How do you spell?
Do you spell Birmingham with and e or an i?
Well how was I supposed to know?
Words and letters just sound the same
after a while of trying to decipher
which one comes first and what come next
it’s really no cause for laughter.
For the English language is just so tuff
with homophones a plenty,
so how do you know which one to chose
oh yes and incidentally,
how do you know which rule to use
i before e, plurals and more
prefixes,
suffixes,
letters that are silent,
it’s no wonder as it’s so confusing,
that I make mistakes
and my spelling is a mess
as it is all completely bemusing.
A mistake I made in sewing class is still lodged in my memory. It was one of many times that I quickly reduced a teacher to laughing at me, right in front of me and even worse, right in front of the whole class. She did not even save it for the staffroom. Although I am under no illusion at all that it would have been met with yet more laughter as she regaled the whole sorry tale to the rest of the teachers at her earliest opportunity. We were each making our own skirt and of course needed to follow instructions and a pattern.
Looking back, I do not even think the skirt was that complex or difficult, just a simple circle with a waist band and zip. I of course did not read the instructions carefully enough and I ended up with a skirt which was far too short for me. I was the only child to make a mistake, the only one who had to make the skirt differently.
The teacher suggested that I add a frill to the bottom to add extra length. Well, it looked hideous, no it really did, even to a 12-year-old girl who was not driven by fashion due to her parents’ complete lack of spare money to buy anything at all remotely suggestive of being in fashion. The material was an awful dark green and I remember little ditsy flowers on the fabric, it was hideous and I think I wore it once.
The second error I made with a craft item came much later, at the age of 24 and very early in my marriage to my husband Darren. I knit him a jumper, a jumper in plain blue thinnish wool with a line about an inch wide across the chest of white and red squares. I knit it well although I also knit two backs! Darren wore it far more often than I wore my skirt, he was very kind. Both these errors were down to me not following instructions carefully. This was down to the fact that I disliked reading them so much. It is of course not the last time that the reading of instructions was my downfall.
In order to complete and carry out a list of sometimes fairly complex instructions I needed to read everyday words, but I also needed to read some new, subject related words, words that were pertinent to the thing I was making. With poor reading comprehension, weak tracking skills and a complete dislike of reading so much as the back of a cornflake box; this task was always going to be hard. More than that, it was always going to be extremely tedious, laborious and not in the least bit pleasurable.
Instructions
Read the instructions, follow the rules
for then you’ll know what do.
The step by step guide
from beginning to end
will take you all the way through.
But what happens if you skip
a word or a line
what happens if your eye darts across
page after page
not taking it in
the results are surely not good.
I need to read it two
or three times before
any comprehension of text.
It frustrates me to do this,
takes far too much time and I end up
just getting vexed
If instructions aren’t followed,
You will end up in strife.
You’ll end up with
mistakes and errors.
You may also end up
with no will at all
to continue to read in this way.
So, ask the computer to read,
watch a video to show
the instructions
by which you can then follow.
So, as I am very poor at following written instructions I always try to avoid doing so. I There are fortunately though alternatives and different ways to follow instructions these days. YouTube is helpful as there are visual step by step guides available with videos of actual people doing the same task as the one you are trying to follow by just reading alone.
Assistive technology is also helpful as the laptop will read out whatever is on the screen. This enables you to be able to better follow text rather than rely purely on your own reading. You can also then of course pause the reading, go back and hear it again, whatever needs to be done in order to be able to follow the written instructions and be better placed to compete the task. I would and still do skip, scan and get completely uninterested in the majority of text extremely quickly. I of course forget what I have read due to this very spasmodic approach with just glimpses of coherent fluidity. That is if I am reading silently to myself. If I read aloud, I am so much better and am able to read in a much more fluent and accurate manner. Although the amount of actual meaning and memory of what I have just read is extremely woolly indeed and not to be relied on at all.
I love reading stories to children and am happy to present training or read a lesson in a church service. I still though will not remember too much of what I have read, but I am certainly a better reader when I can hear what I am reading. If it is a lesson in church, I will always type it out and change some of the more challenging words or names of places or people in the bible as they may well be quite difficult to decode and pronounce. I spell them out phonetically using hyphens to break them up into their syllables so making the reading much more accessible to me.
Assistive software is very supportive of reading. A good variety of laptops, kindles and iPads will read to you. Scanning text using a reading pen is a further example of how this difficulty can be easily and very well supported. Reading pens should be more readily available in classrooms. Yes, they cost money but it is surely money well spent if all children are to be able to access the text. Spare a thought for the child with dyslexia in a guided reading session in English. So often this consists of reading in a group, one child at a time, so the child with dyslexia will sit feeling anxious as he or she waits for it to be their turn to read. They end up not taking in any of the reading prior to or following their time of reading as all they are concerned with watching for when it will be their turn. This clearly leaves the whole exercise completely futile as nothing is learned and the child with dyslexia experiences anxiety throughout the session.
If just one child is supported by the use of a reading pen, then it is worth every penny if the result is the opening up of a whole world of suddenly accessible information. These technologies are very much a part of our children’s world. Children are growing up in an ever increasing and very rapid and instant technological world and I feel we are doing them a dis-service if these things are not considered for daily use in the primary and secondary classroom.
Back to the bullying. Unfortunately and very sadly children get bullied in school, a minority of course but almost 35% of children in school experienced face to face bullying in 2024! A surely shocking statistic. I was bullied about having red hair, short hair, curly and wavy hair. I was bullied for not ever wearing a summer dress in secondary school, as my parents could not afford them. I was bullied about not ever achieving and needing to go into ‘the other class’ for ‘support’ lessons. The word support was completely used falsely here. Support is something that gives help, makes something a little better, or a little easier and results in enabling a child to achieve.
These lessons, again I use the word extremely loosely, were just the opposite. I remembered absolutely nothing of what was done in the sessions and of course I then had to re-join the rest of the class who were part way through their maths lesson, or English lesson.
I had to try to pick up from nothing, as I had missed the introduction to the lesson. Of course, Mrs Smith did not even consider that, when writing her hateful comment of the pig’s ear mess I had made of my work!
The bullying continued, as make no mistake that teacher was a bully, each and every lesson. Every time it was maths; I was subjected to snide looks and comments. I always had to stay behind due to the words ‘See me’ written so hard into the paper with angry red ink that it was clearly visible in reverse 3D on the other side of the page. I feel that this shows the intensity of the teachers writing which shows her cross and accusing mood at the time.
Another bullying incident that I remember was even worse as it became physical. It happened as a result of one of my bullies calling another girl a slag. The girl in question did not even hear this first hand. But of course, she got to know through the rapid grape vine of over enthusiastic young pre-teens desperate to stir up any sort of trouble and delight in its gossipy fallout. Rather than own up to her own stupidity and admit to using the abusive term, she needed someone to blame, she needed someone to get her out of the panicked situation she now found herself in, a scapegoat. Of course, her scapegoat was me.
A couple of days later was when I actually got to know about the three words that were spoken, “She’s a slag”. Me and my two bullies, remember keep your enemies close, and the girl in question with her little hareem of ‘hard girls’ were in an English classroom waiting for the teacher to arrive after lunch. I was practically pushed into the gang by my bullies and one said I was the one who had called her a slag!
If I focus hard enough, I can feel the pain in my right eye where her tightly clenched fist swiftly and harshly landed. It was a miracle my back eye was not that visible as nothing was said to me at home and I had not yet reached the dizzying heights of using makeup and had not even heard of the word concealer. But there were no tears.
