What If Slow Progress Was Never the Best You Could Hope For?

Most tutoring helps a bit. For a while.

Then the term ends, or the school year changes, and you're back looking for the next bit of help.

I've had parents tell me they've spent thousands over several years, and their child is still managing the same struggle, just with more support wrapped around it.

It's a bit like trying to run in shoes two sizes too small. Lacing them tighter, running further, pushing harder, none of that makes the shoes fit. At some point the answer isn't more effort in the same shoes. It's different shoes.

I've written about why this happens, what actually changes it, and a comment that landed on my page recently that's stayed with me since, a dad whose kids never thought university was possible for them.

Read the full article below.

What if your child only had to learn something once?

Most tutoring helps a bit. For a while. Then the term ends, or the school year changes, and you're back looking for the next bit of help.

I've had parents tell me they've spent thousands over several years, and their child is still managing the same struggle, just with more support wrapped around it. Slow progress. No guarantee anything's actually going to change. Just more of the same, dressed up differently each year.

It's a bit like trying to run in shoes two sizes too small. Lacing them tighter, running further, pushing harder, none of that makes the shoes fit. It just makes the same hard thing hurt more, for longer. At some point the answer isn't more effort in the same shoes. It's different shoes.

Why doesn't more tutoring actually help?

Because it usually repeats the same fundamentals, word groups, sentence structure, memorisation, in a mind that was never going to hold onto information that way. That's not what I do.

My programme doesn't repeat fundamentals. I teach people to tap into their visual strength and apply it to learning. There's something powerful about taking a thought from inside your head and creating it in the real world, which is exactly what the clay work does. It makes learning stick without hours of memorisation.

I think of two clients I've worked with recently. One told me she found everything hard. She didn't like learning, had no motivation, and didn't understand what she needed to do, so she simply didn't do it. Another told me she "just wanted to get the school day over and done with, because it's too hard and miserable."

I couldn't count the number of times I've heard some version of this. Kids miserable because they're always left behind, catching up at playtime or in their own time and watching as everyone else moves on without them. If I had a dollar for every time a child has described that to me, I'd be a millionaire.

Why do dyslexic children internalise "I can't do it"?

Both of the clients above are genuinely, obviously artistic. Both had spent years being told to just keep trying. What gets internalised is "I can't do it, and I never will." That's simply not true, and it's not fair. They've done everything asked of them. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a person who thinks differently and is what I'd call a visual thinker. What holds a child back is the self esteem damage and the belief that something is wrong with them, built up by years of being asked to succeed at the one thing that was hardest for their mind to do.

What changed for both of them wasn't more of the same. It was clay in their hands, a way of learning that finally matched how their brains actually work. One told me it was the first time she could visualise everything in her head. Both are more confident now, and one has told me she genuinely loves learning, something she never expected to say about herself.

Learn something once, rather than spending years trying to memorise what won't stay. That's the shift I work toward with every single client. From "I can't read, I'm dumb and stupid" to "I can read, I can learn, and I'm not."

Is three dimensional, visual thinking common in dyslexia?

Many people with dyslexia describe thinking this way, in three dimensions, in space, in pictures rather than lines of text. It's the exact opposite of how most schools and tertiary institutions teach. John Britten, the New Zealand engineer behind the Britten V1000 motorcycle, had this. He was dyslexic, struggled with reading and writing his whole schooling, and worked almost entirely in diagrams and visual design instead, starting with go-karts as a kid and building up to a world record motorcycle. He failed at school by every conventional measure, yet built an extraordinary career on exactly the kind of mind traditional teaching had no use for.

So much of what's taught in classrooms has no naturally occurring picture behind it at all, no image, nothing to visualise. For a mind that needs that to learn, that's not a small inconvenience. It's the equivalent of teaching eighty percent of a class in English and expecting the other twenty percent to somehow keep up in a language they were never taught.

Does early support for dyslexia actually change outcomes?

A comment landed on my LinkedIn page recently, from a dad whose kids are all dyslexic, and who suspects he is too. He said a SPELD assessment gave his kids more than an explanation, it gave them tools, and the confidence to use what he called their superpower. His son now has a Commerce degree. Both daughters are studying nursing. He said they never thought university or polytechnic was possible for them.

It's not proof of what I do. But it's exactly the kind of moment that convinced me the difference matters. Real support that stops fighting the brain and works with it doesn't just help for a while. It changes the whole trajectory.

That's the difference between managing something and solving it. It's why I see this as a solution, not ongoing support.

If your child is still needing help you thought they'd have grown out of by now, that's worth a conversation.