Valentine’s Day dinner out put my husband and I at a table with a front row seat to the kitchen of our local Macaroni Grill.  Although it was an incredibly busy night, they seemed smooth, efficient and unmoved by the avalanche of orders they were asked to fill. As we observed the kitchen, we could see there was a method to the meal prep that prevented chaos and kept the correct meals coming out of the kitchen with the regularity of doughnuts dropping out of the chute at Krispy Kreme.

An expediter stood at his command post across a gleaming stainless steel counter from the chefs, feeding one order at a time to each of the half dozen chefs.  Chefs  concentrated on making one dish at a time, allowing the perfect meals to roll out. Plates passed hands for added garnishes, spills wiped from edges and meals grouped together by table, ready to be delivered by a runner. Each job done with incredible efficiency and concentration in the kitchen resulted in wonderful experiences for those of us in the dining room.

The Brain’s Reading Dance

That seamless Macaroni Grill kitchen made me think of what goes on in brains as reading takes place. I have already admitted to my teacher geekiness, so this mental leap of mine should not come as a surprise.

*DISCLAIMER*  I am not a brain researcher, and my version of the brain dance reflects my understanding of what I read from acutal researchers about what happens in the brain during the millisecond between the time our eyes view a word and our mouth pronounces it. It is amazing to me, but don’t site me as a source on your next research paper.

In the brain, the expediter is called Executive Function. He assigns tasks to brain centers based on what needs to be done.  New word?  Send it off to be decoded. Familiar word?  Long-term memory will quickly bring up the link between those letters and the word with its meaning.  Has this word been introduced recently, but is not yet stored in long-term memory?  Send to short-term memory.  Other brain centers put the words together in the sentence, assign meaning to the words and sentence, and decide on the correct vocal inflection based on that meaning. Speech centers serve as the runner, delivering the sentence or passage to be read.

So What Happens in a Dyslexic Brain During Reading?

Dyslexia is characterized by brain wiring gone wrong.  In the dyslexic brain, the messages from executive function may go missing before they are carried out because the work is not done in the most efficient manner.

Go back to the kitchen analogy and imagine one poor chef who has his work station behind the swinging door that hides the dishwashing area and the food pantry.  He comes to the front to get his orders, gathers his ingredients, then rushes back to the nether regions of the kitchen to assemble his assigned meal.  Along the way, he is asked to hold a tray of silverware for the dishwasher, has to thread his way past someone restocking the pantry shelves, and must unpile a stack of plates from his workspace before he can begin his task.  He realizes he left one ingredient on the silverware station when he stopped to help out there, and spilled a little bit of another ingredient as he avoided the boxes being unloaded near the pantry.  After he reassembles all his ingredients, he is not sure if this order called for extra sauce or no sauce.  Heading back to check on that, he begins to feel anxious, knowing the other 4 plates of food which accompany the order he is working on are probably finished and cooling at the runner’s counter.  The anxiety causes him to be clumsy, and a crash and clatter signal the result of his latest disaster. The dish is reassigned to another chef, and our former chef now manages mop duty.

The dyslexic brain can be as inefficient in the language areas as the chef from our story.   Information gets lost, activity is too far apart to be efficient, too much time passes and the job is not successfully completed – resulting in uncompleted tasks.

Can a Dyslexic Brain Learn the Reading Dance?

Proven methods are available to teach a dyslexic person to read and spell better.  They are reliant on retraining the brain, creating new pathways between the language centers in the brain, which tend to be scattered for a dyslexic person.  Orton-Gillingham is the method we use, and is considered the gold standard for dyslexia instruction.  It combines kinesthetic methods, prescriptive and diagnostic teaching that targets what each individual student needs, and sequentially layers knowledge on knowledge.  The younger the student, the better the result from remediation.

Rather quickly, teachers, parents and the students themselves see the improvement, as the steps solidify and the reading dance begins, growing more sure and steady with each lesson.