Teachers need to of course be aware of friendships, especially at the primary school age. Do not split children up just because they are friends. Never underestimated the support a young child can get from another child. Also never underestimate the damage that can be done if friends are not together or a child is put with their bullies.
Friends
Be my friend,
please would you?
Be my friend,
Please could you,
could you
be seen with the naughty one,
the one who was always in trouble?
Could you befriend
a little girl in need
of a playmate,
or am I just to stay in this bubble?
For a bubble of one is a lonely space
in which to spend all day.
I just want some help,
some support,
some comfort,
someone to take me away
from my issues,
my needs,
my constant rebukes from teachers
and chid alike,
I really would like a friend above all
to just go out and play.
I remember the girls, coming to school with their lovely new dresses, their pigtails adorned with pretty ribbons or long ponytails with hair bobbles and coloured slides to keep any wispy bits in. Then there was me, in the same old, same old, hand knitted jumpers and cardigans with horrific dark brown polyester trousers and one pair of brown, buckled school shoes from Clarkes shoe shop. Yes Clarkes shoes were always school shoes, one thing my mum did not skimp on. I do not know why but they always had to be brown, not pretty white or blue or red but brown. Probably because they would get muddy and dirty, but we did have shoe polish, anyway brown they were.
A seemingly little thing like the colour of a pair of shoes is very important to a young child. Now of course school uniforms include the type and colour of shoes that need to be worn, negating this potential threat for bullies to jump on. I did have a couple of nice dresses, but they had to be worn all week and I had to accompany them with those awful knee length white socks with the supposedly pretty cut out patterns.
Of course, I could do nothing about the length, colour or ferocious and untameable curl and wave of my hair so ribbons and grips were most definitely off the shopping list. Thank goodness my own three children grew up having had the security of wearing a school uniform. I am not sure any child truly ever really likes their school uniform or enjoys wearing it. I certainly did not in secondary school. But it is however, very supportive of equality and gives rise to some discipline and identity of belonging to a school. The thought of having to belong was repugnant to me, I did not want to even be remotely associated with school, never mind to feel as though I actually belonged there. If you belong somewhere you may feel secure, but I felt closed in, hemmed in with no means of escape.
In secondary school the girls had an option of wearing summer dresses, quite pretty light blue with ditsy little white flowers if I remember correctly. The trouble was that my parents just could not afford one. Bearing in mind how early we used to finish the end of the school year, at the end of June. This was just at the beginning of summer, so potentially the dress may be worn at longest for three weeks or so.
The following photo, taken at primary school possibly in year two or year three, shows the efforts of my mums knitting, a cream cable knit and a blue knit cardigan. I can bet my bottom dollar that if the photo was full length there, I would be in my brown polyester trousers and my brown buckled shoes. My hair actually looks fairly flat here, but you can see the bounce of curl almost moving in the picture as it tries to make its escape. I had probably had it combed, yes painfully combed just before the photo. The missing tooth can surely age me here.
Maths was always horrendous for me and actually very bad indeed as I never ever had any understanding of what was going on. I did though quite like working through the maths workbooks we were given to get on with. It is interesting that I felt I could actually let in, some sense of security in having the same book for maths work, I knew where I was, I knew it was maths so I would be working on a couple more pages in my book. We know how important structure is to any child when needing to learn and embed information if they are to stand a chance at being able to apply it at a later date with at least some measure of success.
However, the structure of a book such as the maths workbooks and being told the exact page numbers to complete gave me a sense of what I needed to attempt in the lesson. What it did not tell me however, was how to do the actually work that I found was put in front of me.
We were very much and very often simply left to get on with it, to work independently while the teacher sat at her desk which again, always seemed to be enormously tall from my viewpoint. I wonder what she actually did do up there, marking work, preparing work, I really don’t know. I think sometimes she may have heard individual children read.
This need to be able to work with a certain level of independence is also very difficult for a child with dyslexia. We know they need structure; we know they need good modelling and we know that in maths they need the opportunity to work with manipulatives and multi-sensory resources. This is the same for all children but I feel it is needed much more so for a child with dyslexia.
The instruction to work independently is all well and good if you have the knowledge needed to actually fully understand and complete the tasks in front of you. If, like me and I dare say some others in the class, could not remember the instructions, the concepts, the order in which to do the different steps or what the different mathematical syllables meant. All this even before even attempting to gain anything looking remotely like a correct answer.
Beta books, now out of print, thank the Lord, were the order of the day for maths and I think I rose to the dizzy heights of a green level B2 book! I’m sure the pages inside had some green colour on each page to correspond with the outer cover. Thinking about this now, I feel that may be where some of my security in using the book came from, the fact it was the same colour inside and out gave me some slim reassurance. I think there were also blue books and alpha books for more advanced maths, which I of course never reached. I cannot remember all the details but it is interesting that colour has remained in my memory here.
I also remember how the experience of trying to decipher the use of white chalk on a stark blackboard, reliant on a teacher with half decent handwriting, was not a pleasant one in maths lessons. I would sit on the classroom carpet in front of the blackboard, huge and looming and too high above all of us. So, I sat looking up straining my neck as I was tall. I just could not make any sense of whatever the teacher was doing or talking about up there. So, I painfully tried to achieve while being taught three-digit column addition and when asked if anyone did not understand it, of course I said nothing.
WHO DOESN’T UNDERSTAND?
Sitting on the carpet
doing column addition,
the teacher asked us if,
we all understand it
if not raise a hand
but how could I……
again?
——
For I’m the one the teachers hate,
the one that causes them grief
‘cause
I might not get things first time round
and there’s no way I can get relief.
—–
It doesn’t matter you see,
how many times they say,
you should know it by now,
we only did it last week.
—–
But they don’t understand
they will never know
how hard it was to speak
up and say
‘I don’t understand’
for that would just ruin my day.
The opportunity to ask for help can be very lacking in our schools. I do not think that this for one minute is a conscience decision on the part of teachers but the fast pace of teaching just does not allow for it. The curriculum in the 1970’s was surely not as crammed packed and seemingly as desperate as it is today. Yet I felt the pressure, really felt the pressure so how much more pressure on our children today?
Children very often do not feel confident enough to put up their hand and ask for any help. There is little time to go over any of the learning much of which is new as yet another new topic is introduced, especially in maths. Maths is very heavy on the amount of content that needs to be covered year on year. One step relies on securing the previous step and securing it in a way that it is understood, not just completed. The need to ask a question also relies on knowing what you need to know. What are you actually trying to find out? It is very easy to become quickly overwhelmed with the amount of content, mathematical vocabulary, steps to make and all in a given time frame, which is seemingly never long enough. The task then of asking for help is not an easy one and the decision to put ones hand up and be in the spotlight is not taken lightly.
A child with dyslexia needs to weigh up the need for an answer against the possibility of feeling very much the centre of attention. They need to consider if it is worth being deemed a failure and possibly or more likely probably, not for the first time.
There is a huge difference between writing a correct answer and knowing how you actually came to achieve that answer correctly. Knowledge of how you achieved the answer is vital in maths. So too is the full, often long and complicated route you had to take in order to achieve the correct answer where surely the actual learning takes place. So, all these steps need full understanding and consolidation. Unfortunately, it is so easy to not fully understand just one of the steps and then you sadly fail. You also may not know which of the steps you fell down on so how on earth can you attempt to improve and how on earth do you know what to ask for.
More people may surely have survived the disaster if the titanic had more lifeboats, so where was my lifeboat? I did feel like I was drowning with little chance of survival with no lifebuoy to grab hold of. I would actually settle for a rubber ring or a pair of arm bands, anything to keep me afloat. Anything to give me just something to grab hold of in my maths. A little knowledge so as to make a better attempt at the answer. The sums were often left on the board but they were just white digits with squiggly symbols which of course you needed to recognise and be able to fully understand their meaning. Not only that, but you also needed to know how to apply the symbol and what impact it had on the digits in front of you.
What happens then if you see 657 on the board but write it down in your book as 567, what happens if you add instead of take away? You get the sum wrong, of course. But you should not be marked down for this, you should be sympathetically marked. The teacher should realise that a child with dyslexia is quite possibly going to mix and transpose the digits before them, three digits or two digits. It may be number 59 but be written as number 26 due to the digits being reversed or flipped in the child’s mind.
These difficulties for a child can be present with dyslexia or even dyscalculia. Dyscalculia is a much more pronounced mathematical difficulty which deals with the number system as a whole, in addition to a poor sense of time, issues with understanding measurement, space, shape to name just a few areas of difficulty.
I remember scouring the book and looking up at the board desperately trying to see if the same sum was there so I could copy down the answer. I mean, what are the chances, absolutely zero I am sure. Where were the manipulatives, the multisensory resources, counters, cubes etc? Where was the apparatus to aid counting, dividing or doing whatever it was I was asked to do? All I had was a pencil. By this time, which was high up in the school now, possibly even the last class before leaving, so year six today, I had long since lost my rubber. Or at least if I had not lost it, I no longer used it as it only really served to illustrate when I had made a mistake. This error making was not something I necessarily needed to be reminded of. Or maybe I had simply long since worn it out as I rapidly tried to hide all my errors. The latter here is highly probable following the amount of errors I made.
I do remember in the reception class in the new primary school that we did have the use of multi-sensory resources. I do not though remember any such apparatus when I was attending the few weeks I did in the first school, the old building in the village. I remember in reception using small, coloured counters, the sort used when playing a game of tiddly winks. I also remember the primary-coloured cubes that could fit together, they were fun to use. I do not though remember much of anything being used further up in primary school.
As for secondary school, forget it. I seriously cannot remember one piece of maths equipment that was available for me to use. We had things like rulers and protractors but nothing to help with more basic mathematical concepts. I think once you were taught a topic, that was it, the expectation was that you should have got it. There was no time to go over teaching or try a different way to learn it.
So why not ask for help? Sometimes children don’t even know what they are asking for as their level of understanding in the subject is so poor. The content of a maths lesson relies heavily on a child fully understanding the mathematical concept. This teaching gets built on repeatedly so has a cumulative effect. So, if a child with dyslexia has little understanding of the initial concepts of mathematics, they will be completely lost. If what is taught back in reception, Foundation Stage class, has not been understood, embedded and applied many many times in different situations, how are they going to be able to move forward in their learning if they simply have no knowledge of previously taught content?
Assumptions are made continually. Assumptions that children know. Assumptions that they know everything they have been previously taught and are now ready to build upon this learning.
HELP
Please help me,
come to my aid
as I do not know what to do.
I don’t understand
what you just said
when you stood at the board
and just stared.
Your eyes burning in my direction
although I’ve nothing at all to say
when asked to give the answer
why do you pick on one child?
why put them on the spot?
You may think it’s a good way to
teach, but I can tell you
sincerely it is not!
I need practical here,
counters to add,
cubes to position,
shapes to feel.
Only then will I have a chance
to understand.
But then I will need it again,
and again until it sticks.
So don’t chastise me if
I don’t get it first time,
give me a chance to learn
with objects to hold,
to feel and to move them maybe
it will stay in my head.
