In my world of school there are 6 years to senior highschool. The first three not so important years 7, 8 and 9 are really there to get you use to being challenged a little more than in primary school, the methods they use are exactly the same as primary school.
Year 10 is the big year, I was 15 in year 10, younger than a lot of my peers, I was also the kid that every teacher loved to hate. The kid that a lot of other kids made fun of. Often times I would be on the shcool bus and the taunts would start, those nasty taunts that happen ohh so often when young children test their own powers of words and personal identity. Its nothing new.
Usually at home in my very small bedroom I would stare out of my window at night, having finished two hours of home work and study, I'd talk to the stars in the night sky and hope for better things. Hope that I could make something of my life, something better than the taunts and sillyness of those kids who I felt didn't understand.
I always tried in those early days of schooling, simply because I enjoyed learning. I enjoyed acing exams but then something happened. I started to slip, my grades began to tumble to a level I had never ever had before. My father tried to help me with different study methods, he'd talk to me and ask if there was something wrong. I couldn't see what it was, I just became frustrated.
In year 10 my math was so bad I was in the dummy class, those taunting friends now taunted for another reason, of course I wasn't in the top of the class anymore, I was in the bottom of the bottom. The dunderhead class. English was much the same, the only subject I had kept my grades on was science and the reasons elluded me to no end. History and all of my other social science classes were abissmal and became dangerously low, to the point the school social worker thought something was wrong at home.
An auntie, that to this day I still adore, the kind of women who is ever so ellegant, smart, intelligent and very poised was visiting our father. Of course I came up as a topic of interest, you see she always loved the fact that one of dads kids was doing okay in the academic world.
It was this Auntie that helped me in my final two years at highschool, she realised I was dyslexic. All of the schooling so far in primary and little highschool had ignored my problem and labeled me either very smart or as was now happening a dunderhead. She checked the way I read, the way I spelt words, the way I came to a conclussion, all ass about. The only reason science was working for me was that it is a visual subject in essence, even formula are visual.
Dyslexics come in many shapes and forms, mine is that it enters my brain perfectly normal, upon triggering a question to retreive the information I mix it up, when flustered I even begin to talk ass about, by that I mean I talk with words that are pronounced incorrectly, spoken with the end at the front and the front at the end. (Lucky I didn't get flustered while making my movie huh?)
At 16 this became my only problem in life, the fact, the more I flustered the worse I got took away my confidence. Auntie helped when she could and so did my dad by providing ways for me to slow down, to visualise answers before I spoke them, to flag information so that when I recall I do it with an image, with this method I can actually do okay, I tend to not make mistakes, not make a fool of myself.
I worked very hard in my year 10 studies to make sure I got good grades. It didn't work, in exams I fumbled and missspelled the simplest of words, my concepts were ass about, the answers riddles more than anything else and I flunked year 10.
I became so disappointed that I told my father I would prefer to get a job, he was understanding but asked me to stay another year just to be sure that it wouldn't settle and let me go on to further studies. You see thats the only reason I ever wanted to try, those dreams at my window were dreams of being a teacher, of showing people the world of knowledge and wisdom out there to be had, to see a young face like mine brighten with a new idea or concept.
Can you imagine how devestating it is to feel dumb at 16, to be made to feel stupid by a school system that cannot in its entirety teach those people like myself with backward minds? devestating is a word I like to use. I had zero confidence, at 16 like many teenagers I had pimples, I was awkward in my new found budding breasts, my hips slightly larger yet thin frame and long legs all going the wrong way, the wrong way along with my mind.
So my dreams of becoming a teacher were fading, with every exam mark stating my lack of grammer, my lack of syntax my lack of this and that.... what can you do? I gave up. In year 11, second last year of highschool I gave up and got a job, now in my mid thirties I wished I'd perservered. I still have terrible syntax, terrible grammer but I maintained my joy of learning, I still get excited, that tingle in the pit of your stomach when you find you didn't know but now do???
I won't be going back to school any time soon, my life's direction and hopes have changed, they've turned into a different kind of desire to share. I just want to be a writer, I'm getting there, for the last year I've said naught about it, I'm making efforts in starting small. I won second prize in a simple competition that was state wide, I've come close to being first in many others. I write regularly for a publication in our area, and enjoy hiding amongst the words on the pages of a book I intend to finish some time in my life, when who knows?
I spend a lot of time making sure that with my submissions there are no mistakes, thats why here I let go, it takes time and a lot of energy to be perfectly correct when writing, for a dyslexic, a dunderheard so here I like to relax, to let the idea come accross and not just worry about a period, a missplaced comma, a missing apostrophe a run on sentence....:-P
I don't know why I wrote this, one of those posts that just comes out I guess, maybe its Beyonds request for decent reading material here, it might not be well written guys but I'm sure its interesting none the less.
