Selected highlights

Story: Acceptance, with problem-solving

When I taught a group of dyslexic students at university, they complained that they couldn’t use dyslexia as an excuse with me, because I’d just say, “OK. Let’s find the way round that, then.”

Story: A dyslexic passenger

One student knew he was dyslexic at a young age.  He’d had support at school.  He was good at sport and had a confident, cheerful outlook on life.  He continued support at university.  I was aware that he wasn’t gaining anything useful from the support sessions with me. 

I gave him an overview of the effects of dyslexia and how to deal with it.  I told him nothing would develop in his mind until he could see it was relevant to him.  I told him coming to support was a waste of his time until he wanted to make progress.  We kept the lines of communication open. 

He eventually came back saying my comments had made him reflect.  He realised he hadn’t put any effort into learning as a child; he’d used dyslexia as an excuse; he’d gone to the support sessions as a passenger.

He had treated support at university in the same way: as a passenger.  He has now recognised the impact of his dyslexia and comes for support with a readiness to develop skills.  He even wants to learn how the English language works.  He felt my comments were the first time he’d been challenged to face up to his dyslexia and deal with it.

Story: Not told as a child

Sam was in his fourth and final year of a degree course when he first came for support. 

He had been assessed while still at school.  So his parents had known he was dyslexic since he was 15.  They didn't tell him the result of the assessment because they were afraid he would use it as an excuse and not continue working.  Sam thinks they were right at that time of his life. 

He struggled in the first years of his university degree, which is often the case even when someone knows they are dyslexic.  He didn’t really communicate his struggles to his parents and so it wasn’t until partway through his third year that anybody thought the way he was struggling had anything to do with dyslexia or that there might be effective solutions to his problems. 

Sam acknowledged that he had effectively wasted 2½ years struggling when he could have been learning how to manage his dyslexia effectively.

Story: Don’t worry, we know you can’t do this

One student needed help with writing a major report.  We went through the standard collection of received wisdom for dealing with major projects.  We used different types of technology, programs and recording devices.  We drew up plans for the report, timetables and various lists for dealing with all aspects of getting the report written.

She was making a little bit of progress.  There were many issues to do with the work that had gone wrong and which undermined her writing fluency.

She was dyslexic and known to have mental health problems.

There was one session at which she had decided to face up to the enormous task she was trying to complete.  Gradually we could see that she was crippled by the legacy of kindly meant reactions from her childhood: “Don’t worry, we know you can’t do this.” 

She has a deep-seated belief that she can’t do anything and any time there was a difficulty with her writing, this belief got activated.  It is so deep it is going to take this student many years to be free of its influence.

The people in her childhood were doing the best they could, but the outcome was far from good and a huge burden for the student.

Story: Best case scenario: good techniques, minimal dyslexia

One student was doing a vacation job for a few weeks alongside me.

I observed her ways of working for several weeks. She had many strategies that dyslexic students use but didn’t seem to have any dyslexic problems.

I asked if she were dyslexic. She told me that she had a few quirky spellings, but she knew what they were. She explained that her mother was a specialist teacher for dyslexics and that her mother had recognised the early symptoms of problems and had taught her how to overcome them right from the start.

This student enjoyed all the riches of her strategies and thinking preferences without experiencing most of the problems, and without being bothered by those she did have.

Insight: Set in stone

Story: Sleeping is not doing

Insight: Children are told early on that ‘verbs are doing words’, and they are taught the patterns of verbs using doing words.  ‘Verbs are doing words’ becomes the oldest memory trace that can’t be modified.

Story: One dyslexic student objected, “Sleeping is not doing; it cannot be a verb.”

Story: Mal-sequencing in spelling

Michael Newby (1995) persuaded Tim Miles [editor of a book]that some spelling errors were mal-sequencing, or mistiming, rather than not knowing how to spell a word.

Certainly many students have described their writing problems as the mind racing ahead with thoughts while the hand lags behind.

The result is often that words the mind is thinking about get written into the text the hand is writing and the words look jumbled up.

Story: Not finding words

In a group of dyslexics, person A was giving directions to B.  It was a conversation, but neither was using words very well.  They were using hands and diagrams to ‘speak’ to each other.  At one point the rest burst into laughter.  “You aren’t using words! But B knows where to go!”

Story: Noticing curious behaviour

Often groups of students live together in a house.  They select their group because they all get on well together.  One student in such a group came to ask to be assessed for dyslexia.  The others in her house were dyslexic and already putting together ways to manage their dyslexic traits.  They had watched her using the same kinds of strategies so then they all discussed the problems they faced.  The others were convinced she was also dyslexic and that their shared experiences were why they all got on.  On assessment, she also turned out to be dyslexic.

Story: To London for a cup of coffee

One student was settling down to write his essay, and decided a cup of coffee would help. He found he’d run out of coffee, so he went down the corridor to borrow some from a friend. As the friend was out, he decided to go to the local shop and get some. The coach for London was picking up passengers outside the shop. So he got on and went to London.

Story: The effort to arrive at precisely the wrong time

One student discovered that the more she tried the worse the problems became and the more people emphasised any complications the more difficulty she had.

On one occasion, a tutor stressed that he had to go to a meeting at 3pm, so he would have time to see her at 2pm.  The stress on ‘3pm’ eclipsed the session start at 2pm.

The student was very pleased with herself to arrive exactly at 3pm; she had taken a lot of trouble to get herself there on time, to no avail.

Story: Not realising what you are doing

“You are so busy asking the question, you don’t realise that’s what you are doing” is the way one of my dyslexic colleagues describes her lack of grasp of what is happening when she is using words.

Story: Changed perspective 3: “I got one spelling right!”

A teacher was looking at some work with Lucy and commenting on the spelling.  Lucy had spelt one particular word many different ways, including one that was right. 

Lucy’s tactic was to use as many different versions in the hopes that one would be right. 

The teacher was puzzled by the variety and said to her, “Look you’ve got it right here, so why didn’t you get it right every time?”

Lucy, internally, was gleeful and thinking, “Yes, I got it right once!”

The external and internal views about the spelling were so different that there was no discussion about it, nor any development of spelling strategies; so Lucy made no progress from the conversation.

This story is not an unusual one.  It shows a behavioural outcome from Learned Confusion, p 44.

Story: “Meet you at the top of the road”

Two people A and B have agreed to meet “at the top of the road”.  A is walking along a path to the road.  B is coming to the road from a roundabout.  They have to agree a time for meeting because parking is difficult.  B was quite frustrated when he had to wait a long time for A.  Since this happened several times during a week, they decided to compare what they meant by “the top of the road”.

Figure 1 Where is the top of the road?

X marks the top of the road for the 3 people A, B and C

A and B have internal, mental maps with themselves at the bottom, at the point where they enter the road; which is why they wait for each other for ages.

B told the story to C and discovered that in C’s internal map she is at the top of her map, again where she enters the road.  She would have met with A as soon as they have both arrived.

Story: Time words have no meaning

One lad kept missing evenings out with friends.  They would all agree something like, “See you at 8 o’clock”.  He would even check that he was free.  The connection that was missing was: 8 o’clock was only an hour after dinner time and that the diary entry ‘dinner with Matt’ meant he was unlikely to be free at 8 o’clock. 

Similar but different things kept happening to him.  None of the solutions he tried worked until he saw that he was not really thinking about time, even when he was talking sensibly about it.

Story: I want to be there early for once

2 friends went to a birthday party together.  They arranged to go in one car. 

The driver emphasised that she wanted to be early and to arrive before 6pm.  She said she’d pick her dyslexic friend up an hour earlier, at 5. 

When she arrived at 5pm, the dyslexic wasn’t remotely ready, thinking there was still an hour left before the car owner would arrive. 

So they were unhappy and late.

The emphasis on arriving early made 6pm the important time.

When it comes to getting ready, the important time is when to start getting ready, so 6pm had become the time to start getting ready.

Story: I never start on time

One student came and said he could never start at the time he wanted to and that he wasn’t getting enough revision time.  He was getting depressed about his late starts and therefore not working well.

When we did a very detailed look at his timetable for the day, he realised he wasn’t putting in time to eat breakfast and that eating breakfast made him start revision later than he planned.

Once he put in time for breakfast and was no longer starting later than he expected, his revision went well.

Story: An inconsistent memory for space and direction

A manager frequently had to direct visitors to the office of the next person the visitor was going to see.  The manager’s memory for the route depended on the way she was facing.  She could remember details of corridors and spaces in the direction that she was facing, but if the route for the visitor turned a corner, she had no memory of what came next unless she turned to face the new direction.  But as she turned for the new direction, she lost her memory of the route she’d just described.  So to describe a complete route, she had to keep turning herself with every turn of the route.

Story: Clothes for the week

One headmistress set out all the clothes she would wear during a week every Sunday, so that choosing what to wear didn’t add an extra task to the morning.

Story: Architecture in mind maps

One student put a whole year’s architecture modules in mind maps that he put on his walls. He found he had to remember only one key idea on each map and then he could remember all the rest of the map.

Story: Distant deadlines

One person had three deadlines all in one week which was several months away. 

We had a single calendar sheet which went from the present day to the last of the deadlines.  When we put in her lectures, her holidays, some family events and calculated the amount of time she had for each deadline, she found she had just three weeks for each of the deadlines.

Realising how little time she had gave her the motivation to work seriously even though each deadline was several months away.

Story: Using punctuation to read

One student used the punctuation to help her read aloud while recording herself.  She didn’t try to understand what she was reading.  She used the punctuation to modulate her voice, so that it became softer at the end of phrases and sentences.

She then listened to her recording.  The rise and fall of her voice helped her to understand what she was listening to.  For her, this was much more satisfactory than re-reading a passage several times and still not understanding.  It was better than reading aloud on its own because she could go back over any passage if necessary.

Story: Someone knows about dyslexia

At my first role as university support tutor, the students had to fill in a form to request exam provisions every time they had exams.  The exams office were frustrated that the forms from dyslexic students were so badly filled in.  I told them to put example answers on the back of the letter that went with the exams form.  I stressed that the students needed to see the blank form and the answers at the same time, otherwise there would be no improvement.  The forms were then filled-in correctly.

One student told me the example being on the back of the letter told her that someone in the university knew the problems of dyslexia.  The knowledge reassured her to the point that she relaxed about her difficulties and found her own ways round them.

Story: Assessment test sidestepped

“Well!  He (the psychologist) said I’m dyslexic.  It makes sense of quite a few things and he explained some issues to me.  But he said the digit span [a test that is frequently used to assess auditory memory] showed I had a good auditory memory.  And in my head, I saw my hand as I imagined writing the numbers as he said them and I read them from the picture.  To read them backwards, I just read in the opposite direction. That’s not verbal.  I can’t do it without picturing it.”

Story: Feynman on testing thinking

Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, describes how he found out about his thinking in What Do You Care What Other People Think? Further Adventures of a Curious Character (Feynman, 1988).

He wanted to know how accurately he could count 60 seconds.  (He was accurate at 48 secs.) As a result of his experiments, he found out how he did the task.

After he talked to colleagues about his experiments, one of them repeated the trials.  They found that his colleague did the same task in a completely different way.  Feynman was talking to himself; his colleague was watching a tape with numbers on it going by.

Feynman wrote:

‘We discovered that you can externally and objectively test how the brain works; you don’t have to ask the person how he counts and rely on his own observations of himself; instead, you observe what he can and can’t do while he counts.  The test is absolute.  There’s no way to beat it; no way to fake it.’

Story: A spanner in the notes

One student came to me, for the first time, just before he had to do a presentation.  We discussed his thinking preferences and how he was making his notes.  He stopped making verbal notes for his presentation, because we had decided he was a visual thinker, and he drew his notes.  A week later he came back with a grin on his face; he said that his conclusion was a drawing of a spanner.  He looked at the spanner, knew what it meant; he looked his audience in the eye, and he “socked it to them”.

Story: Memory recall triggered by movement

One successful company executive could never remember whether she had put the milk back in the fridge at the end of the day; the question would surface in her mind just as she was dropping off to sleep and then, whether she got up to check or not, going to sleep became difficult.  She was a kinaesthetic thinker; she found that if she made some bizarre movement as she put the milk away, a different one every night, she could think of the movement, remember the milk going into the fridge, and go to sleep.

Story: Who eats the apple?

One school-teacher friend used to ask his children, “If you are hungry and there’s an apple on the table, is it any good if I eat the apple?”  “No, sir.”  “Learning is the same: it’s your brain that has to do it.”

Story: Pupil reluctance

Hugo was 10 years old when he started receiving support.  He was new to the idea that there were other ways of learning and, initially he was suspicious of some of the techniques.  The teacher didn’t think that he really believed they would work. 

They started with a target of learning how to spell some of the fairly short high‑frequency words that cannot be taught by using phonics, e.g. said, many, piece, etc.

So, on the ground they lined up as many footballs as there were letters in the word, i.e. 4 for ‘said’, 5 for ‘piece’.  He would shout out the word and then as he kicked each football as hard as he could, he said the name of the letter; so in auditory terms, it would sound like “said, S, kick, A, kick, I, kick, D, kick”.

They continued to go through this five‑minute routine every day until they had covered about 10 words.  At the end of the time, he was assessed and he could spell every word correctly.  The teacher thought he felt that a bit of magic had happened.

Hugo is so proud and pleased with his progress that he wanted his own name used in this story.

Story: Geography by 3 methods

One geography teacher said in a workshop, “By the time I’ve taught a topic in 3 different ways, almost all the children have got it.”

Story: Correct words but no spelling learnt

One girl was given a page of spellings to practise by writing each word out 3 times.  She handed in the finished page and it was accepted as correct.

What the teacher didn’t know was that her method was to write all the first letters down the page, then all the second, and third and so on going down the page each time until the words were finished.  Writing the complete words was too boring.