My Fight with Dyslexia on Behalf of my DS – Pt 3
DS excelled at sport, he is an amazing sports person, both in skills and in team work, his classmates vied to be on his team and the school won many competitions because of his playing ability. DS loves the word “discombobulated”, when he held his hand up in class, he was ignored and when he made a point of being acknowledged, he said he was discombobulated., the teacher responded by asking if he knew any other 6 syllable words and then made him leave the classroom, this happened on multiple occasion, the consequence to this was he lost his good standing, by losing it, he was unable to participate in school sport, this was the end of control the school behaviour system had over my DS. He became disruptive, challenging and disengaged to the point he didn’t even pretend to do anything.
I pulled him out of main stream schooling on the 5th August 2014.
I ran a battery of assessments to ensure I knew exactly what he could and couldn’t do and after I knew that, I deschooled for 5 months.
I was horrified, my DS had been taught to read as fast as he could, but in Yr. 8 his reading comprehension was at Yr.3 level, he couldn’t even follow medication instruction. His spelling was OK, but he had no ability to structure texts or indeed write anything that reflected his actual knowledge or his oral language skill and more sadly he didn’t care or want to. He genuinely thought he was useless and a failure and he didn’t see what was the point to it. With another Mum we spent almost 2.5 years working together to reinstate an interest in learning, working hard to reengage him in his ability to achieve what he wanted and to foster a belief that everyone who has the language ability he has, can be whoever and do whatever they want to.
He completed a Cert II in General Education in Yr.9, with the reasonable adjustments he was entitled to, he orally recorded many of his responses for his assessments, had a reduced number of written tasks and was expected to use assistive technology on everything he did. We provided a scribe for everything, he could record his answers, and we had a lecturer who was willing to learn about dyslexia and dysgraphia.
With all the apparent success he had been having, I recall him having an assessment returned because he had chosen to type it and it made no sense. I walked into the room and he was sitting on the couch with despair resonating around him, he was desolate, feeling a complete and utter failure, when we spoke he asked me why he couldn’t just write what he knew the answer to be and why his writing (typing) always ended up representing something a yr.3 would write and not what he wanted it to say. It was at that moment, that I knew I’d made the right choice, if I had have left him in the system he would have had no self-esteem, no success and I would have probably had a delinquent on my hands, one who had found anyone that would accept him. I was proud that with my support my DS was going to have a choice of career, one he wanted and one he could choose having achieved the required entry requirements on his own merit.