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#1: Dyslexia at the Chalet School? Author: Xanthe, Location: London

Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 10:36 am
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I am not dyslexic (both my siblings are though) but one of my best friends at secondary school was, incredibly severely so. The school was a language college & Gem used to come to quite a lot of grief in French/German/Italian because she had enough problems with dealing with one system of phonics & conversion of sound to written words without trying to learn three more...

So how on Earth would CS pupils have coped - and how might the staff have managed things? (And yes I know that dyslexia has only relatively recently been recognised etc, but let us engage with the counterfactual for a bit...) Because you can be very bright indeed & still do appallingly at school if your dyslexia is bad enough/if you don't receive the right support.

*stroking the Imaginary Giraffe verrrrrrrrrrry thoughtfully indeed*

#2: Author: Kat, Location: Little Venice/Swansea

Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 1:51 pm
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I suspect that Sally go round the moon would have given special tuition to anyone with problems... or else Matey would have dosed them - it seemed to work for everything else!

#3: Author: LizB, Location: Oxon, England

Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 1:56 pm
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I was thinking it would be more special coaching sessions for Sally Denny Laughing

#4: Author: RroseSelavy, Location: Oxford, UK

Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 2:19 pm
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Didn't someone write a short drabble about Phil Craven being dyslexic? I can't remember who wrote it, but I thought it was quite believable.

#5: Author: Lesley, Location: Allhallows, Kent

Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 7:22 pm
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Unfortunately I can see someone being identified as just being lazy because the Mistresses can identify that the person is intelligent but that their work wasn't up to scratch. I'm sure that's what happened a great deal in the past. It must have been exceptionally frustrating for those affected.

#6: Author: KB, Location: Melbourne, Australia

Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 9:23 pm
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There is an excellent biography by Susan Hampshire that describes the problems she had with her dyslexia and the way she was seen at school at home. (She was born in 1937.) In the end she was educated at a school her mother had started, but she still had difficulties. Despite that, though she went on to be an actress. The book is called Susan's Story and is a very interesting read. She wrote more about the problem in a book called Every Letter Counts.

#7: Author: Nina, Location: Peterborough, UK

Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 8:37 am
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Lesley wrote:

Unfortunately I can see someone being identified as just being lazy because the Mistresses can identify that the person is intelligent but that their work wasn't up to scratch. I'm sure that's what happened a great deal in the past. It must have been exceptionally frustrating for those affected.

That's what happened to my brother in the 1970s. I think he's far more intelligent than I am, but he struggled with reading and writing to the point where he just became the class troublemaker so he got sent out a lot Sad

He left school with no qualifications at all. He's now 40 and has never been able to achieve his full potential because of this - he should really be an engineer of some sort but he's ended up in dead end jobs because he can't even manage an application form properly. I think he was even more misunderstood because I was good at English and he was therefore expected to follow in my footsteps - I often wonder what would have happened if he'd been the eldest, or if he'd been 20 years younger and diagnosed properly.

The CS didn't have an entrance exam as such, did they? I know there were tests to see which form you would be in, but often that was after the girls arrived at school. There was no SEN as such, just extra coaching or staying back a form. I hadn't thought about it before, but I wonder if many small private schools ended up with the well-off and bright but dyslexic children who didn't pass entrance exams to the bigger public schools? This would have a knock on effect of making the exam results of the smaller schools look bad - a bit like today, when you have to know why a school may have worse league table results than another and yet perhaps be a better school - factors like a large number of SEN or non-English speakers.[/i]

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