DYSLEXIA AT SCHOOL

Last year was a good one for me in my professional growth (luckily I met a lot of  great teachers around the world on Facebook and Twitter), and in my learning (I always try to be up-to-date with my English and ... started learning French).

But one thing was rather challenging to me: I had a new student, a ten-year-old girl, 4th grade of primary school. She is dyslexic but she is a hard-working and rather intelligent girl struggling with her disability in reading, writing and spelling. I have been teaching English one-to-one for more than fifteen years but have never encountered such a problem so close before. 

The girl was bullied by her classmates and treated badly by the teachers who thought her being lazy and unmotivated. Neither her class teacher nor her English teacher (both rather experienced ones) had not thought that the reason of her poor learning was dyslexia. (I wish we were taught something about it at universities.) What is more, once her class teacher ridiculed her for her poor reading before the whole class! It is incredible! The girl has already had a very low self-esteem and thinks she is stupid. Her parents were also unaware of their girl's problem and did not know how to help her. So I turned out to be the first one who revealed her disability and advised to show the girl to speech therapist and psychologist. Now the diagnosis is confirmed.  I hope the situation at school will change for the best soon. Building self-confidence and friendly atmosphere are major elements of day-to-day teaching  in the classroom.

Surfing the Net I found out that in some countries the rights of children with dyslexia are protected by law. But not in our country. This may seem strange, but we don't even have a law on special education for different categories of children with difficulties. Ten years ago a project was created but it is still a project. Our dyslexic children receive low quality education, it is hard for them to learn and very difficult to go to colleges or universities.

By the way, the girl is good at art and acting. I still teach her English. We are struggling together and I am trying to do my best to help her because I made a difference.