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In October 2019, we ramped up our intensive rebuilding of Matt’s cognitive architecture. A colleague and occupational therapist referred us to Kathy Johnson, MS. Ed. Her expertise in cognitive retraining was a godsend; she arrived as if on a magic carpet, carrying a toolkit as unconventional as it was demanding.
Kathy had refined her skills over the years, beginning with her own daughter’s classroom challenges and expanding to help other students transition from learning disabilities to successful learners. Kathy is the creator of the Pyramid of Potential, a developmental model designed to address the root causes of learning struggles. Rather than just providing tutoring, her approach emphasizes the remediation of underlying brain development. Beyond students, she now applies her knowledge to individuals with Parkinson’s disease, a condition involving cognitive decline that impacts executive functions like planning, memory, and language. She willingly invited Matt to join her Brain Training group. In a way, it was a unique opportunity for her; unlike others in her group who wished to slow down an impending loss, Matt had the potential for significant improvement.
At first, Matt was reticent. It was a massive commitment—every afternoon for an hour, five days a week—that crowded an already busy calendar. It required him to bundle up against the cooler temperatures, warm up to new faces, and adapt to unfamiliar group dynamics. In social settings, his limited language skills would instantly jam as if he had lockjaw. Yet, in my mind, that was precisely why this was the perfect place for him to grow. As his relationship with Kathy blossomed and the friendly group members nurtured him, his hesitation faded. He made a deep commitment to the group—and to the significant mountain of homework that came with it.
This commitment was made even more difficult by the weight our family was facing at home. As I previously shared, I was battling breast cancer, overwhelmed with surgery and a calendar full of Matt’s appointments alongside my own, trying to stay composed. Sometimes, during his sessions, I would walk across the street to the historic Congress Park to pray and regain my optimism. By February, as I started six weeks of daily radiation, Kathy’s compassion extended beyond Matt to our entire family; she kindly let me leave Matt in her care, giving me just enough time to scoot to the hospital for my treatment and back again.
Kathy took everything in stride and, without interruption, began formulating the best plan to rebuild Matt’s mind. As vital as it was to pinpoint his impairments, it was equally important to leverage what was still working. Kathy quickly pointed out two key strengths: first, that recalling digits was far easier for Matt than letters; and second, his creative "Alphabet Strategy." When Matt couldn’t recall a specific word, he would mumble under his breath, mouthing the alphabet—or counting through a sequence of numbers—until he hit the first one in the target word—a spark that often ignited the full memory. In fact, even eight years later, he occasionally reverts to this fundamental approach to retrieve an elusive word.
Under her watchful eye, her evaluation quickly revealed how much effort that "spark" required. For example, during the first week, she handed Matt a sheet of random figures from the Equipping Minds workbook and asked him to vocalize them aloud. Matt looked at the first entry, 8, and whispered to himself, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,” before finally saying “8” aloud. He did the same for the number 5, and the next, and the next. In that moment, Kathy learned two imperatives: it would be a long time before Matt could keep pace with a metronome—an essential tool in her training arsenal—and, even more importantly, she confirmed that this data was still inside, just waiting to be liberated. For now, he could only recognize the number by indirect means. This was a key building block.
Having garnered this knowledge, work began in earnest. One of Kathy’s primary tools was a deceptively simple device: the metronome. To a musician, the beat tempo keeps time; to a TBI survivor, it acts as a pacer for the brain’s internal wiring. Brain injuries often disrupt temporal processing—the brain's ability to coordinate different regions to perform a single task at a specific moment. By practicing repetitive exercises to a steady click-click-click, Matt was engaging in neural synchronization. This rhythmic training acts like a physical therapist for the mind, strengthening the "highways" between healthy cells to bypass damaged areas. The exhausting rigor forced Matt’s brain to self-correct in real-time. We knew that when he complained his "brain was hurting," it was the literal sound of new neural pathways being forged.
Her emphasis on his abilities gave us a boost of confidence; it was fuel to press on toward the next horizon. As Kathy got to know Matt better, a parallel truth came to light: his silence wasn't a lack of thought but a communication bottleneck. Matt was still a man of depth and intellect; he just needed someone to help him open the right door. Typically, Matt answered questions with a simple "yes," "no," or "I don’t know." One grand afternoon, a breakthrough happened when Kathy asked what he did in his spare time. Matt managed a single word: "Read."
Through a series of careful, binary questions—Fiction or non-fiction? Science fiction?—Kathy struck gold. Matt wasn’t just reading; he was immersed in the complex world of Harry Potter. When Kathy couldn’t remember the names of the books other than The Sorcerer’s Stone, Matt excitedly interjected, "4!" specifying the one he was enjoying, The Goblet of Fire, a dense, 700-page novel. As they departed, Kathy mused, “It is a sobering reminder that many people are thought to lack intelligence when, in reality, they are simply waiting for someone to help them navigate the terrain of their own minds.”
Kathy’s assessment confirmed the same frustrating truth—a ‘mechanical gear-slip’ noticed months earlier in speech therapy. Matt couldn’t sound out words phonetically and relied instead on a mental inventory of words he recognized on sight; until he could relearn the connection between letters and sounds, his language progression would be stunted. Following her suggestion, we tried 'Reading Reflex,' an unusual teaching method that focused on breaking words into sounds rather than using phonics linked to visual letters. It was an attempt to provide a different way home—a strategy to bypass the broken phonetic gears. Although we eventually set it aside because it became a 'bone of contention,' the attempt itself was a testament to our philosophy: we would try every tool available and lean into our most important tools of all—our determination and perseverance.
Once teased to life, Matt’s proficiency with numbers soon locked in place, and in no time, he was able to recite a grid of one hundred digits (1 to 9) with ease. However, switching to letters remained an uphill climb, and identifying animals was nearly impossible. Even more mysterious was how colors—particularly red—proved strangely evasive. To span these gaps, we spent upwards of two hours a day at home circling A’s and squaring C’s. This 'task-switching' forced the two hemispheres of his brain to communicate—a mentally draining, nevertheless indispensable process for reclaiming his fluency.
We eventually graduated to a complex worksheet of colored arrows pointing in four different directions. The exercise was a gauntlet for his processing speed and working memory—the "mental scratchpad" that lets us do the work in our heads. First, Matt had to translate colors into numbers (green is 1, blue is 2) and write them as quickly as possible. Then came the ultimate challenge of multi-layered logic: correlating the colored arrow with its number while drawing its associated symbol (1 is an X, 3 is a square). Matt became a star student on this task.
In January 2020, the "haze" was thinning, and by March, the payoff for this mountain of work appeared in the most rewarding places. Matt was doing better speaking in sentences, and on a particularly fruitful day, he emerged from a session declaring that his brain felt "sharper." He proved it minutes later at Juicy Burger, where he stepped up to the counter and gave his order to a stranger with a level of confidence and clarity we hadn't seen before.
Eager to keep the momentum going, Kathy generously offered one-on-one sessions tailored to Matt’s word-retrieval problem. They began with drills using a list of engineering terms—RAM, ROM, and NORS—forging a creative link back to his professional identity. In a stepwise progression, Kathy then incorporated Matt’s old Lafayette College lesson plans into their sessions. As Matt role-played the professor and Kathy played the student, the transformation was staggering. She was blown away by how well he explained complex engineering concepts in an accessible way. In that glimpse, Matt the patient receded, and the brilliant 'Professor Watkins' appeared once again, standing at the front of the classroom.
Kathy later remarked that in all her years, she had never seen a student work harder. Watching him move from the slow "1-2-3-4...8" counting to the rapid-fire symbol translation was proof that the "highways" were finally opening up. Kathy attributes his success to several factors: Matt was extremely smart to begin with; his brain’s fundamental wiring remained strong; and he had a support system willing to work with him for hours each day. Yet ultimately, in her experience, the individual’s desire is the crux, and there was no denying or squelching Matt’s burning desire to get back to teaching as quickly as possible.
I sometimes wonder where that drive truly originated. In those early days, was Matt’s brain even capable of generating that level of sustained motivation on its own? Or was I acting as his external frontal lobe—providing the discipline, the schedule, and the "can-do" spirit until his own engine could catch fire? Perhaps his progress was a reflection of our shared will; my determination acting as the bridge until his own desire was strong enough to take the wheel, or maybe I’m underestimating the level of recovery within, which can’t be measured. Regardless, what matters is that it's real.
© 2026, Sarah Watkins
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