I’ve been doing this a long time.

I mostly work with families now, but when I started I volunteered as a mentor in a juvenile detention center in central Virginia. I’d go in once a week and spend the day there working with kids who had been locked up for months, sometimes for years, and were working towards their GED. This was a group of ten or so kids of totally different ages, in different places in their education, with behavioral problems and learning disorders and disabilities. It was my job to guide them towards getting that diploma.

At first, I had a lot of trouble with it. I would show up and try to review math concepts or make them read books, and that never worked. They just weren’t interested. It’s because of who they were and where they were:

They thought that the work wasn’t worth doing or that they weren’t capable of doing it.

I had to step back and rework my entire approach: my job wasn’t to teach them math, but to teach them that math was worth learning and that they could learn it.

That transformed my entire approach to education. Sure, I can teach the content, but that’s only part of my job.

My job is to teach students that they can learn something and that they should learn something.

I learned how to do this in probably the hardest place to do it: in juvie, where the kids are literally there against their will. So I had to get good at that kind of inspiration, and I’ve carried that expertise and that lesson with me into the rest of my career.

So if your child believes, because of their learning differences or their personal history or for whatever other reason, that they can’t learn something or that it’s not worth learning, I can help.

I’ve seen it before, and I have built confidence and mastery in students with learning differences just like that.