All about me - Part 2

 Much as we might want to avoid labels they are put on us from an very early age and they shape what we think about ourselves. And those beliefs end up shaping us.

At school I was labelled shy, bright and lazy. There was no such thing as dyslexia in those days.  My mum tells me that my infant teachers thought I was 'backwards'.  I was so shy I barely spoke, I was slow to learn to read and even slower to complete any task that involved writing.

My first Junior school teacher was surprised to find that I was good a maths....I had been so slow in infant school I never got to the harder stuff.  I couldn't copy from the board, a standard task in those days. I was always last to finish anything....even my lunch.  I was uncoordinated and terrible at PE.

In Secondary school I was in top set for all subjects except English.  I had good general knowledge, I remembered every fact that I was taught effortlessly. I was good a maths and science but terrible at reading aloud, writing and spelling.  And I was still very slow...  ...so I was definitely 'lazy' and I was 'careless' with my work.

As an experienced teacher now, I read this and the signs of dyslexia are obvious.  But strangely I only realised I was dyslexic when I was training to be a special needs teacher.  My headteacher put me forward for dyslexia training as she felt I had a special empathy with the children who had learning difficulties in my classes. For me I just did what came naturally, I did what I thought all teachers did. I believed in all my children, I was convinced that with encouragement and guidance they could all achieve something. I guess some of this came from being misunderstood as a child.

I can still remember sitting through my first lot of dyslexia training. We looked at a list of common characteristics of dyslexic learners. Mentally I went through the list thinking about how many of them applied to me. Still I managed to dismiss the idea that I was dyslexic with the conclusion that these things must apply to many people.  When I went on a second training course and the same thing happened, I read the statements and thought, "I do that and that and that...." Slowly I started to accept that I must be dyslexic.

Looking back, being dyslexic explained many of the challenges and frustrations that I experienced as a teenager and young adult.  I could not copy a text without making a mistake, which cost me many hours of time as a student and infuriated my first headteacher when my set of reports were riddled with errors.  Any task that involved reading or writing seemed to take me twice as long as anyone else. This was evident when my friends completed assignments and lessons plans quickly and effortlessly.  It wasn't that I couldn't read or write well, it was just that each task was very time consuming. 

While I loved to read to myself, reading aloud still remained embarrassingly hard. I remember as a student teacher that class teachers often thought an easy and fun task was to read a story to the class. For me it was my idea of a nightmare, trying to keep track of the text, while holding the book so the children could see the pictures, deciphering unfamiliar names without any practice and trying to keep an eye on the children to manage their behaviour all at the same time. As student there was no escape, I had to endure this stressful ordeal, hoping the children would not sense my fear or laugh when I stumbled over my words. As a young teacher I could control my environment -I learnt a few stories so that I could tell them without really having to read, I opted for story telling whenever I could and the children loved this, I used story tapes for longer stories or used confident readers to read for me.

This ability to adapt and develop our own strategies is what makes many mildly dyslexic adults successful in their lives and careers. However I would not wish on anyone the stress of trying to deal with these difficulties alone, particularly as it become more evident that others around me were not struggling with the same things. This is where understanding yourself and reasons for your difficulties can be so empowering.