Dr. Jeremy Sharp (00:35)
Hey folks, I am really glad to have NovoPsych Psychometric sponsoring the show. If you do structured assessment work, then you will likely love NovoPsych. NovoPsych brings 150 plus standardized measures into one platform. What I particularly like is the extra layer of psychometric interpretation. So it helps you understand what scores actually mean. So the results are easier to communicate. If you are interested in high quality measures for personality, disability, ADHD, or autism,
You can try NovoPsych with a 15 day free trial via the link in the show notes, is novopsych.com slash testing psychologist. That’s N-O-V-O-P-S-Y-C-H.com slash testing psychologist.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (01:21)
Hey folks, welcome back to the testing psychologist podcast. I am thrilled to have an excellent clinical guest here with me today. We are talking all about identifying and conceptualizing learning disorders and problems with the discrepancy model and an alternative approach to think about learning disorders. So I have Dr. Paul Belgin. He is a pediatric neuropsychologist practicing in Scottsdale, Arizona. He is past president of the American board of pediatric neuropsychology or ABPDN.
Paul holds child diplomat status with ABPDN and adult diplomat status with the American board of professional neuropsychology. In 2016, he completed a postdoctoral master’s degree in psychopharmacology from New Mexico State University. So pretty early on that train. Paul’s co-authored misdiagnosis and dual diagnosis of gifted children and adults.
ADHD, bipolar, OCD, depression, and other disorders. He also co-authored large-scale brain systems and neuropsychological assessment, an effort to move forward. He’s a nationally retained forensic expert, lectures nationally and internationally. Paul, in his practice, will see kids from all over the country and even internationally.
And he’s just a wealth of information regarding learning disorders, giftedness, and many other topics. So very lucky to have Paul here. Some of the things that we talk about are, well, how do I identify learning disorders? We talk about the discrepancy model and the problems of it quite a bit. We talk about Paul’s alternative framework for looking at learning disorders that takes a more ecological approach. We talk about the relationship between learning disorders and ADHD.
We talk about communicating in our reports, you know, when we use an alternative model, we talk about giftedness and learning disorders and many other things. So there’s a lot to take away from this episode, like always, and I think that you will enjoy the content. Dr. Belzen is a very dynamic speaker with lots of knowledge to share with us.
Before we transition to the episode at this point, I’m kind of guessing here, folks. So forgive me if all the spots have filled, but at least at the time of recording, I still have openings in my in-person business retreat this summer called Crafted Practice. This is a small group. It’s 20 people. It’s relatively intimate.
We take four days to step back and work on the business aspect of your practice and really dial in some of those some of those problem spots that you may have been putting off because you don’t have the time or the energy to do it. So you can get more information at the testing psychologist.com slash crafted practice and would love to chat with you to see if it’s a good fit for now though. Let’s jump to my conversation with Dr. Paul Belgian.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (04:37)
Paul, hey, welcome to the podcast.
Paul Beljan (04:39)
Thank you, it’s nice to be here.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (04:41)
Yeah, yeah, I appreciate it. I’m excited to chat with you. You know, just our pre-recording chat was pretty dynamic, and I know you have a lot of thoughts on this topic. So I am excited to dig into some of those things. So I’ll ask you the question that I ask everyone who comes on just to kick us off here. And that is, why is this important to you? Out of all the things you could do, spend your time on, care about, research, why this in particular?
Paul Beljan (05:07)
In regard to learning disorders, it’s important to me because I think frequently it is done incorrectly by a large swath of the population of psychologists. And I don’t mean to sound arrogant saying that. What I’m saying in part is many of my students that I have, doctoral students, are being taught exactly how I was taught 30 years ago.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (05:09)
Sure.
Paul Beljan (05:31)
It is drastically different than it was 30 years ago. And it’s shocking to me that they are still being taught things like discrepancy model testing. They’re not being taught deeply what dyslexia is, how to assess it beyond comparing IQ to achievement. And these are doctoral programs and it’s shocking to me. And the reason why that’s important to me is because, you know, if you are going to dedicate yourself to doing well or to working with children,
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (05:35)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (06:00)
you need to dedicate yourself by being accurate or you change their life to a trajectory that shouldn’t have happened. And you need to take responsibility for that as a professional.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (06:12)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re right on. I think we forget sometimes the weight that we carry in kids’ lives, right? Like these are not light decisions that we’re making. Yeah.
Paul Beljan (06:22)
No, I always think about that. I always kind of bristle when people, parents might say, I don’t want a label on my chin. Well, you know, if it’s accurate, it’s not a label any more than cancer is a label. You know, it is what it is. But if the label or the diagnosis is incorrect, that is profoundly damaging. And it is one of those things that you can’t foresee it 20 years down the road. But you’ve got to be thinking that way.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (06:48)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s easy to forget that. I think about that a lot, actually. Flashing forward from this kid is 17, 22, whatever it may be. What’s this going to look like, and how is this going to affect them? Yeah, it’s important.
Paul Beljan (07:03)
Yeah, you know, if it in addition to that is let’s say I am right in my diagnosis. The other thing we do in this practice is I’m to have a free meeting that I’ll offer to the parents to meet with the child and explain it to them in the best I can in their language, because if there are seven, I want them to understand it at 17 in the most proactive way possible.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (07:31)
Yeah, I love that. I might pin that and try to come back to it. would love to hear how you explain how you do a child feedback in some of these cases. But I want to maybe tease it and give people something to wait for here. But maybe we start with an overview of learning disorders and how they’ve been identified over time. Clearly, you’re not into the discrepancy model. But there have been other conceptualizations of learning disorders over time.
Paul Beljan (07:38)
Yeah.
Sure. Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (07:59)
Could you maybe just like give us a brief sort of history of how we’ve thought about learning disorders and identification?
Paul Beljan (08:06)
Well, I don’t have a deep history on it. mean, ever since I’ve been in the field, like I said, it’s been discrepancy model and you know, that was old public law 91 142. I think it was 94 142 IDEA and that sort of thing. And what it is is if your IQ is one and a half standard deviations above your achievement.
So about 22 points, then you have a learning disorder and that’s wrong. What if your IQ is 21 points above? You magically don’t have a learning disorder. And it does sound funny, right? It sounds ludicrous, but there are psychologists and school psychologists who will figure that out to the 0.001 level of discrepancy. And it’s insane. It also goes into that I don’t believe in being statistical centric that way.
I don’t need a doctorate to plug numbers in and say, it’s 21 points different. You have a learning disorder. There’s way more thinking involved. You the other discrepancy that the schools use and that frequently is taught in graduate school is that if you are functioning two grade levels below placement on your academics, then you have a learning disorder. And that’s why probably most kids in this country don’t get diagnosed.
until third grade because you can’t get to grade levels below grade two. And that’s a massive problem because, you know, third grade is what? Eight, nine years old, right? And if heretofore you have mixed dyslexia, it’s undiagnosed. Everybody is treating you as if you don’t have the problem. Your life experience is all my peers are doing better than I am. I must be dumb because
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (09:32)
Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (09:57)
That’s the life experience of a child. That’s what they’re gonna render it down to. If I can’t do what my peers do, I must be dumb. So now it’s daily, hourly chipping away at my self-esteem. And eventually I might start being the class clown, showing learned helplessness behaviors, escape behaviors. And when third grade rolls around and I am two grade levels below, then I’m gonna get tagged as emotional disorder.
You know, and I would say ADHD, just put them on meds when that isn’t the issue. In part, the medication thing is, is that when a child is upset and their self-esteem is taking knocks, they’re not going to come up to you and say, I’m feeling a little melancholy and morose. They show it to you in their behavior. And by and large, that behavior is going to look ADHD to an untrained person. So then if they get sent to a psychiatrist or a
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (10:41)
Mm-hmm
Paul Beljan (10:53)
family doc, and they don’t do an assessment and they just go by behavior. Well, Timmy’s not paying attention in class. well, let’s try him on a stimulant. So we put him on a stimulant. He focuses better and inhibits more because we all would. Then we get a self confirmatory diagnosis of, well, it’s ADHD. And again, we’ve missed the learning disorder. And I think this is a big problem.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (11:15)
Yeah, yeah, I’m right with you. The waiting till third grade is mind-blowing to me. Yeah, we certainly don’t.
Paul Beljan (11:22)
Me too.
I can’t stand when I see it. And I’ll tell you, the biggest one that I see, that’s a problem. And I really like Dr. Stephen Pfeiffer’s work, the FAM and the FAR, and I’ve seen him lecture and he’s a good guy and I’ve talked to him. He’s very smart. And the thing about learning disorders that the one that bothers me most is math. You, in my entire career, given…
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (11:31)
Hmm.
yeah.
Paul Beljan (11:45)
from all the way back when I had a two-year degree and worked in schools to pay for the rest of my college and everything, I’ve seen a math learning disorder diagnosed in the public school system three times, three times in 35 years. And the type that we see in this practice, because we assess for it, is the failure to consolidate fundamentals type, where the child understands multiplication
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (11:55)
Mm-hmm. It’s super rare.
Right.
Paul Beljan (12:12)
But no matter how much practice they do on their eights, they might get it for a little bit. But as soon as they stop practicing, it degrades and they lose it. And the problem for that is what the school will say is, well, you’re just not trying hard enough. You’re not practicing enough. And I’ve heard that feedback all the time when in fact, it’s not a memory deficit because parents will say, is that a memory deficit? Well, no, he remembers what he had for breakfast, right?
It is a true blue learning disorder. It’s how your cerebellum communicates with your basal ganglia, your frontal lobe and back. It’s the dual tiered system. And if you have a disruption in that, you don’t consolidate procedural memories like multiplication. And I say memory, but let me better state that procedural learning. Orthographic dyslexia is the same thing. If
Every third time you spell mother, it’s M-U-T-H-R, and you really got to stop and think about how to spell it, even though by third grade, you’ve seen mother 10,000 times, because it’s in every story you’ve ever read as a child, right, or been read to, and you’re not consolidating that, that’s an issue, and it’s not a memory deficit. So not finding these learning disorders have just terrible
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (13:16)
Mm-hmm ⁓
Paul Beljan (13:29)
Negative outcomes for the child.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (13:31)
Right. Right. Yeah. think before we go further it might be helpful to I would love to hear your thoughts on how we understand learning disorders these days as far as like what’s actually happening you know and kids have reading issues math issues writing issues and especially like the overlap between them. I that’s kind of a big complex question. Yeah.
Paul Beljan (13:51)
No, I think there is some overlap.
Well, I mean, first of all, let’s take phonological dyslexia. You know, people might disagree with me, but to phonetic read and it’s not just can you hear it correctly? Can you manipulate sounds in your head correctly? It’s do you pair the sound-symbol relationship? And the key to it is, can you do it on the fly? Right?
Can you do it fluently as you read? And that’s super important because let’s say the child goes to Linamood Bell, which we refer to all the time. I think Linamood Bell is a great program, the Lips program. But if the child still has to go for cat, right? And they get it and then they have to, okay, that’s cat, right? And they’re always kind of surprised, right? That’s like how real dyslexia looks. yeah.
But if you’re a child and you’re reading a sentence and you come up to cat and that’s the one you don’t get and you got to break that down and you’re hate reading, right? It’s the bane of your existence because you have a disorder in this area. You break it down and then you put it back together. Now, breaking it down is going to load working memory slots. So you might be then pushing out what you’ve read, your comprehension. How many kids
On their own, they’re to go, I should go back to the beginning of the sentence now and read this and integrate cat so I understand. is it, who got that done? I’m going to move forward and now I don’t understand what I’ve read. So in part, you know, I think the old way of thinking of the way of thinking about phonics is, you know, left frontal lobroca’s area, Warnocky’s area, angular gyrus. So you’re really talking about how there are multiple systems in the brain.
that have to work together to express these things and that’s what you’re assessing for. In terms of orthographic, same kind of thing, but not the phonological processing necessarily, but it is a big thing on recognition and consolidation of a procedurally learned skill. Again, if you’ve seen mother over and over and over and you still say,
or say father, this is the one I hear a lot. They read it as feather, right? Now they’re approximating, right? F and R at end, feather. And there’s a TH in there. But if I have them slow down and say, yeah, father, I knew that, right? But again, it’s on the fly. If you have to stop to think about what it is and instead you quickly approximate on top of it, and that’s an error, the cumulative effect is,
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (16:09)
Hmm. Yes.
Paul Beljan (16:33)
You don’t know what you’re reading and you can’t answer questions about what you read, let alone do math word problems, which becomes more important in starting in third grade and in my experience anyhow. The math learning. So really quick to step back then into these two. A big part of what you need to evaluate is executive functioning and attention, because if it’s coming out of your frontal lobe in part, it’s going to be attention and executive functioning.
So the reason why that’s important and why discrepancy misses the boat is it’s gonna miss the ADHD executive deficit. And I know that there’s research that says, you know, a lot, lot of kids who have a phonological orthographic dyslexia also have ADHD and executive function deficit. So on another tangent within that, and you can bring me back to the original question, cause I’m a tangent guy, is that,
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (17:26)
Bring us back, don’t worry.
Paul Beljan (17:28)
If you have attention and executive functioning, but I didn’t evaluate for it, I only did a discrepancy or I looked at how you made errors then, and I diagnose it. Well, now I’m going to recommend that the parent go to Linda Mubell or Orton Gillingham or Wilson or whatnot Barton and spend a lot of money on intervention. It’s not cheap. And if that child has ADHD, you’re not going to get the bang for your buck if they can’t pay attention.
I know a lot of people don’t like medication. I have a postdoctoral master’s in psychopharmacology. If they need to be on it temporarily just to be able to focus on the intervention, then so be it. So they actually get something out of it. We’ve seen a lot of kids go through it and they don’t get much out of it because they couldn’t pay attention to it. The same thing is, know, executive functioning is important to evaluate because it’s how you’re going to express it and how you’re going to use it as well.
I forget who said it, but one of the best definitions of executive functioning to me is how you do what you do. Perfect. So simple, very straightforward. Because if your frontal lobes don’t direct how you do what you do, then you don’t do what you do well, period. To me, ADHD is attention inhibition. The rest of it is executive functioning. So.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (18:33)
Hmm, that’s good.
Paul Beljan (18:51)
If I’m talking orthographic dyslexia and it is part of this dual-tiered model of procedural learning, well, that in large part is executive functioning, because again, it’s how my frontal lobe works in conjunction with the base of ganglia, the cerebellum, and back. And a nice way to visualize that is this. This is what I say when I lecture. That when you think of the dual-tiered model, it’s kind of like a big city.
a hook and ladder fire truck, right? Where it’s two pieces. And the guy in the front, there’s your executive functioning, but you got that guy, crazy thing in the back steering, that’s your cerebellum. And it is supporting what the rest of the system does. And in fact is seeding, the procedure is seeding there. And as the frontal lobe needs that help, it fires the information in there. So I think this is a really important concept in learning disorders.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (19:21)
Mm-hmm.
I like that.
Paul Beljan (19:47)
is how does that whole system work because in that area if it doesn’t, again, you’re not going to get your bang for the buck out of intervention because you’re going to be hitting the wrong thing.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (19:58)
Mm hmm. Yeah, this is super important.
Paul Beljan (19:59)
Math, yeah, so the other learning disorder, math learning disorder to me is very tied with orthographic, because again, it’s that dual tiered, are you learning with repetition? When you learn with repetition, do you consolidate it to a habituated skill that you can repeat without thinking about it? That’s the key. You don’t think about mother when you read mother, it’s mother, right? Eight times seven, 56. You don’t think, 56?
That means you’re thinking about it. If you have to think about it, it slows the process down and you shouldn’t have to. So Alan Murzke coined a term called focus execute, which is brilliant. And it’s basically discussing this process. Dr. Len Colzio, my old mentor, and I don’t have mentors anymore. They all die. So I don’t make mentors anymore. Dr. Colzio, you know, he coined it more as a
perception-action coupling, and in research I’ve done we call procedural learning and coupling because I think it’s more specific. And basically what it is is this, and think about this in terms of reading and math and writing, okay, grammar. If I cannot consolidate a skill set to habituation, then I have to think about how to do it. So here’s a good example of how this process works.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (20:57)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (21:16)
If you think back to the first time you ever drove a car by yourself, and that car felt really big, and you’re concentrating on how to do it, and you’re thinking about how to drive the car because it’s not seated in your cerebellum yet, you haven’t done it enough, so you’re thinking your way through it. Now, think about how you drive, or even weeks after when you learned, and what happens? As it seats in the cerebellum, you then free your cognitive thinking
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (21:22)
terrifying.
Paul Beljan (21:45)
and all your working memory to think in real time as you’re still doing this very complex task without thought, right? So now, let’s say it was a automatic shift car that you learned on. So you’ve consolidated that. You can do it without thinking. I should now be able to teach you stick shift and you are going to assimilate that quickly into the new consolidated scope. To me, that’s literally a learning theory, right?
So you consolidate and then you blend. So now I get more and more and more skilled consolidated. I can do more and more and more complex things without having to think about it. And a great reference for this is the executive brain by Elkanon Goldberg, which I think is a great book. I think Elkanon is a great thinker. But he talks about that. I’m sorry.
the executive brain, the other one he wrote, the wisdom paradox. Why do people my age, your age, are, know, people who are new in the field are like in awe of what you know and what you can do. When to you, it’s like second nature’s because you’ve done it so much. You have so much problem solving on board, so much habituated skill set that you can express these things without thinking. But
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (22:46)
Okay.
Paul Beljan (23:08)
You can also use that resource to think in real time and problem solve way more efficiently. Tie that again to learning disorder. If I have to think about 8 x 7 and I’m doing a quadratic equation on the SAT, well, and I have ADHD, and I’ve a factor, part of that is, there’s a part where I have to factor 8 x 7.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (23:15)
Right.
Paul Beljan (23:35)
And I gotta write 8 plus 8 plus 8 plus 8. I gotta do it real slow that way. Or I gotta go 8 times 7, 56. Yeah, I think it’s 56. Well, one is, what are the odds I get that right? Two is, once I get it, what are the odds I put it into the right spot to figure out the rest of the problem? My error variance goes through the roof, because I’m thinking about things that I shouldn’t have to think about that should be automated, and it makes the expression much less efficient.
So what I get done in my math on the SAT might be correct, but I didn’t get a lot done because I’m incredibly inefficient.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (24:14)
Right. Right. All right. So that was a lot. That was a lot. I’m going to go back and clarify a few things. All right. So people make sure people are hanging with us. So super basic. But I think this will be helpful. Give me a little bit more explanation of the difference between phonological and orthographic dyslexia in terms of what’s happening.
Paul Beljan (24:16)
That’s a lot.
All right.
Right, and you can simply look at the errors. If I give you a spelling test and I can tell what you’re spelling, right, but it’s incorrect and you generally spell it the same way every time, mother, M-U-T-H-R, that would be more orthographic. And to steal the Jerry Seinfeld joke, if mother is M-U-K-Y and the symbol for boron, right, that’s phonological, because I can’t even tell what you’re trying to spell.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (24:58)
You
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (25:03)
Or, if it’s a compound word, I might get the front part, but I can’t tell what the back part is. So this is where when I say not being statistical centric comes in, which is you can’t only rely on statistics. You know, a chimp can do that. When you’re a professional, you’re making your neuropsychology assessment three dimensional. What is the statistic? What is the error type? And what was the child’s behavior?
How did they go about getting that error? Or correctness the way that they did it and the efficiency, right? So you’re factoring numerous things, not just this one-to-one statistical thing that takes no thinking. So in terms of phonological, I’m going to obviously use more of the phonics testing off the far.
And orthographic, I’ll use more of the orthographic or both the entire FAR. But I’m also going to do the Wyatt. I like the Wyatt a lot. No test is perfect, but there’s some other achievement tests. just, I bought them and I sent them back. ⁓ but the Wyatt I like because it gives me word reading, word fluency, pseudo word reading, pseudo word fluency. And that’s really going to get at phonics good because two things about it. If it’s pseudo word.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (26:03)
Okay.
Paul Beljan (26:19)
It means you’ve never seen it, you have to sound it out. And when we do it, I don’t just mark that it’s wrong. I’m going to write out what you said phonetically. That’s important. The other part then is if it’s fluency, then I can see if you can do it on the fly. But that’s tricky because the statistics frequently on that test, and I love the test, is that the fluency is a little higher than the pseudo word decoding.
And I really started looking at it, it’s because the pseudo-word decoding words get progressively way more difficult, but the fluency words are not that difficult. So you can pick up more on them than you can the other way. Some kids don’t, but some kids do, and that’s the way I’ll kind of look at it. So I’m looking at that statistic, and I’m looking at what do their errors sound like and writing them out phonetically. Same thing with the…
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (26:58)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (27:16)
word reading and word fluency. You’ll see the same kinds of things. And I’m always telling my students, write it out, right? And what we also do is when we do fluency now, I’ve done this more often, is I record it. Because I don’t want to interrupt, wait, you stop the watch and write it out, you know, they could be going very quickly. I don’t want to interrupt that. So I will go back and review it or try to do it from memory as well as possible. So I am collecting the statistical and
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (27:30)
I like that.
Sure.
Paul Beljan (27:44)
the qualitative information. Then on spelling, it’s like a phenomenal test to do because now I really get to see the error type. And I’ll write out the correct word next to it in red. So when I do a feedback session with parents, I can show them this is the error type. Can you tell what that word is? I cover it up what I wrote. Can you tell what this is? Right? Collection, C-L-U-K-S-I-N.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (27:46)
Yes.
Paul Beljan (28:12)
No, I can’t. I take it off. like, my God, it’s collection. And you see it obvious. You don’t even need the statistic for that. And then like I said, that keyword again is mother. If you’re nine and you can’t spell mother, man, you got a problem in life, right? You’ve seen it over and over. There is a reason why you’re not getting it and we can figure that out. So real quick then.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (28:29)
That’s true.
Yeah, yeah.
Paul Beljan (28:39)
I like looking at those differences in the error type. Overcoming dyslexia talks about it too. So then in math, what I find, I do math very differently. I use the FIFER a fair amount, I like it, but just the Wyatt numerical operations, you get as much time as you want. But I will time it, because I want to see how long it takes them. And they don’t know I’m timing.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (29:05)
my gosh, yeah, we have,
yes.
Paul Beljan (29:08)
And because if they get a 50th percentile, but it took them 30 minutes to do it, a of a qualitative bit on what’s going on there. I’m looking at the kinds of errors. they add when they should subtract? Well, that’s not a math learning disorder. That’s more of an ADHD process. Did they show their work or did they approximate and glance and try to do it? If they showed their work, did their work, what’s their work correct? So I’m not just taking
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (29:13)
Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (29:35)
right or wrong and pulling a statistic, I’m really taking apart what they did. And then what I’m going to do is I always do the fluency. And the reason why I like the Wyatt is it’s separate one minute, single column addition, subtraction, multiplication. I think the WJ it’s all mixed together. You don’t know what you’re getting. It just seems illogical to me. So if I see that, OK, the challenge in second or third, they’re doing multiplication. So the multiplication score is high.
But now the addition and the subtraction is way low. And I’ve watched them do it and they’re counting it. It’s not consolidated, right?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (30:07)
Yeah.
What do you make of that by the way, this is kind of an offshoot, but what do you make of that when addition and subtraction are low, but then multiplication, is, mean, presumably a more complex skill is higher.
Paul Beljan (30:28)
Because that’s the thing that they’re doing at that time more frequently. So now we’re not doing as much addition and subtraction. So it’s going to deteriorate without the practice, right? And that’s part of this PLC issue of as soon as you stop practicing it, it starts to deteriorate faster than other people. I mean, I still have most of my multiplication tables, but I still got to think about the 12s and the 11s, okay?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (30:31)
Mm-hmm.
Use it or lose it.
Mm-hmm.
Sure.
Paul Beljan (30:56)
because they never had those down great, but the others I’ve got. So it’s not that everybody’s going to lose it. And when you interview parents, an interview is so important. Do you find that Timmy learns and loses? And they’re like, yes. Same thing with his reading. He had mother down, five minutes late, M-U-T-H-R, right? They learn and lose. It doesn’t stick. And if you’re
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (31:16)
Yes. Heard that all the time. Yeah.
Paul Beljan (31:22)
And sometimes they might get it right. So if you’re a teacher, and I love teachers, I respect their work, but what am I gonna say if I got 30 kids and yesterday Timmy could do this and today he’s not, plus he has ADHD, Timmy, you’re just not trying today. And it’s too easy to blame the child. And then the last thing I’ll say about math, and we talk about dysgraphia a little bit, the issue with math too is, is…
I don’t know who sold this to the American Board of Education or whatever it is. Singapore math, I think is the dumbest thing that ever came down the pike. eight ways to do the same problem, right? Why? You learn one way to walk. The brain doesn’t work on learning numerous things at once. You learn one and then you blend.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (31:59)
For anybody who doesn’t know, what’s Singapore math? Yeah.
That’s true, yeah.
Paul Beljan (32:15)
That’s what this model is talking about. So learning it seven different ways and assuming that I understand the ordinality of numbers and the temporal order of numbers, that’s a big assumption. So if you’re to teach me seven different ways to do multiplication, to do long division, and I barely understand what addition is, we’re going to have a big problem. And I’m sorry, my voice is getting louder. I get really passionate about this.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (32:28)
That’s a big assumption, yeah.
Paul Beljan (32:42)
Now we’re not practicing. When I was in third grade, my teacher, when the recess bell rang, my class lined up into two rows, everybody knew their position, she would come out and she’d go, sixes. And we would march in doing the sixes every day. You worked on it and worked on it and man, you mastered it. And if you didn’t, I don’t know about her, but you know, if that’s what they’re doing and they don’t master it, that’s a problem, because the brain works that it should work that way. So yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (33:18)
Yeah. So with the, we hear that a lot. The, know, it’s there today, gone tomorrow, sort of observation. And you would argue like this is an issue with procedural learning. Is that right? Like they’re not, yeah. And the coupling. So how do we know, this is kind of a chicken or egg question. Like how do we know that it’s an issue with the learning and the coupling versus like an quote unquote
Paul Beljan (33:31)
Yeah, and coupling, that coupling part.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (33:44)
innate issue with the content, you know, the, the either a reading or a math.
Paul Beljan (33:48)
conceptual understanding of the ordinality of math. That is what most math in my reading historically has been about, right? And you know, again, it takes all the different areas that have to take place to do it. And that problem in my entire career, I hardly ever see a kid who has that kind of issue. And think about it.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (33:52)
Yeah, yeah.
Paul Beljan (34:14)
It gets into language and stuff. If you don’t understand prepositions above, below, between, around, prepositions are where the cat goes and you don’t kind of innately get that, man, you’re going to have a problem in life, right? Timmy, get the salt. It’s in the back of the cabinet above the pepper.
Right? And you don’t understand those terms and the ordinality of that or the spatialness of it. And math is spatial. You you’re going to have trouble in math understanding. Well, if I add, I’m up. If I subtract, I’m going down. And then, you know, once someone throws negative numbers at you, it’s all out the window. What? So, but that problem, I think I’ve really seen that like twice and I look for it because I don’t want to miss that one.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (34:36)
Yeah, pretty foundational.
Okay, yeah.
Paul Beljan (35:01)
But it’s rare.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (35:01)
Okay.
Paul Beljan (35:02)
One you more commonly see is the failure to consolidate problem. So real quick, do you want to talk about dysgraphia and how it relates to that too?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (35:12)
I would, yes. So let me throw, let me throw a, this is one of those like random facts that I accumulated at some point. I don’t know if you do this. Like I read it somewhere and now I’m just sort of like stuck on it. So at some point I decided that there, that writing disorders don’t exist really once you pull out kids with dyslexia or kids with ADHD. Like is there a standalone writing disorder?
Paul Beljan (35:18)
Yeah, yeah, that’s our whole life.
I think there is. Yeah. And it goes to the same process. So think about this. If you never remember to capitalize the first word, you never remember to put the period, right? As much as you’ve learned apostrophes, they’re either not there or they’re wrong. And you’ve done it over and over and over. It’s the same process, whether you read or not.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (35:40)
Okay, let’s talk about it.
Paul Beljan (36:07)
Okay, so if you can sound out, if you can recognize, great, but you can still have that kind of dysgraphia that is based in consolidating that procedure to automaticity. And if you have to think about it, then it’s hit or miss or not at all.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (36:07)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So I guess my question is like, is that when you say like consolidate that, that procedure or that knowledge, is that knowledge actually specific to writing? Like, is it a separate skillset? Like we’re talking about, you know, phonological awareness or math ordinal, you know, ability. thing in writing?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (38:06)
Hey, everyone. I’m really excited that NovoPsych Psychometrics is sponsoring the show. NovoPsych is a platform for psychologists who care deeply about assessment and testing and want their self-report measures to be the very best. NovoPsych has an extensive library of 150 standardized instruments with strong coverage across the presentations many of us assess every day, like disability, functional impact, autism, ADHD, and a wide range of symptom measures.
You can also use it for broad personality assessments like the Big Five or go deeper when you’re looking to understand personality pathology. What makes NovoPsych different isn’t just the range of scales, it is the quality of the experience. So I really appreciate the depth of psychometric info that it provides and the clear graphs and visualizations that make results easier to interpret and communicate. If you want to try NovoPsych psychometrics, you can access a 15 day free trial via the link in the show notes, which is
novopsych.com slash testing psychologist. That’s N-O-V-O-P-S-Y-C-H dot com slash testing psychologist.
Paul Beljan (39:14)
No, it’s part of the process of how consolidating skills go and how we blend new skills into consolidated skills. So if I’m still thinking about, I got to get the period down, where do think I’m going to be with apostrophes? I’m still focused on periods. You see what I mean? The more I have to think about, the more it loads my working memory and I can’t really do it automatically. I can’t maintain the sentence in mind and get it out with my flow of consciousness.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (39:32)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (39:44)
Another way to look at what you’re asking is this. What other areas would this procedural learning and coupling issue express itself? Well, what about social relationship? My joke when I lecture is, if you’ve met anybody who’s married five times, they don’t consolidate and they don’t adapt and adjust and they don’t learn well.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (40:05)
Ha!
Paul Beljan (40:07)
Right? That whole process, that’s neuropsych, how you do that. And that’s separate than autism. If they don’t learn from experience that’s happened over and over and over, you know, they might have impulsivity, yeah, and they act before they think. But even if you have impulsivity, there are certain things, I’m impulsive as I’ll get out, I still know to put a period and it’s automatic. These are things you shouldn’t have to think about.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (40:08)
Sure. Yeah, it’s good.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (40:34)
If you have to think about them, again, they don’t work right. know, during COVID, there’s great research on kids and stuff, and kids just had such a hard time. And the best example that I’ve read, and it makes so much sense perfectly, is kids lost their routine. What happens when you lose your routine? You have to now think through the new one. That slows you down.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (40:51)
Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (41:00)
Your error rate goes up, it causes you anxiety, versus now is the time we have Graham Crackers. Now is the time we do spelling. Now is the time this right. But when it was all on the Internet now and it’s all different and you know, everybody’s doing different things. They had to integrate everything brand new for them. Kids don’t do that as well as adults. So yeah, that you had a lot of upset kids. But to me again, it’s out of that same process.
We like our automaticity because it’s part of our knowledge base in how we do things. I mean, if you had to think about how to drive a car every time you drove a car, it would drive you out of your mind.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (41:35)
Yeah, yeah, that’s such a good point.
Right?
Right. No, it’s a good point. It’s a good point. mean, it eats up so much of the executive functioning that there’s not a lot left over for new learning or whatever we need to do. Yeah.
Paul Beljan (41:52)
Right. Right.
So the way to think about it again, to me, then is that there are not individual lobules in the brain that do these specific things. It’s how everything is interrelated. Everything. That’s why they say, you know, executive functioning is the conductor of the orchestra. You have all these parts of the brain that play music beautifully. Their instrument
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (42:11)
Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (42:15)
but it takes the executive to pull it all together and all of this is happening at once. I’m thinking about what I want to say, I’m maintaining that I’m sticking with the question, I’m trying to have a stream of consciousness in how I say it, and that is all driven by my executive functioning. It all happens at once. So a hitch in one part, and this is why I like to break executive into its base areas, has a ripple effect into everything else. How could it not?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (42:32)
Right, right. Okay.
Paul Beljan (42:45)
And so this is why all the way back to the beginning using my working memory, when you think phonological dyslexia, orthographic, math, anything like that, you have to be also thinking executive functioning and attention.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (43:00)
Yeah, yeah. So let me ask a dumb question. I’m guessing people are maybe thinking this as they listen. If there’s so much executive functioning involved in these different academic skills, how do we separate something like ADHD from the actual learning disorder?
Paul Beljan (43:18)
Yeah, good question. First of all, maybe I’m biased, but I see it together so frequent, right? To me, it’s almost hand in hand. You do get kids that are ADHD that don’t have learning disorders, but rarely do I see a kid with a true blue executive issue, any part of it, that don’t have learning disorders. And that’s just, that’s my experience, you know?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (43:27)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (43:44)
I haven’t crunched any numbers on it, but executive gets into everything. Again, how you do what you do, how you read, how you do math, how you live into everything. So I’m not trying to tease it apart as much as I’m trying to see if both are there, I guess would be the way I’m saying it. And it’s interesting. It’s a good question. It’s not a dumb question because
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (44:02)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense.
Paul Beljan (44:11)
I see it so infrequently that it’s really fascinating when there is a pure phonological dyslexia and there isn’t the other stuff. And now that I’m thinking about it, that is going to be the one that I’ll see more often versus if it’s orthographic, dyscalculia, or dysgraphia, because those are very executive based where there’s the phonics isn’t.
As an executive, I think it’s more of a linguistic thing, but that also has some executive with it. This is why, you know, this is why you test everything that the beauty of NeuroPsych is I’m not putting my frame of speech language and then OT and then PT and so on. I’m trying to take the snapshot of everything and how it all works together. That’s why I think Neuro answers when it’s done right.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (44:40)
Mm-hmm.
Mm Yeah.
Paul Beljan (45:06)
so many questions. And I think that if schools did that upfront, as opposed to an executive or a discrepancy evaluation, they would figure these out, these problems out better earlier and be able to intervene better than waiting down the road and parsing things out.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (45:30)
Yeah, yeah, I think you’re right. I mean, I’m biased, of course, but of course, I think we do. We do it, right? Yeah, yeah. No. So maybe I’m going to ask that question in a slightly different way, and then I want to move on and talk about kids who get lost in the discrepancy model. I think that’s important. So slightly different way to ask that question then is how do we know that academic concerns are attributable to true, quote unquote, academic weaknesses versus just
Paul Beljan (45:34)
Sure. Yeah.
Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (45:59)
an executive functioning weakness. You see what I’m getting at here? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess if I’m testing a kid and you know, they have, you know, weaknesses in reading and math, how do we determine like what I think it’s tempting, like you mentioned to just say, this is ADHD. They’re just not like paying attention. They’re not, they don’t have, you know, the executive capacity to, to learn this. Like, how do we know there’s
Paul Beljan (46:04)
No, can you say it again? Sorry.
⁓ okay.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (46:25)
an additional academic learning disorder.
Paul Beljan (46:30)
Well, you know, my typical battery when there’s questions of ADHD and learning disorder is going to be IQ. I really don’t care about the IQ unless it’s really high or really low. I’m talking about the Wechsler. I love all the little subtests that tell me a lot and they take those, a lot of those subtests take linguistic abilities and they take executive functioning, right? They also take attention, inhibition and working memory. So there’s a lot there.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (46:43)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (46:58)
right off the bat that we break those subtexts out into other domains that we’re going to talk about. We do a full battery of executive functioning and attention. We do a full battery of academics. And then we’re also going to do sensory motor, visual, spatial, and learning and memory. And if a child moves funny, I’ll take them outside and do what I call running and hopping them, where we’re going to run, skip, hop, balance, and you know.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (47:25)
Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (47:26)
pretty much do a field sobriety test, you know, and see if there’s any issues there that could be causing disruption. So I think the answer to your question is that by and large, I do a comprehensive battery. If a parent says, I want a dyslexic battery, yeah, I don’t do that because it doesn’t work that way. I would never just do academics and say, here’s your problem. Because you’re…
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (47:28)
Yeah
Paul Beljan (47:52)
By doing that, then you have that one frame and you’re missing everything else that is contributing to it. Because if everything is multimodal and you don’t test everything, you don’t know which are the parts that are working beautifully or not. And how does all that integrate?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (48:07)
Right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m with you. We do a comprehensive battery. That’s what we do. We don’t we don’t answer single questions like that.
Paul Beljan (48:15)
Absolutely. And to me, you know, in doing what I said, again, you can see how it isn’t all statistical centric. So let’s get to real quick. It lends itself to the discrepancy thing, which is this. And this is the really sad part about it. What if a kid has an 83 IQ? Right. They’re in that terrible no man’s land.
They’re not impaired, but they ain’t average either, right? And it’s very difficult for them. Odds are their academics aren’t gonna be as good. And you can still figure out if there’s a True Blue Learning Disorder. However, if I do discrepancy and some of the achievement tests, only takes, depending on age, it only takes a few correct responses to get an average score.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (48:53)
Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (49:10)
Because if you don’t look at the statistics on that, on the manual and stuff, you can delude yourself into thinking that this is average ability when they got three right. So now they’ve beat the discrepancy because the tests that are used don’t have a low enough basal. And we’re really careful with that. So when I write a report, I have a disclaimer. This is not a discrepancy.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (49:20)
Yeah, it’s a great point.
Paul Beljan (49:35)
This is based on the principles of neuropsych and here’s how we figured this out and here’s why this child beat the discrepancy.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (49:44)
Yeah, yeah. Where is a very practical question, but I can be super concrete sometimes. Where do you put that disclaimer in the report? Like is that at the top? it at the measures?
Paul Beljan (49:54)
I gotta tell you, I have, you know, the last five years have, eight years have been the best days of report writing because I listened to, I’m gonna flake on her last name. it Stephanie, Dr. Nelson. I was gonna say Wilson. She did that beautiful three hour lecture at ADPDN like five or six, eight years ago. And she started with,
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (50:07)
Yeah, yeah, Stephanie Nelson.
Yeah.
Paul Beljan (50:19)
Nobody reads your reports. know, there’s 400 neuropsychologists. Nobody reads your reports. And she talked about how they’re written at a 19th or higher grade level. They’re written like a research paper. They’re written in a way that assumes parents understand even percentiles the way we do. And, you know, she laid out, here’s how to do it. So I, you know, swallowed my ego and I bought some supervision time from her and I totally redid how I do it.
And I do it the way she says, which I think is excellent, which is I have my, here’s the questions. And then I have my answers right off the bat. And I do my answers in the order of my summary sheet, which is IQ, executive functioning and attention, language, academics, I’m sorry, language, learning and memory, academics, speech, language, visual space. Well, you get what I’m saying.
and so first I’ll talk a little about, you know, if they’re gifted, this child is brilliant. He has this IQ. he has all the behaviors that are consistent with giftedness. This, this, this, and this, right? He has ADHD learning disorder and there’s several paragraphs. They’re boilerplate, but they’re exactly. And I’ll also say, you know, this is why Timmy might do this in this situation. And then when it gets to the learning disorder stuff is.
That’s where there’s a paragraph of this is how we did this. This is not discrepancy testing, right? ⁓ And I do it without being snarky. I used to be more snarky about it. But then I find, well, people don’t listen to me then. And then we’ll lay it out more neuropsychologically how we figured it out, OK? Now, in the body of the report,
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (51:49)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
That’s great.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (52:07)
where it’s going to look at working memory, inhibition, procedural learning, coupling, and so on. Once it gets down to the achievement area there, in the achievement area, I will give more statistics, because I know the school’s going to be reading it too. Parents are likely going to give it to the school. But the thing we do is we will also separate out, here’s the phonic errors, and we have a table of, let’s say, the word reading.
Here were the words, here’s how Timmy said it. Spelling, here were the words, here’s how Timmy spelled it. So you cannot deny it and just make it so obvious. And then that way, and then at the very end, mean, that’s where the recommendations are. So it’s the questions, the answers, the diagnosis, what were the list of tests? The way we write the tests are, here’s what this test measures.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (52:45)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (53:02)
or here’s what this domain is looking at, not with the test measures. Here’s how the child did. Here’s what that means in real life. I want to make it real that way. Because then that report is an actual usable tool that many people can read. And if I wrote it well, like my old dean would say, Dr. Fox, putting complex things simply without being simplistic and limiting
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (53:05)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (53:28)
not having big $4 words, but nickel words. So I eat my ego there too, because even though I have a big vocabulary, I’m gonna write it smaller because I know I got a big vocabulary, but not everybody does. So I’m make it easy reading and really, really explanatory and useful. that’s it. Yeah, mean, she’s ⁓ the best. Yeah, and you can’t,
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (53:44)
Nice. Yeah, I’m right with you. Stephanie Nelson, big friend of the pod. She’s been on many times. Yeah. Yeah.
Paul Beljan (53:53)
be that old school neuropsychologist of, know, it’s a lesion here or there. And this deep jargon of brain function and pathways, you know, which you and I don’t even memorize. I know where to find it in the book. I have the basic map in my head for it, but I don’t talk that way. And I don’t expect a parent to get it if I write it that way. So it’s got to be written in a super usable way.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (53:59)
Yeah.
Paul Beljan (54:22)
And it’s actually faster.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (54:24)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. This is great. I didn’t know we were going to get an endorsement of simplified reports, but I’m 100 % on board with that. Yeah, I love that stuff. Yeah.
Paul Beljan (54:31)
Absolutely, I can’t
stand reports that are just jargon laden and it’s like I don’t even understand what you’re talking about, you know
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (54:38)
Yeah,
yeah. How does our audience? So you, I, you started talking about the kid, the 83 IQ kid. Um, this comes up so often. And so I think sometimes people get stuck, right? Because even if we’re not using a discrepancy model, the current DSM still says like they need to be, um, sufficiently, you know, behind, I forget the language, but you know, substantially below where we’d expect based on age and grade and
Paul Beljan (54:46)
Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (55:06)
people kind of get hung up on that and then they’re like, okay, well, is this a learning disorder or is it just kind of like low IQ? ⁓ that
Paul Beljan (55:12)
And it’s, I’m sorry, but you should just trigger the neuron. It’s so ridiculous because you could have a 170 IQ and still have the learning disorder. It’s got nothing really to do with your IQ unless it’s super low, right?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (55:25)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Sure, sure, yeah. So I think, but this is where I wanna get like super concrete, cause I think people do get lost and they’re like, well, how do I know it’s a learning disorder if it’s a, well, I mean, we could go to either end of the spectrum, right? Like a 122 IQ, but then reading is a 109. I’m being super simplistic. But then on the other end, it’s like the 83 IQ and then reading stuff is a 74. Like how do-
Paul Beljan (55:56)
No, no, no, that’s…
Because you’re gonna prove it with your neuropsychological testing and the way that you write it and giving your examples in the little tables and explaining, operationally defining what is phonological dyslexia, what is orthographic dyslexia, and then showing it how they make those mistakes as well as having the statistic. Now, if the statistic seems inflated, then I’m gonna argue the statistic.
Well, the reason why the statistic is high is Timmy got every other one right. So cumulatively, yeah, he got a lot of points, but qualitatively, he is showing me the consistency of the skill set is not there. And that’s what you see in class a lot, and that’s why the kid gets called out. You’re just not trying. You know, today you spelled mother, but you misspelled father. If you could spell mother, you can spell father. Maybe not, right?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (56:35)
Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (57:00)
And then you hit on something that’s extremely important. I have kind of a reputation for gifted and co-wrote the misdiagnosis book on gifted with Dr. Webb and Dr. Ed Eamon. And those are the kids that really get screwed. Cause let’s say you have a 135 IQ and your academics are average, 105. Well, you meet discrepancy.
Do think the school’s gonna give you service? Absolutely not. And you my joke when I lecture is, heck, we got kids that can’t read at all that we don’t help. You know? It’s criminal. Not that everybody who’s smart reads at a super high level, but if you’re gonna use discrepancy, use it for everybody. And why is it that the kid with a 135 is reading at a 105?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (57:28)
Right.
room.
Paul Beljan (57:55)
and spelling at a 104 and so on. It shouldn’t be that way. It should be better. So it’s important to be able to explain it neuropsychologically. And in my experience, because I get a lot of gifted kids through this practice and even ones with learning disorders, it is near impossible to get the school to give them service, to give them an IEP because they’re like, what’s the problem? It’s average.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (58:23)
Yeah, yeah. Well, and maybe this is taking us in a different direction, but it makes me think what is, I mean, for lack of a better way to put it, like, what is the point kind of, you know, like they’re doing fine. And is there any intervention that would take that we get them any higher? You know? Okay. Yeah.
Paul Beljan (58:36)
That was the point there.
Hell yes, absolutely.
Again, the scientifically proven ones that the public law says they’re supposed to use, but do you know any school, public school that does deep down, Linda Mubell? I don’t. I have a friend who’s an educational advocate. She was at a meeting and she goes, are you guys using scientifically proven methodology to remit this child’s dyslexia? Yeah, what do you use? Wilson?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (58:54)
I know.
Paul Beljan (59:07)
really? Up there on the shelf that’s still in the saran wrap? yeah. You know, so if you push, they’re not. I don’t hesitate to tell parents… I’m really jaded in this if you can’t tell. I will tell parents this when they’re like, what do we do? Alright, one.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (59:11)
So that’s brutal.
Paul Beljan (59:26)
Give the report to the school. I’m happy to communicate with them. Sign a ROI. Two, if they don’t listen to you or you feel like they’re snowballing you, which they will, get an educational advocate who knows what the hell they’re doing and get to know a few of them, right? Three, get it privately if you can afford it because even if the school gives you everything they have, answer if you think, ask you the question.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (59:40)
Mm-hmm. yeah.
Paul Beljan (59:54)
Have you ever seen a public school remediate dyslexia the way some of these private programs can? I haven’t. Ever. Ever. Because they don’t follow it, they will dumb it down and slow it down. They’ll give them less work, right? They give them more time. And now they’re not even getting a robust education, and they’re not getting intervention. And frequently the person doing the intervention, if they get it,
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (1:00:02)
No.
Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (1:00:22)
isn’t even a teacher or trained in specialized education. And so they give out an IEP with an eyedropper and I’m convinced it’s about money. They’ll give you a 504 all day long because it’s free. An IEP costs us an employee. God forbid we need a new football stadium.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (1:00:27)
Sure.
I don’t doubt that’s true in some cases, maybe many cases. Yeah.
Paul Beljan (1:00:51)
I know in Texas, you know, they do what I’ve said for years, apparently. lot of the districts now, they have one good football stadium and everybody uses it versus everybody having a $10 million football stadium. What a waste of money. I know it’s a tangent, but you see my point. The gifted kids, I’ll tell you, if we have time, just a quick story. I call this kid Ascot Boy, okay?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (1:01:11)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (1:01:19)
Because when he came to my practice, he was 15 years old and he was so mature, I visualized him in a smoking jacket and I asked God, he was more mature than I am. And he said, look, I think I have dyslexia. I want to go to medical school. I’ve got to figure this out, right? We do this big evaluation with him. He’s got a 4.0, but enormous amount of effort to get that way more work than same age peers. And he’s got about a 140 IQ.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (1:01:27)
Nice.
Mmm.
Paul Beljan (1:01:48)
and he is functioning average in his academics. But when you looked at the errors and you look at the neuropsychological process of it, he very definitely had dyslexia. OK, so he went to private school. Luckily, his mom, you know, was reasonably they could afford it, got him specialized education. I believe it was with Lindy Moon Bell. He did well. He still has some issues reading. He
He got through college, and he would check in now and then, here’s what I’m doing, right? And he said that the MCATs were extremely difficult for him because it’s not necessarily as medical as the board exams. The passages are longer, it’s a different test. It’s a very heavy reading test. Versus by the time he comes out of medical school,
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (1:02:36)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (1:02:41)
and internship and so on, he can take the medical boards because he knows the language. And he can read the language of it well. You give him a book by Oscar Wilde and he can’t read it that well. It takes him a lot longer than it does. Bottom line, he wound up, he’s a neurosurgeon in Florida and he has dyslexia. Is that crazy?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (1:02:46)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
That’s amazing. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. That’s funny. It reminds me of a kid adult now that I saw a long, long, long time ago, but same, same deal. Med school, clear dyslexia, just had to, you know, find the accommodations to get through the exams, but doing great.
Paul Beljan (1:03:17)
The ball had a guy on Shark Tank, is it O’Leary, is that his name? He has an MBA, he has dyslexia. He said, look, getting that MBA took me blood, sweat, and tears. Would I change it if I could? He goes, hell no, because the benefits of dyslexia are what make him think different than his peers. So, coming full circle using working memory again, how do I explain it to kids? Exactly like that. That look.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (1:03:21)
yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mmm.
Paul Beljan (1:03:45)
We figured out you have this thing called dyslexia. Here’s what it means. Do you find that you make mistakes on words that you’ve seen over and over? Like, yeah, I do. Is it difficult to sound out words and do it as you read? Yeah, that’s really hard. Yeah, that’s what dyslexia is. by the way, we figured out you’re pretty bright. You’re as bright as most anybody else. And with effort, you probably could go to college. That’s how bright you are. Even if they have a 105 IQ, whatever.
I want to separate those two things out. Does this stuff, does it make you feel dumb when they ask you to read in class and you can hear kids snickering? Yeah, I really feel dumb. You’re not dumb. We really want, we call it an awareness meeting. I want you to be aware correctly and using the right terms of what it is. Okay? We might then also say, hey, we also figured out you got this thing called ADHD.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (1:04:20)
Mmm.
like them.
Paul Beljan (1:04:43)
Do you find that people are like, you know, hey, Timmy, Timmy, and you’re looking out the window and you’re, what? And you are distractible. Do you find that you’re in trouble before you even realize it? Yeah, all the time, because you’re kind of impulsive. You act before you think it doesn’t occur to you to put the rules down. So we want to demystify these things. So we call this an awareness meeting. This is the issue you have. Everybody’s got something.
My hair fell out. I make jokes. You know, the kid up the street has to prick his finger three times a day and check his blood sugar. Everybody’s got something. This is what you have. Now let’s talk about the upside. Well, first we talked about how you can’t use it as a crutch. This ain’t getting you out of anything, okay? The upside is, look, when you have dyslexia, you think different.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (1:05:30)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (1:05:36)
You see the big picture of things. You tend to get the thousand foot view. A lot of people with dyslexia are extremely artistic, very musical. A lot of them actually do well, of all things, in architecture. Same thing with ADHD. Life of the party. Everybody gets along with the ADHD guy. They’re funny. They have a sense of humor. They’re very creative. They’re excellent problem solvers.
because they don’t fall into group think and they’re because they’re not paying attention to how the group is solving the problem. They’re over here going, what if we did this? Right. And they’re totally outside the box. There are benefits to these things if you take ownership. And here’s how you take ownership. Your parents are going to get you help. They’re going to have you do this. It’s going to take more work for a period of time. They’re going to impose more structure on you. It doesn’t mean you’re in trouble.
They’re getting you out of your own way, that sort of thing. And then what I do is I bring the parent in. Here’s what I told Timmy, and I say the same thing again, because I want Timmy to hear it twice. Okay? then what we teach the parent is, is before we do this meeting is, one, it’s an awareness meeting.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (1:06:31)
like that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, see previous.
Paul Beljan (1:06:51)
Because if the child doesn’t understand what the issue is, they’re going to push back against the intervention because you’re taking my freedom now. Or a bit of it. I got to work over the summer. Are you kidding me? So then it is the parent’s job over time to develop insight with this. With insight, you understand the problem well enough as the child that you do accept the help, that you do work with it.
You understand you have to do things in certain ways because when you do it that way, you really succeed well. And that means you can go to college, you can achieve it pretty much whatever you want to do, and life doesn’t have to be so hard, but you’re going to have to impose some rules on yourself.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (1:07:38)
Sure, sure. I like all that. I like all that. That’s a nice, yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of optimism.
Paul Beljan (1:07:42)
It’s so important, like I said, I do it for free. It takes about 20 minutes. I don’t charge for it. It’s that important. Plus, I also think that, look, I’m the guy that did the testing. You know, wouldn’t it show respect for this child who spent six, seven hours with me to hear it from me? And also then, it’s not just mom and dad saying it. It’s this guy who said, hey, here’s how this works.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (1:07:47)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Paul Beljan (1:08:08)
and they might take it in a little bit differently. And it shows that it’s back.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (1:08:11)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. No, I love that. I love that. I don’t know if you’ve seen Liz Angoff stuff. You know, she’s a big proponent of feedback with kids and has a whole framework for, you know, how to do it. yeah. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
Paul Beljan (1:08:23)
I, and Stephanie does too. She talked about that at one of her lectures and I do it differently
than a lot of them do it. I’m not a real huggy feely guy that way, but I’m very pragmatic about it. And I was horribly, I still am very ADHD and I was not a good reader growing up. I don’t have dyslexia, but I just, it wasn’t my thing. And so.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (1:08:33)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Paul Beljan (1:08:48)
And I have vivid memory of childhood. So I can really put it in ways how I felt it, and that’s pretty universal, that they’re like, yeah, that is how I feel. It does, yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (1:08:59)
Yeah, that means a lot. it does.
That might be a nice note to end on, you know? Feels pretty good, heartwarming. Yeah. Yeah.
Paul Beljan (1:09:06)
This has been fun.
I was very flattered that you asked me to do this, by the way. Thank you.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (1:09:13)
my gosh, of course. Yeah. Well, you are doing great work in our field and have a great way of communicating some pretty complex and interesting ideas. So I’m just grateful that you’re willing to come and chat with me for a little while. I appreciate it, Paul.
Paul Beljan (1:09:23)
Thanks a lot, Jeremy.
Click here to listen to the podcast instead.