Mastering The Art Of Success

(^) Jack Canfield
I think that in almost everybody’s life there’s been that one teacher
who loved him or her as a human being—an individual—not just one
of the many students the teacher was supposed to fill full of History
and English. That teacher believed in you and inspired you.
Les Brown is one of the great motivational speakers in the world. If
it hadn’t b een for one teacher who said, “I think you can do more than
be in a special education c lass. I think you’re the one,” he’d probably
sti ll be cutting grass in the median strip of the highways in Florida
instead of being a $35,000-a-talk speaker.
WRIGHT
I had a conversation one time with Les. He t old me about this
wonderful teacher who discovered Les was dyslexic. Everybody else
called him dumb and this one lady just took him u nder her wing and
had him tested. His entire life changed because of her interest in him.
CANFIELD
I’m on the board of advisors of the Dyslexic Awareness Resource
Center here in Santa Barbara. The reason is because I taught high
school and had a lot of kids who were called “at-risk”—kids who would
end up in gangs and so forth.
What we found over and over was that about 78 percent of all the
kids in the juvenile detention centers in Chicago were kids who had
learning disabilities—primarily dyslexia—but there were others as
well. They were never diagnosed and they weren’t doing well in school
so they’d drop out. As s oon as a student drops out of school he or she
becomes subject to the influence of gangs and other kinds of criminal
and drug linked activities. If these kids had been diagnosed earlier we’d
have been able to get rid of a large amount of the juvenile crime in
America because there are a lot of really good programs that can teach
dyslexics to read and excel in school.
WRIGHT
My wife is a teacher and she brings home stories that are
heartbreaking about parents not being as concerned with their children as
they used to be, or at least not as helpful as they used to be. Did you
find that to be a problem when you were teaching?