The Touch Typist

There's been a lot to take in since yesterday.

Yesterday H's teacher wanted a word with me. They're concerned he's dyslexic. He's an atypical dyslexic in that he is a few years ahead with his reading and spelling. His problem is getting stuff out of his head and on to paper. He writes about a fifth as much as his classmates. So assessments to sort out and support plans to implement. I'm not terribly surprised that he may be dyslexic but I was upset for him to find that he'd been struggling for a while and feeling that he was failing in some way...and that trying harder just wasn't working.

He described it like this:

'All the words bounce around in my head and it's as if there's something blocking them coming down my arm to my hand.'

When we asked him about his music he said, 'That's different, the music appears in my head and flows down my arms really easily. My fingers just know what to do.'

So I let him type his homework this morning and he wrote more than he's ever done, but he was still a bit slow because he was having to scan the keyboard for the letters. I suggested that he might like to learn to touch type and his ears pricked up. We went to the BBC website and there's a touch-typing course for children in about twenty little sessions. He was hooked and has spent most of the day, bar two hours for gymnastics, teaching himself this new skill. This photo was taken over the top of my laptop. He seems delighted with it and told me that if he can write as fast as he can think it will make life easier. He said it was more akin to playing the piano, which he finds relatively easy. It was great to see the relief on his face.

We'll now begin the slow process of assessment, made slightly smoother by the fact that I have a lot of contacts in this area and know a fair bit about the workings of the brain in regard to dyslexia and its other associated problems.

Anyone whoever bothers to read my waffle will know that I'm only too acutely aware of how the education system (that's the system, not individual teachers) so often fails dyslexics and children with binocular vision problems. In the past I've been a visiting optometrist in prisons and the number of inmates with serious visual problems and / or specific learning difficulties is scarily high. Once a child becomes disenfranchised from the education system it's very difficult to re-engage them and then they slip away...

Anyhow, on the same day that his class teacher dropped this particular little bomb shell his violin teacher was on the phone talking scholarships to music schools...so decisions to make there too.

Tonight Bob took him to star-gazing live at Cambridge Uni and they've had a ball. He's full of tales of seeing Jupiter through an enormous telescope.

I look at H and see this fabulous, funny, interesting, amazing, musical little weirdo who I love to pieces. I have no idea where he'll end up but I do know he'll be just fine :-))