dyslexia

If you Google Cinthia Haan, you learn that she helped launch Sprint, oversaw various mergers and acquisitions in telecommunications, created and sold more than one company of her own. Next you learn she's now dedicating herself to helping children with dyslexia and has formed, for this purpose, the Haan Foundation for Children. She's also President of power4KIDS reading initiative, a clinical trial of innovative teaching methods. Lots of lobbying Congress involved here. This information hardly prepares one for meeting her. She's a gorgeous, very feminine blue-eyed blonde with creamy skin and a radiant smile that make her look twenty-something. When she smiles, you think, this girl would make a wonderful friend; she's so empathetic and real. When asked why she switched from business to education, she says she sold her last company and went on a celebration vacation with her then husband. "We left our two grammar school children at home," she says, "and when we returned, I got the shock of my life: a message from Stuart Hall. 'Your son cannot read,' it said." As she remembers, she shakes the long wavy hair that she trims herself during teleconferences. "Horrible visions of an adolescence filled with depression, drugs, despair rushed at me, so I asked where to go for help. At the end of a year, it became apparent that the existing facilities didn't help, at least not enough. She's a big supporter of the New Three R's, a program of social, psychological, and cognitive intervention that can help nonreaders. "The brains of true dyslexics have been studied." She mentions a local Fortune Five genius whose eponymous company is a national brand. He's dyslexic, and he joined a group of subjects (all with dyslexia and IQs over 140), who solved problems while MRIs, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, recorded their brain activity. "The studies showed that these people are in fact wired differently, and their cortical function is entirely different from the general population's," she says. Now her son is off to college after nine acceptances, and her daughter, also a dyslexic, has graduated from college and is on a fast career track. She explains the new approach to teaching these people: combine phoneme awareness with phonetics and then put symbols and sounds together. Learn to deconstruct and then build a scaffold by visualizing and verbalizing. Comprehension and fluency follow once the pattern is set. "Our primary mission is to unite scientific research, education practice and technology toward the goal of improving education for all children," she says. "We will mobilize practices and programs that prove to be highly effective into schools, after-school programs and the homes of students . . . Through 'gold standard' research, we will analyze, design and disseminate winning practices and programs that target instruction to many different learning profiles, improving both the strengths and weaknesses that are inherent in all learners . . . Our ultimate goal is establishing a research institute that will unite scientists from varying disciplines (brain sciences, biological sciences, environmental sciences, behavioral sciences, education sciences, and genetic sciences) to study and develop a comprehensive understanding of how the mind works best, environmental factors that may impair neurological functions, various biological issues, genetic traits effecting cognitive abilities; and the behavioral and emotional dynamics of learning aptitude."