Once I got the dyspraxia diagnosis I did get permission to use a laptop. This was treated as very funny by all the other students. Not content with their usual total abdication of moral responsibility for the children under their care, the teachers joined in on the joke.
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Eventually the laptop in question was stolen. I didn't get a replacement. I don't remember exactly how things went down but I can't imagine I was that keen to get the support I really did need back given the torment that came with it.
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So, yeah, universal literacy is good, but please don't pretend that school is somehow any better at literacy than it is at anything else. It's the same bullshit as all the other subjects, where they pretend you can do a one size fits all and then punish students for not fitting
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30 years later I'm still sensitive about my hand writing TBH.
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I guess I don't talk that much about the problems that growing up with what was functionally a fairly severe learning difficulty caused me, because honestly they were still way less bad than many other things about school, but they definitely inform a lot of my views.
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Fortunately as well as having significant learning difficulties I'm also very smart, so once I was able to lash together an adequate set of coping skills on my own I did OK in most classes.
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But it was very clear from the ones I did not do OK in that where I couldn't figure out how to make that leap myself (e.g. music, art, oddly history but that may have just been bad teaching), teachers absolutely didn't consider it their job to do more than tell me to try harder.
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So yeah. If you sometimes wonder why I am quite so obsessed with teaching people the basics of things, maybe that provides some context.
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When I write things like notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2021-07- it's not just because I'm sad about other people having difficulties (though I am), I've very much been on the receiving end of it and hold a massive grudge over the whole thing.
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Replying to
I really identified with this, particularly the math bits.
(I failed various math classes four times in university, even while doing decently in any course that required programming).
It wasn’t so much that my teacher did violence to me, as the overall system, I think.
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To be clear: the overall secondary school system in Malaysia. I think the math instruction in university was decent, but my foundation much too weak to be able to appreciate it.
Replying to
Yeah I think one of the big problems in maths education is that once you hit a block if you don't figure out how to actually overcome it, everything after that becomes incredibly hard and eventually impossible. With other subjects there's more slack, but maths is so layered.
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