Dyspraxia and the School System

I've been thinking a lot about learning disabilities recently, specifically dyspraxia. This is because I have dyspraxia. I would say it's at its worst when I'm in an academic setting. Sure, I can manage to scrape an A if I absolutely have to — half of my results for Intermediate 2 were As. But I can definitely point out a few moments in my school career where my dyspraxia decided to be a right pain in the ass. And some people didn't necessarily realise that my learning disability was the reason why I was struggling.

Let me take you back to my fifth year of secondary school. I was studying biology and chemistry at the time. This was partly because of my school's nonsense rule of "you have to take at least one science to higher" (despite the fact that I did not and still do not plan on going into a career purely based on science, but apparently the school system doesn't give a tuppence about that). My favourite out of the two was definitely biology. It wasn’t my favourite subject ever, sure, but I had a much better time understanding it than I did with chemistry. The reason I took chemistry was because my parents kept insisting that “it will look so good on your CV.”

Yes. That D looks great on my CV. Thanks, Mum and Dad. (I wanted to take a crash higher in art instead. Needless to say, I’m still slightly salty about it.)

Chemistry was horrible. I couldn’t understand the equations at all. The experiments themselves were fine, but as soon as it came to writing up the report and trying to calculate the total number of moles or whatever, I was gone. It was like I would just take one look at the equation that I had to do, and my brain would just shut down. You see, I need to see a logical way for an equation to work if I want to be able to do it properly. I need to understand each step perfectly. As in A + B = C, and that works because of XYZ. If that process isn’t there, you can pretty much guarantee that I’m not going to understand it. Needless to say, if I was given the answer “it just does” to the question “how does this equation work?”, that was about as helpful as “I can do this, and you can’t. Now, kiss my neurotypical ass.”

My chemistry teacher clearly thought that I was just stupid. With every homework assignment, I could see her frustration growing more and more out of control. There was one time when she actually told me the answer to a question on a test, just so I could meet the cut-off mark for a pass. I am not even joking. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t even allowed to do that.

I’m not entirely sure if she knew that I have dyspraxia. If she didn’t, then I guess she can kind of be forgiven for her frustration – they’re called invisible disabilities for a reason. But if I was in her class, and the headmaster, deputy head, and my head of house knew that I was dyspraxic, then why wasn’t she told? And, if she was told, then why was she acting like that? Surely she would have noticed that treating someone with a learning disability in that way would just discourage them from trying any harder?

Making someone with a learning disability feel like they’re stupid is not going to encourage them to spend more time studying and go to drop-in sessions. It’s going to make them feel hopeless – like they’re going to fail no matter how hard they try, and that putting extra time and energy into the task at hand is useless, because they feel like they’re going to fail anyway, so what’s the point?

Maybe I just got unlucky. Maybe if I had a different teacher, I would have gotten a better mark. Who knows. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that my teacher shouldn’t have been acting like that. At the end of the day, she’s been trained to teach a group of very different kids. Not every child is going to fit the cookie-cutter formula that many private schools expect their students to conform to nowadays. Learning disabilities exist. As a teacher, it is your job to work around that and do your best to help your student understand that equation that they always get stuck on. Drumming the same old processes into their head because “it works with everyone else” isn’t necessarily going to achieve that outcome. And, if they really don’t understand that one part of the course, then try your best to make them understand everything else, so at least it won’t be a huge issue if they get that one question wrong in the exam. Getting evidently frustrated with the kid and basically telling them that they’re stupid is not the way to go.

I often wonder if some teachers dread teaching kids with learning disabilities. If we’re labelled as the “problem children” over coffee in the staff room. I honestly never really wondered this until I had that chemistry teacher in fifth year. I hate to break it to you, but there isn’t really anything that kids with learning disabilities can do about that. We were born with it. There is literally nothing we can do about it. All we can really do is try our best to get on in a world that isn’t made for us. A world that repeatedly tells us “you’re not dyspraxic, you’re just clumsy”; “you’re not dyslexic, you’re just stupid.” A world that clearly prefers the outgoing neurotypical to the introverted dyspraxic.

It’s a vicious circle, but you can make your way through it. Refuse to listen to what the world is telling you. You are smart. Maybe some people aren’t intelligent in the academic sense, but that’s OK — there are different types of intelligence. School isn’t for everyone. Steve Jobs didn’t graduate from college, and he went on to create Apple, one of the most successful companies in the world. Albert Einstein was Autistic and a high school dropout, and he is now praised as a genius. You’re not going to end up starving on the streets if you don’t have a handful of As under your belt. You’re going to be fine.