Louise Barnes took advantage of the brain’s natural neuroplasticity to ‘re-wire’ Jake’s brilliant brain.
Jake (not his real name) is a lively, bubbly six-year-old who loves learning and reads beautifully, but he always morphed into a totally different person when he was asked to write anything. The problem had got to the point where he would scribble over the piece of paper he had been given to work on, scrunch it up or rip it into pieces and deposit it in the bin. Unsurprisingly, his teachers saw this as ‘naughty’, meaning he was often in trouble.
The effect was profound. Jake no longer wanted to go to school. He was withdrawn. He wouldn’t engage with any written activities at home either. He was already showing signs of anxiety. My first conversation with his mum was an emotional one. She couldn’t help crying and was clearly desperate for support and a solution. Because he read so well, nobody at school could understand why her son ‘refused’ to write. She felt she had nowhere to turn. But deep in her heart, she knew, as mum’s often do, that her son wasn’t just ‘naughty’. There was more to it and she was determined to help her boy.
When I met Jake for the first time, I had to agree with her. He was a likeable, friendly, polite boy with a good sense of humour. He was intelligent, too. Jake wasn’t a ‘naughty’ child. What was going on? Why wouldn’t he write?
Simply put, it wasn’t that he wouldn’t write. The fact was he couldn’t write. Or more precisely, he couldn’t spell. It didn’t matter how many times he was given words to take home to practise, or how many ‘Look, Cover, Write, Check’ exercises he sat through, or how many phonics lessons he took part in. The information literally would not stick in his head because of a processing issue. But more about that later…
For now, I’d like you to put yourself in his shoes for a moment. Can you imagine how difficult it was for him? How sad, frustrated, angry and quite possibly ashamed he might have felt to be unable to do what he saw the other children doing—even when he was doing his best? Consider how awful it must have been to write words and then have them corrected or marked wrong almost every time, despite trying as hard as possible. Jake was simply trying to avoid those deeply painful feelings. He couldn’t tell anyone why writing triggered them, but his instinct was to stop it from happening. Unfortunately, the reaction to his behaviour only caused more emotional anguish.
I see many students like Jake who are labelled as ‘naughty’ or ‘lazy’ because it looks like they’re wilfully refusing or avoiding reading or writing. The reality is, the way their brains try to process letters and words makes it almost impossible for them to read or spell.
Please know that I’m not blaming anyone, but how can we begin to empathise or know how to help when we don’t understand what’s happening? Think of the children who read the words but can’t answer the questions afterwards. I promise you, they’re not being lazy or not trying hard enough. It’s highly likely their neural pathway to storing written information is blocked in some way, or that this neural network isn’t complete. Or even that their brain can’t internalise the information in the first place. They literally cannot remember what they’ve just read and so cannot answer the questions—however hard they try.
Consider the ones who spent time in a small group, or one-to-one going over a particular sound and definitely got the hang of it yesterday. Today, they act as if they’ve never seen it before and have no clue about the same set of words. It’s tempting to get frustrated, isn’t it? I certainly felt this when I was a class teacher.
These children often can’t access the part of their brain that stores the image of the sound they learned. To them, it really is as if they’ve never seen it before and no amount of thinking will help them. And what about the child who reads well, but can’t write the simplest of words—like Jake?
There are clues in written text. Context, first and last letters, and even the shape and length of a word can enable a child to take a good guess. Spelling requires those ‘clues’ to be stored in the brain. To write a letter or a sound, you first have to access the ‘storage area’, retrieve the correct image (the letter, groups of letters or whole word) and then recreate it. If there is no reliable storage, spelling is a nightmare. Where do you even start?
It isn’t all bad news though. Just one month after meeting Jake, things were very different. He proudly told me that he’d written two independent pieces of work and got a certificate in assembly. He was happier, more confident and the English homework that his parent had previously described as ‘torture’ was something he wanted to do. Happy boy and happy mum. Even his teacher told me ‘I don’t know what’s happened in the last month, but the whole situation’s completely changed and now he loves English!’
How did such a huge and positive transformation come about? In a nutshell, we took advantage of the brain’s natural neuroplasticity to ‘re-wire’ Jake’s brilliant brain. Then he was able to reliably store the images of written sounds (digraphs and so on) in the correct place. That allowed him to easily retrieve and recreate them, meaning he could build up his understanding of spelling and embrace the writing process. Which he duly did.
But the process, although simple, is not the point. The point is to ask all educators and anyone involved with a child who struggles to read and write to be aware of how much this can affect their mental health. All too often, literacy issues are misinterpreted as bad behaviour, laziness, daydreaming or something equally negative. These unwanted behaviours are a response to a nervous system in crisis. And without careful handling, we may be causing more pain for a child who is already struggling.
In almost sixteen years of working with dyslexia, I have never encountered a lazy or naughty child. Each one has simply been processing text in a way that made reading or spelling exhausting, frustrating and extremely difficult. Each of them was trying so hard. This is something I wish I’d known at the start of my teaching career. Because I too have been guilty of telling a struggling child to try harder. I admit I’ve previously expressed frustration and questioned children who couldn’t remember something while alluding to the fact that they weren’t trying hard enough. I cringe when I recall keeping children in at break for unfinished work, or for making mistakes when it was ‘only copying’ . Now I know better, and it’s become my mission to share this knowledge with others. Alongside offering a CPD-accredited training programme, I also support educators as well as the parents and children that I work directly with.