“Can you turn right here? No, the other right.”
“Helen, I’m not sure you meant foot biases in this paper about vegetarian food.”
“Do you realise you’ve spelled lecturer wrong in your email signature?”
“Errr, people are meant to re-sit exams, not resist them.”
These – among many other comments are a very familiar occurrence within my life. I have four degrees. I’ve worked in higher education for nine years now. And I also have dyslexia.
My dyslexia wasn’t diagnosed until I was just starting my PhD and it is quite surprising, looking back. English was always my weakest subject at school. I was a slow reader, didn’t know my left and right (and still don’t… my driving lessons and driving test were a sight to behold), found that words shimmered on paper and I needed large font with large spaces between lines of text in order to not drift to the wrong word or line, had poor working memory, learned to spell by creating songs and learning the phonetic spelling of words, and was known as being very disorganised. You know… many of the symptoms of dyslexia.
However, I was also a high achiever in school, much of which was due to me using strategies to address these weaknesses. Learning how to spell by learning the phonetic spelling of words is a good example (and even now, I spell in “baby letters” – if you ask me for a spelling, it’ll take a while because I have to translate to capitals in my head). But, in school I was simply labelled at being bad at English and not paying attention in class, not caring about my work, and being generally careless. It was the frank (but hugely appreciated!) email from my PhD supervisor saying “for the love of God Helen, go and get tested” which led me to get my formal diagnosis. This diagnosis made so many things make so much more sense – and was incredibly validating. It made me understand why I couldn’t read when I was younger without the audiobook of the same story playing at the same time, why I was constantly distracted by other activities going on around me if I was trying to focus on reading or writing, why the thought of long writing exercises at school made me feel sick, why my speaking and presentation skills are so much better than any written work. It also explained why, when I was in Year 5 (9 years old) I received a Good Letter Home from my teacher stating (and I’ll never forget this) “Helen actually got 10/10 in her spellings this week”. The one and only time this ever happened.
Working in academia with dyslexia is an interesting experience – and is something I’m very open about (partly to explain the numerous typos and accidental word-swaps in emails, research outputs and student feedback). If I don’t get the Ye Olde Faithful red squiggly line telling me that (usually) the letters are there but they’re in the wrong order, I don’t see that I’ve used the wrong word – especially if the substituted word either looks similar or sounds like the word I want. Proof reading doesn’t help very much because I still often don’t spot it, and I do find it very helpful when people alert me to these things as it’s the only way that I know to specifically keep an eye out for these errors in the future. I’ve been very lucky to work with incredibly supportive people in my life, and I genuinely think this makes all the difference when carrying out this job that I love, even if the speed at which I mark student work is noticeably slow.
So if you ever spot me struggling to read text out loud (the amount of research authors’ names I have butchered borders on embarrassing), relying on Google’s “did you mean this”, printing out several trees so that I can plonk a pale green colour filter on top, or being invited to a social event at “the Sh*t In” (a genuine email I have sent to an entire department of staff), my neurodivergent brain says hello.
Dr Helen Knight, Senior Lecturer and Director of Education in the School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen
Hi Helen,
Interesting read.
What a difference understanding colleagues can make to an academic life for those with the gift of neurodiversity! Those long nights and weeks marking essays were particularly difficult!
Kind regards,
Carol
This piece speaks to me deeply. In school I was told that I was just "slow at reading and writing" and my mother was fobbed off with an age related spelling test after years of demanding a dyslexia test. They even went as far as to say that test proved I wasn't dyslexic.
On joining the University of Aberdeen, the university kindly had me tested and the results could be summed up as "why weren't you identified before?". But the poor support in my previous schooling forced me to learn strategies that to this day I use to mask my dyslexia.
The only cases I can think of where my dyslexia has actively held me back were in academy. I was pulled from higher economics because "you wouldn't be able to keep up with the writing". And I was forced from higher music in to intermediate 2 English to "help pull you up to the right level"... Before being dropped to intermediate 1 some time before the exam and only being told when my exam timetable said "intermediate 1".
I now have two degrees, and between my profession as a product development lead and lead software engineer, to my pet projects like Pesky Poetry and Pesky Publishing, I've never let my dyslexia hold me back... Indeed, I see it as a blessing not a curse.