: Because the accommodations were incredibly incredibly outrageous. But it was the state government it's

Sabine Kvenberg: So tell us about that. What does it mean? What does it mean the accommodation?

Russell: Well, they I gave an oral presentation for hours instead of a normal paper.

Sabine Kvenberg: Mm-hmm.

Russell: I was given administrative assistance to help clear up all my writing. Anytime I had issues reading things, they read it to me. They got me a brand new computer. Okay. They gave me access to just a whole just a starting laundry list. And because of th those extraordinary accommodations, they fucked me. So it's still

Sabine Kvenberg: Mm.

Russell: on my record twenty nine years later. So at that point, I said, this was just remember where I was coming from. I was in the office that ran the place that normally is reserved for a grad student. Okay? I stayed nights, I stayed weekends, I like them, they like me. I was offered all of these out incredible positions because I could pick up the phone and talk to the people that ran the place. But I said, I'm gonna fix dyslexia. So I went to my professors, I said, where can I go to force myself to learn to read and write in grad school to help so I can teach other dyslectics? They said, Well, if you like politics and law, it's easy. Law school. So I went and I audited two law school classes where you read and write more than anybody. My second day in contracts, the professor calls on me. And what they do is they use the Socratic method because nobody knows what's going on the first week. You don't know the answer, which nobody does. They ask you questions to embarrass you publicly that you can't answer until you eventually adopt. That didn't happen to me. I didn't respond as the professor's as a student. I responded as the professor's equal. Understand what I'm saying. He was a professor longer than I was alive at that point. So he's going after me, I answer his questions, and then I go right back after him. Which he looked kind of perplexed. Then he's after me, I'm after him. We're going back to each other like crazy. We all know where both of us are going multiple steps ahead of time. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes. He throws up his arms, said Russell, you couldn't be any more correct. In the in in the interest of time, I gotta move on to the next case. I learned to read within a month. I learned to write within a couple of years. Then I go back to the New York State paper.

Sabine Kvenberg: So how, can I just ask you something? So how did you know all of that? Because it was like the first, yeah, the first few days, right?

Russell: it was the second day in contract, yes.

Sabine Kvenberg: So how did you know all those answers?

Russell: well, there's this funny thing about dyslexia. Let's just kind of go in and what's going on. This is the top book on dyslexia, overcome dyslexia by Dr. Sally Shaywitz from Yale. That's dyslexia. See how the back part of the gen ed brain has this massive neuroactivity?

Sabine Kvenberg: Okay.

Russell: See how the back part of the dyslectics has next to nothing? But the front part

Sabine Kvenberg: Yes. So.

Russell: of the dyslexic brain's about two and a half times overactive.

Sabine Kvenberg: Okay?

Russell: I did this for the first time, really, right here. It's word

Sabine Kvenberg: Okay.

Russell: analysis followed by articulation. Dyslectics do tremendous in grad school.

Sabine Kvenberg: So I have to say to our listeners who couldn't see that image here, it was an image of two brains and one was with dyslexia and it didn't have... Can you verbally explain it to someone because I can't so well, who is listening to this?

Russell: Sure. Yeah, let me explain what's going on. The back part of the dyslexic brain has like just nothing going on, essentially. The gen ed brain does tremendous amount of activity. I'm gonna really oversimplify neuroscience to drive them crazy, but essentially think of that as the kindergarten through first two years of college part of the brain. The front part of the brain is about two and a half times overactive. That's the grad school part of the brain. It deals with word analysis followed by articulation. So what happened? Is for the first time everything just organized and clarified. All right. And when you're here's the key thing I found out later: when a dyslectic is in their specialty, their area of extreme interest and ability, and we're asked not from a general to the specific, but a specific to the general, we do so much better. So everything just organized, and I could just go back and forth. It was like I'm playing with an equal. And Everybody's just looking at me like, what the heck? They never heard of anything like this. So then when you know, as I said, I learned to read within a month, I learned to write within a couple of years. The key thing is how I transferred that over. So I went back to the New York State Senate and I said, I found a solution for dyslexia. I want you to fund it. That got their interest. But when you want state funding, the pathway is extraordinary. So what happened? Is they said, go over to the New York State Education Department and you have to go through them. So I did. I said, the majority leader of the Senate sent me over here, like literally, his education aid. Now they have to take me seriously. So they said, Well, we want a New York State SUNY distinguished professor in psychology, their highest rank, to evaluate this. They said, if you don't get a good report back, you're done. So they said, Where is this out of? I said, Buffalo. So I go out to Buffalo, I'm thinking this is no big deal. There's two of them. in entire western New York. One just happened to be the professor that gave me the original valuation. Her name was Dr. Irene Holychka. And because she gave me that previous valuation, she knew it was a lot higher quality. So she went to her old department at Buffalo State College, got the most extreme test she could give me. It was twenty hours over three days. And what she said essentially was I I evaluated this kid a couple of years ago. He was reading and writing at the sixth grade level, I'm sorry, the six year old level like a first grader. Reconfirm that when he turns his system on, he's going from a part of the brain that doesn't work to one that does. His writing's now at the 70th percentile of veteran grad students. All right. And it's a light switch. So I brought that back to the state education department, and they're like, not expecting this. Then I had to go and connect it to a senior professor's research. There was one in Western New York that made any sense. His name was Dr. James Collins. He had a million half dollar grant from the U.S. Education Department, wrote a book called Strategies for Struggling Writers. It was supposed to take me years to get his approval. I did in under two weeks. Notice how I'm doing good in grad school. That's dyslexia. So then

Sabine Kvenberg: Mm-hmm.

Russell: I entered a university-wide competition, get fifteen thousand. We then test the st the pr the program on two students. They go from the zero percentile to the fiftieth to eighty fiftieth to seventieth percentile for the two of them, and if only transferred over. At that point. The local school district that I worked with, the Aver Park Central School District, right outside of Albany, New York, our state capital, said, we want this. At which point, after a further investigation, the Senate funded it. So what we did is my competition takes two years to become certified after college. Then she modified it. To meet her teaching standard, who she worked with. The kids were highly motivated, highly intelligent, juniors and seniors with dyslexia. They went from the middle school writing skills to the average range of entering graduate students, one class period for the school year, cost less than nine hundred bucks. Our success rate was 100%. Compared to Landmark College at the time, we were 3X as successful for less than 1% of the cost. And that's how I got started.

Sabine Kvenberg: Wow. Now, how did you figure that one out? How did you turn the switch, so to speak, from not being able to read to all of a sudden do it like in no time?

Russell: Okay, so you mean this is a book that turns most people dyslectic. most people can't read the first chapter on first paragraph of this book on post-war Japanese history, even though the guy won the polls in the National Book Award. I read it, it's very easy. What you need to understand about dyslexia is that it's not a reading problem. If you ask a dyslectic In their specialty, do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed but with little to no no organization? These answers yes. So what we need to do is force the dyslexic brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output. Let me kind of put that into English. I want you to yes, I I want

Sabine Kvenberg: Yes, thank you.

Russell: you to think if you were if Bill Gates hired you for three weeks to write a high school history paper, let's say what a 14-year-old would write, you are limited. To a university library, you can't ask any help. Here's the question. What effect did Martin Luther King's famous I Have a Dream Speech have on the American civil rights movement of the nineteen sixties? Could you then just go into the library, find the books, and write a basic paper that's at the high school level? Okay, that's because it's big picture, eventually going down to the details. But for a dyslexic, that's like grabbing fog.

Sabine Kvenberg: Mmm.

Russell: There's nothing to grab onto. We don't know what to do. So we gotta flip that. We gotta start off at a very specific point and then slowly go out. So we would ask what personally compelled Martin Luther King to want to give his famous speech? Well now that's a book. And we know what time the speech was. We go into that period and go, this is why he wanted to do it. That answer would get us another question, which would get us another answer, which would give us another question. That forces the dyslexic brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output. And the exact opposite of how most people think.

Sabine Kvenberg: Yeah, wow, that's interesting. That's very interesting. And especially nowadays, I believe more and more people or the younger people, they don't have the ability anymore to think because they just have to read something and write something down for their SATs and whatnot. But we are not being taught to think and reason in a way that rather than, we're just writing something or we're just asking AI about it. So what is your take on how the educational part is today and also specifically using AI and having AI as, I don't want to say competition, but as a tool that replaces so many things in the learning field?

Russell: Well, to be honest with you, just so people know, when AI came out, Chat GBT had his pro two hundred dollar a month pro plan in December of twenty four, I bought it that day. I'm

Sabine Kvenberg: Mm-hmm.

Russell: one of those people that does more than ten X the work you'd expect an educated person to do. Somebody else takes ten, twelve hours, I do it in less than one with AI. All right. So what I think is until I get students to write an advanced body paragraph, I don't want them going anywhere near AI. Not for

Sabine Kvenberg: Mm.

Russell: anything academic. So, my view of it is I want you to imagine an analogy. I was a math student, pretty good one in high school. Then I started off as an engineering student. So in calculus-based physics, we started using graphical calculators in the fall of 1992. Okay. That is like using AI. Because if you didn't know how to do it, if you didn't know how to structure it and to think it through, you were gonna flunk. Okay. My professor even allowed that. He said, If you 'cause some students complain, he Yeah, well come to my office, you can take eight hours instead of three. Bring your textbooks, bring your notes, bring everything but Uncle Bob, and it's not gonna make a darn

Sabine Kvenberg: This is so cool.

Russell: bit of difference. This isn't history, this is engineering, this is math, this is calculus based physics. So I get my students to write advanced body paragraphs and then what they know what good looks like, because if you're going to use AI, we have stopped writing reports. We have the AI do a draft and we're just getting better and better drafts. We have to know what good looks like and when it doesn't, how to get it fixed so it does look good. If you don't know

Sabine Kvenberg: Yeah.

Russell: that, you're done. So it w it would surprise you. Would you believe to use AI comes down to a book called The Craft of Research? Are you familiar with it?

Sabine Kvenberg: I am not.

Russell: Okay. It's I want imagine you you want to do a doctoral dissertation. This book has sold over a million copies in the past thirty one years. It literally teaches you how to do context to go ahead and to t get something on the same page, how to come up with a unique problem statement and then a unique solution so the reader learns something substantive. That's what I literally teach students to use. That so when I presented in New York City and I went in there and I said, I solved dyslexia. I got two reactions. The professors came back and said, We don't care that two-year students scored in the 70th percentile of earning graduate students. We want the craft of research. It's like, you want me to teach dyslectic high school kids content so advanced, no private school in the country even looks at it. I s they said yes. And they are serious as a heart attack. They want the kids to have those skills before they start college. And I I'm

Sabine Kvenberg: Thank

Russell: absolute they told me that for 20 years. And then the teacher said Does this work for normal kids? And I said, absolutely not. Come back when it does. So I came back eight years later. So what we found works as a model is if you take a super mo like, let me just tell you about my most motivated student ever. Her name is Casey. This is a one off edge case. I never saw anything like this before, Casey. I'll never see this again. Of the hundreds of teachers I taught, they'll never see this. Casey was a lower middle class student in the Midwestern United States, ten years old. She turned eleven over the summertime, reading and writing at the second grade level. And she so I she was interested in president of Theater Roosevelt. So I assigned her to this crazy book, The Rise of Theater Roosevelt. 900 pages. The Rise of Theater Roosevelt. This is for tenth grade to first year college level, depending on who you ask. Casey went up to her room for three hours a night for six months. Nobody asked her to do this most of the day in the summertime. At the end of that, you could flip to this random page, point to that random word, and she would tell you the dictionary definition exactly. She jumped eight grade levels in six months and I worked with her for fifteen minutes a week.

Sabine Kvenberg: Wow, that is

Russell: And that's not the point. Yeah, but that's not the point. The point is when I we went to something she hated, her motivation dropped by about fifty percent. So if you're talking about outside of a kid's speciality, which is almost everything in kindergarten through the first two years of college, their motivation is down 75 to 90 percent. Your your intervention will fail for that very reason. So during the intervention period, you have to be in the kid's speciality. Then we ask them. In your specialty, do you have ideas flying around your head at light speed but with little to no organization? They say yes, and then we go through what I went through with Martin Luther King. And then part three, the front part of the brain deals with word analysis followed by articulation. If you follow that, the kids are gonna increase their skills drastically, very fast.

Sabine Kvenberg: And you can do this also with a kid or a person who's not dyslexia.

Russell: Yeah, let me give you an example. our one of our most advanced students now, his name is Grayson. Grayson wants to get his he's he's just your he's not dyslectic in the least. He's your 99th percentile math kid and your ninety-ninth percentile science kid. He wants to get his PhD, work for NASA to terraform Mars. So we have to get him published eventually for him to do that in a peer-reviewed journal, which is what you know, doctorate students do. So what we did is we're gonna get him through we're doing the advanced body paragraphs now, his dad's teaching him. In the next four or five years we'll get Grayson to actually she should get him past a desk review for for the journal we selected for him and then get rejected by a peer review by a senior reviewer. You miss a comedy, you get rejected. Then we're gonna hook him up with a senior professor and he's and Grayson's gonna go and say, I got rejected because of all of this. I wanna work with you to get this published. And watch the professor's jaw drop because Grayson's on the young side. how old do you think he is?

Sabine Kvenberg: no.

Russell: He Grayson's time.

Sabine Kvenberg: my gosh.

Russell: Yes, same process. Remember, this is the craft of research we're taking them through.

Sabine Kvenberg: Right.

Russell: So for most students to get them what what really where we where we are right now is for most students that GRE were the first student we had about fiftieth percentile for undergrad

Sabine Kvenberg: Mm-hmm.

Russell: students, we have transferred that over to the GRE. It's a literally it's a seven course process. We have the parents teach their kids. With that formula that I gave you, our instructor, her name is Angela. She is a she was she's a certified elementary school teacher in the state of Texas with a two-year master's degree and eleven years of experience. She is homeschooling both her dyslexic kid August through this and her super kid Alfred, who is twelve and is just a very advanced STEM kid, science, technology, engineering, math. He's into hawks as hunting birds. Everything we create for him is custom created and he's incredibly into it. So the same process works for both. The Gen Ed kids fly through it a lot faster, the dyslexic goes a lot deeper.

Sabine Kvenberg: It makes so much sense because we all are born with special talent and interest, right? I mean, for me, math was the furthest away what I liked. I liked dance, acting, singing. That was my area. So now if you can explain it in a very easy way, like to a second grader, right? How your talent, how your interest can, if you foster that, that's how I understand that you work with children, can elevate your genius.

Russell: Okay. I'll just tell you about one of my clients, his name is Reed. He's in a book I'm writing with Evelyn Whitebear, who's on the New York State Dyslexia Task Force as a teacher. It's gonna called If You Write You Can Read. I met Kimberly, his mom, on December twenty seventh of two thousand twenty four. Her background, she's a religious homeschooling mom with some college. Few weeks, few weeks before we taught, she spent seven hundred bucks on the state of Ohio test her kids. Her four gen ed kid, she taught to read brilliantly with standard methods. But her dyslexic son Reed wasn't working. He was reading at the at the eleventh percentile, writing at the fourth percentile. So starting in January, I worked with her for a half an hour a week for the next eight months. She worked with Reed for an hour and a half a week for the next eight months. Most parents do ten to fifteen minute sessions. Over the summertime at 25, Reed's friends came to him and said, Reed, we want you to be with us in class. So he was tested inside a public school in August of 2025. Call it eight and a half months later. Well, if Kimberly tripled what he did, he still would have been placed in special ed, away from his friends, Unhappy Kid. That didn't happen. His reading jumped from the 11th to the 64th percentile. His reading went from the fourth to the sixty fifth percentile as of April of twenty six. He's in mainstream classes with his friends, getting mainly A's and B's. Kimberly did what every parent dreams of in less than nine months. The top dyslectic schools are about sixty five to eighty grand a year and they take four to five years. That's how powerful this is.

Sabine Kvenberg: if someone would like to learn more about it, how can they find you?

Russell: just go to dyslexiaclasses dot com with an S, Dyslexiaclasses dot com, click on the button, download free guide, answer three questions and set up a time to speak with me. It's a half an hour doesn't cost anything.

Sabine Kvenberg: Okay. That is fantastic. wow. That was such great information. Something totally out of what has been covered before on this podcast. So I always like that we have something different, something out of the box, like what you teach as well. So thank you. Thank you so, so much for this information. I definitely learned something. And I wish you all the best to keep educating the world, literally, and keep making the difference.

Russell: And and I'll be happy to so if anybody has a question on that or anything else, just get in contact with me and I'll see what I can do to help out.