A number of years ago I was asked to write this human interest piece for Absolutely Education talking about my personal experience of dyslexia, my experience as the parent of a dyslexic child and as a professional working in the field. Since then, as dyslexia has (thankfully) made its way more into the education mainstream, my work has tended to focus more on ADHD and Autism as that is where the greater gap in psychoeducation currently lies. HOWEVER it is important that our dyslexic kids are not forgotten. Although it is great that dyslexia is now a more integral part of the 'education conversation', I do worry at times that the term has become so normalised that we can forget that these kids still need support and their experience needs to be heard and understood.
With this in mind, I felt it was timely to revisit this piece:
My Son, Dyslexia and Me
The colour coded spines of the Oxford Reading Tree books were the bane of my existence when my son was learning to read. I was not surprised when reading proved difficult for him, being dyslexic myself I expected it, the problem was seeing the pain in my little boy’s face in this very public display of difference. The dyslexic child gets stuck between that rock and hard place as they become old enough to notice they are different from their peers but too young to understand why. The careless comments of teachers or other mums when they saw my son’s scrawled, illegible writing; suggesting my thoughtful boy was careless or lazy. I boiled inside knowing the herculean effort involved for him to produce just a few sentences by hand.
… and so it goes for the dyslexic child.
Just setting out as a Specialist Teacher back then, I knew what was next. Despite teaching children like my son every day, there would be no simple way through this. My son would need a different tool kit than his peers and I would need to find a way to help the school to understand and see the bigger picture. I felt like a combination of the Lone Ranger and Robinson Crusoe; a masked rider charging forth brandishing my Dyslexia Institute Literacy Programme in one hand, while simultaneously charting a path through what I knew would be an unknown and unknowing wilderness with the other.
Perhaps the greatest challenge was to not project into my child my own painful experience of growing up in the unsympathetic education system of the 1970s and 80s. There was no real understanding of dyslexia in schools back then and therefore, no useful rationale for a child like me who consistently mastered IQ tests (big business in the 70s) yet could not learn to properly read or write. To the school it had been simple, I was difficult and lazy - end of story. I manage to keep my head more or less down from 1970 – 83 and somehow, miraculously arrived at university, though woefully unprepared. On the cusp of being kick to the curb due to my poor grades, I agreed to meet Will Ryan in the Learning Support Centre. I am forever grateful to him for what happened next when he said, ’I don’t think the problem is you can’t write, I think it’s that no one has ever showed you in a way that works for you.’ We soon found, not only could I write, I was actually very good at it. It was then that I fell in love with academia, my fervour for it has only grown through the years.
In its simplest terms, the dyslexic brain processes language differently, so while dyslexics may excel visuospatially or with non-verbal reasoning (and are often verbally adept), the way the brain and the hand sync up to write does not become fully ‘automatic’, which is what one needs in school where we must listen, look and write simultaneously. Understanding my son’s neurology, I knew he could sit in Writing Club until the cows came home but it would not give him what he needed. As the inimitable Dr Sally Shaywitz from the Yale Centre for Dyslexia and Creativity said ‘Dyslexia robs people of time’. It is recovering time through skills like touch typing, creative uses of technology, granting extra time for completing certain tasks, exam technique and dyslexia friendly revision skills where that very able child can reclaim the time lost in the classroom where the clock reigns supreme.
This was my son’s road.
The most important thing any school can offer a dyslexic child is this understanding of their reality and a offer a genuinely flexible approach to discover how that child works best.
I will never forget when my son rang me from university in his first term to tell me he achieved a 1st.
Emergent with strength and pride from the wilderness, he’s not looked back since...
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