Do Australians Know What Dyslexia Is?

I take it you already know 

Of touch and bough and cough and dough? 

Others may stumble, but not you 

On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through? 

Well done! And now you wish, perhaps, 

To learn of less familiar traps? 

Beware of heard, a dreadful word 

That looks like beard, and sounds like bird.

 And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead; 

For goodness sake, don’t call it deed! 

Watch out for meat, and great and threat, 

(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

 A moth is not a moth in mother, 

Nor both in bother, broth in brother. 

And here is not a match for there, 

And dear and fear and bear and pear, 

And then there’s dose and rose and lose..... 

Just look them up..... and goose and choose, 

And cork and work and card and ward, 

And font and front and word and sword. 

And do and go, then thwart and cart. 

Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start. 

A dreadful language? Why, man alive, 

I’d learn to talk it when I was five. 

And yet to read it, the more I tried, 

I hadn’t learned it at fifty-five.

We (poor students) were read as unworthy, laughable and often dangerous. Our school mates laughed at our “ugly shoes”, our crooked and ill-serviced teeth and the way we “stank”, as teachers excoriated us for our inability to concentrate in school, our “refusal” to come to school prepared with proper school supplies, and our ethical behaviour when we tried to take more than our allocated share of “free lunch”. Whenever backpacks of library books came up missing, we were publicly interrogated and sent home to “think about” our offences, often accompanied by notes that reminded our mother that as a poor single parent she should be working twice as hard to make up for the discipline that allegedly walked out the door with my father. When we sat, glued to our seats, afraid to stand in front of the class in our ragged and ill fitting hand-me-downs, we were held up as examples of unprepared and uncooperative children. And when our grades reflected our otherness, they were used to justify even more elaborate punishment that exacerbated the effects of our growing anomie.

This is an example of school from a poor student’s perspective. Students who struggle with literacy, suffer similar humiliation and shame.  Please try to see each student’s life through their eyes and not through the filter of a literate adult. They need positive, supportive and caring patience to learn.