funny the things that happen to a dyslexic

Many dyslexics feel isolated. Remember, you are never alone

I  qualified as an inclusive education teacher oh wayyy wayyyyy back in 1995. I went to the Bolton Institue of Higher Education and took a years PGCE and I really loved the course and working with the student's on the course. I originally applied to do the PGCE course in Greenwich London I lived in London it made sense to do the course there. However I didn't get on the course can't remember why not. I later found out that someone from Bolton didn't get on the PGCE in Bolton but got into Greenwich.

Obviously I passed the course and thus began my teaching career working with students with learning and / of physical disabilities. This meant I could be working with tetraplegic students one day and students with mental health issues the next.

Part of my job including providing pre course tests for students to ensure they had the right level of English and maths to get on a course of an appropriate level. I won't get into the rights and wrongs of this right now. However, I came across quite a few young people described as disaffected learners. This is a euphemism for students who hadn't achievde at school for whatever reason, who were disruptive and or who had gotten into trouble with the police etc. All of them had left school without any qualification what so ever.

The testing showed that many of the student's were not able to attend courses they wanted to attend because of this. Oh yes they could take more basic level English or maths classes but could take any practical based courses because none existed. Almost all these students didn't want to take the basic English and maths courses. They had already tried to do this in school and had failed but they did want to do other courses. Engineering kept on being mentioned when i was talking with them.

At the time I was teaching what were then called vocational access courses so I designed a vocational access course in engineering for these students. It enabled students to do things like mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and sound engineering etc. Oh yes English and maths was in there too but it was all based around what they were doing on the course. It was relevant to the students. In the first year we took on a cohort of 12 students.

The hardest part of all this for me was training the engineering teachers in inclusion because none had ever really worked with disaffected students or with many disabled students for that matter. So it was all new for them, some felt a course for students who struggled with the basics of English and maths had no validity but others really got into the whole inclusion agenda.

I taught the English and maths side of the course which was fine but I had to learn a lot about engineering to make the learning in class relevant to the students. It soon became obvious to me because of my own dyslexia that over half the students were dyslexic. I needed to do some specialist dyslexia training. It was the start or my journey to specialising in dyslexia.

The college where I was working at the time provided this specialist training and it was fantastic. But I must have become the most tested person for dyslexia. As I was the only dyslexic on the course my classmates all gave me dyslexic tests lol. Then there was the Dyslexia specialist taking the course. 

I would be writing away or answering a question and the teacher would suddenly put one finger on her nose pointing to me with another finger and exclaim to the whole class, "See look this is how a dyslexic would do this or that". Looking back on it now I can laugh but at the time it was quite disconcerting.

Anyway that's how I started my career as a dyslexia specialist.

Getting back to the students I was working with on the engineering course all passed and went on to other courses in engineering.

#PeaceLoveGrooveyness to you all

Steve #UniqueDyslexic McCue