NLP for Spelling, Reading, Math

How can NLP help for difficulties with spelling, reading, and math all in one?

The problem:

My daughter has been tested at school.  The results showed a composite IQ of 118 with verbal and nonverbal being similar.  Her math computation is 91 and spelling is 93.  Listening comprehension is 134 and written composition is 140.  My daughter is 13 years old and had a very difficult time learning to read and knowing the sight words.  She could not go from cat to rat to hat to matt.  And she had to sound out and decode every word.  She had some reversals, but I do not recall it being a huge deal.  Her spelling has always been poor.  She was slow at learning math facts.  She has no sense of time and how much has passed.  

Her teachers have always said that she is average and doesn’t need extra help.  Now she is failing Spanish and not doing well at English and science.  The teachers remark that she needs to study more and try harder.  They do not know that she studies a lot every night, and always has.  She would have been failing sooner if we didn’t work so hard every night.  She has poor organizational skills; some days she doesn’t even realize that she has homework until the teacher asks for it.  And she has neurofibromatosis type 1.  I worry that she is part of the 50% that have learning disabilities.  The school says that even her low scores for math and spelling are still in the average range.  She’s really starting to get frustrated.  What do you think?  Could she have a learning disability?  Are there any other tests they could give?

The solution:

My work with NLP for resolving learning difficulties is unconventional and mainstream educators will not advise you this way, hence their recommendations to “try harder” which cover all, yet don’t cover anything.  But if what you’ll read here happens to align with your beliefs, you’ll see that this approach makes common sense and will help you realize why all this is happening.

Forget the labels

Firstly forget all the fancy labels such as neurofibromatosis and especially the phrase learning disabilities.  These labels mean nothing for your daughter’s progress in life if your daughter is wrecking her brains every night, yet failing.  The word disability is the most disabling – especially for you the parent, so I strongly advise that you completely exclude this word from your vocabulary for life. Replace it with the word difficulty which suggests that a difficulty is difficult now, but has the potential to become easy or disappear.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with your daughter. She has learnt the wrong strategy for spelling, reading, and math somewhere at a very young age, and applies the wrong strategy across all learning. One can’t blame her – that strategy is the only one she has ever known!

Wrong tool for the job

There is no wonder that she is failing Spanish, English, reading, spelling, and math, because they’re all visual activities and your daughter tries to crack them by sound!  Of course that won’t work!  If we take a closer look at one of these activities – spelling, we’ll see that all good spellers spell VISUALLY.  Ask them to spell cat, and they’ll SEE the word as a photograph in their imagination, feel that it’s right, and spell it loudly.

If your daughter doesn’t see what the word cat looks like written, she won’t spell it, because sound goes in time [like music], therefore can get confused, twisted, duplicated, or parts forgotten. A picture is in front of you all at once. Looking at it takes a fraction of a second.  A picture is in this sense much more factual for the brain than sound. This is why the brain finds pictures much easier to remember. This explains why the visual memory is the most reliable of all sensory types of memory.

What your daughter is dealing with is immensely common and happens to millions of people around the world. These people are old who were taught English via phonics instead of visually as well as young who were born into a fast moving world. I tell every one of these people that s/he needs to pack up the sounding strategy and retrain the brain to make a habit of VISUALIZING everything. Many people’s reaction is “Oh my god!  Why did I not think of that?!”

Seeing it is NLP for all problems with spelling, reading, and math

Teach your daughter to visualize words, numbers, and the content of what she reads.  Practice for as long as it takes to make it an automatic lifelong habit.  The fact that she lacks the visual strategy is beautifully confirmed when you say that she does not have a perception of passing time and has poor organizational skills.

Both things need visualization.  Would you be able to organize a party without a visual mindmap of what, how, why, and with whom would happen at the party where and when?  Would you know that you had homework if you didn’t have it visually coded in the brain the same as a visit to the dentist?  Intelligence and visualization are linked only to the extent that since a picture holds a lot of information in a fraction of a second while the eye looks at it, visual people take information in faster and remember it better. That is why others perceive them as more intelligent.  But the IQ quotients have nothing to do with how visual a person is.

Use NLP for spelling, reading, math

Are you thinking of someone who has difficulties with spelling, reading, or math? How else could NLP help? Let’s talk about it.