I moved house a lot when I was younger, so this issue went largely unnoticed. I would find myself in just enough trouble, then I would change schools. “Oh, Rachel’s just settling in.” “When she finds her feet she will be fine.” Of course I wasn’t fine, but the fact I was bright, stayed out of playground fights & kept my head down protected me from most problems. That was until 1976.
In 1976 I came to live in Greater Manchester, and to my sixth & final primary school. By now I was ten. I had always managed to hide the problems I had with maths. Despite changing schools so often I was always popular & I overcame my maths difficulties by sitting next to the person who was good at maths. Simple. I was very good with shapes, symmetry & stuff like that, but anything to do with numbers might well have been a foreign language (which I also can’t do). I had a ‘lovely’ teacher - who I won’t name, ok then I will, Mrs Schofield who uncovered my secret & promptly put in the bottom group. Not just the bottom group for my year, but the bottom group for the younger year. I was now officially thick. I learned my times tables by rote, then the next day couldn’t remember any of it. At no point did anyone question why I knew the oldest man in the bible was 969 but I was completely baffled by what numbers this was divisible by.
I didn’t really put my hand up to answer questions anymore. Mrs Schofield would always have a smart response & I could no longer be bothered with it. What I loved to do was read. My reading was never a problem (I now know this is unusual). I could always recognise the shapes of the words, how the words, sentences & paragraphs looked on a page. I marvelled at how someone could not only organise their thoughts but write it all down correctly & in the right order.
One day class 4R had to choose a reading book and the book I was reading at the time was the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I wanted this book as my reading book. Mrs Schofield had other ideas. In fact Mrs Schofield didn’t believe me when I said I was reading this book & made me bring my book to school & read for her. For ten minutes I read beautifully, I watched her face change from smug challenge to absolute disbelief. Feeling my confidence grow I went on to tell her about Mark Twain & how he became named so. In those few minutes the balance was restored.
But not for long. I again started to put my hand up & answer questions. I knew that the Belgians spoke Flemish. I’d even managed to learn that there were 180 degrees on a straight line - I visualised it. I had proved without any doubt that I was clever. This fact was accepted by Mrs Schofield & things were looking up. WRONG. Everything took so long to do, my spelling was awful, all facts were out of order, my handwriting was all over the place and if something didn’t capture my imagination I couldn’t retain/recollect it. I’d proved I wasn’t thick. What I now was worse. Much worse. I was lazy.
“You can’t even be bothered to take the time to spell correctly”. “If you spent less time gazing out of the window your work would be done on time”. This of course was nonsense. I tried so hard to spell correctly, I just couldn’t. I couldn’t work out which vowel made which sound. I gazed out of the window because my head became so full of jumbled up stuff nothing made sense. My ‘punishment’ when the cane proved to be ineffective was to finish my work during PE. This wasn’t a problem because I couldn’t catch a ball either.
Secondary school continued much the same way. I found that I was very good at art & drama and was fascinated with history and surprisingly physics (O’Level physics was my greatest moment). I continued to read. I loved the novels of the nineteenth century. I read more plays; Oscar Wilde, Joe Orton, Dario Fo. At sixteen I left school & for reasons unrelated I also left home. I had a variety of ok jobs and even supported myself as an actor briefly. I worked in catering & ended up as manager of a busy restaurant which I loved but I wanted to do something more creative.
At the age of 25 I decided I was going to go to university, my partner at the time thought I was mad but encouraged me & supported me. I applied to Huddersfield & was amazed when I was offered a place studying English and Theatre Studies.
People were more interested in the content of my work than my spelling & organisation and things appeared to be going well. Until one day my course senior lecturer wanted to see me. Here we go again I thought. He asked if I would agree to see a psychologist. A bit puzzled I agreed. The psychologist’s report came back saying that I was dyslexic. Surprisingly, this fact was at the time of little importance to me. It wasn’t until the university counsellor said I would have an entitlement to additional time to complete essays & exams did the full impact of what I’d been told hit me. If I’d been diagnosed as dyslexic earlier etc etc. I did well at university, this was the days before everyone had access to a computer & my essays were literally cut and pasted. I cut them up, paragraph by paragraph & the stuck them onto paper in the right order. I found stuff that worked for me, I’m very visual & everything was colour coded, highlighted & coloured in. Anyone trying to read my notes was fascinated by the colours & little pictorial representations, but it all made sense and I could organise it into something that made sense to other people.
After uni I worked in mental health for a while then went on to take a PGCE & became an English teacher but I still wasn’t doing what I wanted. It still wasn’t creative.
Over the years I have become fascinated with dyslexia & how dyslexic people learn. How they find ways to overcome such difficulties as I had, and this has led me to teaching dyslexic children. In a way I have come full circle.
I would love to say things have changed since 1976 & Mrs Schofield and in a lot of respects they have, in that people know there is a thing called dyslexia & it affects reading and spelling, but in my experience dyslexia isn’t really being addressed in school. I put strategies in place for pupils which are ignored. I give my pupils Post Its, highlighters, coloured pens only to be told they weren’t allowed to use them. I’ve bought talking books, I’ve recorded my own voice, I’ve recorded the pupil’s voice to be told they were not allowed to listen to them. In September another school year starts. We have loads of new staff. Perhaps next school year will be different.
At the beginning of this blog a made a reference to Leonardo Da Vinci. It is thought that he was dyslexic.
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