Students with dyslexia talk about some difficulties they face

Learning hasn’t been fun at school. The Greek educational system is based in memorisation, memorising loads of vocabulary, dates, names. So a student with dyslexia cannot really cope all this, especially if the student is not taught in a special way.

At that time, I didn’t even know I was dyslexic. People didn’t know what dyslexia was. So that wasn’t really easy.

Also, I had a very low attention span. That means that during the lesson I couldn’t really stay focused for more than five or 10 minutes. So I was daydreaming.

So when I went back home to study I really couldn’t remember anything the teacher had explained during the lesson. So it was just me in front of a book trying to work out what it says and trying to memorise all the information by heart. A number of characteristics I had resulted in low self-esteem. So my self-esteem was really low. That was even worse than the difficulties I had in learning. It was not easy to make friends and maintain friendships. So I felt pretty isolated on many occasions. My organisation skills were also awful. So this affected both my learning and my life in general. For example, my room was always in a mess.

I couldn’t find things on time, being late at school. It’s a chain. One difficultly brought the other. My name is Brandruff McAllister. I am a second year Biochemistry undergraduate. Dyslexia, it’s mainly impacted my writing and my comprehension, which makes it very difficult for me to learn things. It takes me longer to, I think, actually take information and actually understand it. And it’s also quite difficult with subjects like maths because I can quite frequently make errors. Even though I can understand a topic, but it’s just very difficult for me to sometimes be consistent. Hello, my name is Kirstie, and I study English language and Spanish studies at Lancaster University.

I think it’s affected me especially when I was at school a lot because I didn’t get diagnosed until a lot later. And I felt that I was stupid because I couldn’t do things that the other the children could. So my reading was a lot slower. And it took me a lot longer to learn things. And since being at university again, my reading is a lot slower so if affects it because we have lots of reading. And it takes me a lot longer than other people. I’m Markos Markianos. I’m a student here at Lancaster University. I am currently in my second year of studying Biomedicine. Outside school it hasn’t really affected me.

Most of my friends are really understanding when I spell things wrong or mixed up words. Inside school though, I did have a rough time with spelling tests and just generally writing. History was really hard on me.

However, thankfully, the secondary school I went to had a really good dyslexia department. And they helped me work through it. Basically, every day during the summer my mother would take me at around midday and have a two to three hour spelling session just to try and improve my grasp on the words. Eventually, I started seeing patterns in how the words were formed. And then I had a lot of progress over the summer.