It is often said that teachers who have learning difficulties themselves tend to be good teachers.
It seems difficult to understand for most people that something which appears very easy to learn for everybody actually can, for some people, be very difficult, almost impossible or really impossible to learn.
The same goes for many teachers.
Someone with learning difficulties knows from personal experience that this can happen. Such person also knows how it feels not to be able to learn what for the others is easy. This helps becoming a good teacher.
A teacher with learning difficulties is more likely to be open to unexpected, serious learning problems a certain pupil can have.
Without These, I Couldn't Teach Languages
Luckily, there are now many resources available which help dyslectics survive better in this language steered world and me to teach languages. Below, you can find the ones which help me most with my teaching.
Home computers
One of the things that help me a lot is computer technology. Before the availability of home computers or personal computes, yes, I am from that time, correcting texts myself was impossible. I would come to the point that rewriting a page to remove the spelling errors it had, I would introduce at least one or two new ones.
With a computer I can correct only the errors which I know are in the text and leave the rest unchanged.
When spelling correctors became available I could find much more of my spelling mistakes myself. Over time they became better and better.
Home printers
Like with most dyslectics, my handwriting is often difficult or impossible to read, sometimes even for me.
Writing on a computer and having a printer, producing readable texts has become much easier.
With typewriters, producing readable text was easy enough of course but correcting spelling got stuck on the mentioned point of introducing as much errors as correcting when retyping a page. Correction fluid was helpful for those who could detect errors before taking the paper out of the typewriter, something which I wasn't able to.
I always wanted to know why. Why things are the way they are. Why I had to do things this way or that way. Often I got frustrated because my teachers couldn't or didn't want to give me the answers.
To which extent this is related to being dyslectic, I am not sure. It does seem to be true that dyslectics are more intelligent than non-dyslectics, at average of course. Being intelligent makes the urge to to know about the why's stronger.
Thinking I can't be the only one who always wants to know why, I started to give my pupils the kind of explanations I always wanted to get. They seem to appreciate it.
Some pupils even tell me they
missed those explanations with other teachers and like it that I do give them.
If it Works for Me, Should it Work for Others?
Thinking that if something works for me, who has learning problems, it therefore must work for others too, even if they have other or no learning problems, would be pretty naive.
On the other hand,
the chance that it can benefit other learners is big enough to try and see if it does.
That's why I
started to use those things which were helpful for me to learn languages in my teaching, even with pupils who have no apparent learning difficulties.
And of course I check how well it works.
It is good to see that most of those things I tried
like this were beneficial to my learners, including to the rather normal ones.
This part is meant to be about why or how I developed my own teaching resources. Here I use the word resources in the sense of everything one can have available for teaching. This goes from handouts to how one thinks about teaching. After all, everything is related. The choice of a piece of text to be used depends on how I want to use it to teach and this depends on how I think about teaching. Having to bother about the difference between a teaching technique, method, methodology or approach is also avoided.
Here are a few ways in which I tried to use my experience as a dyslectic learner to better help my pupils with their learning.
Avoiding drilling, or other overt repetition.
Rather than following any system, technique or methodology, I focus on helping the person in front of me to learn. This while remembering that helping means, paying constant attention to what that person needs and wants at that moment and see what can be done.
Explaining as much as possible about why certain forms exist, when they can be used, why they can or cannot be used in certain cases. This instead of only presenting rules and patterns with the message, that's just the way it is.
Personal vocabulary lists with vocabulary problems which appeared during classes.
Increasing interval repetition. Training certain aspects of pronunciation by repeating with an increase of repetition intervals in the range from a fraction of a second to about two or three seconds.
Visual cues for correcting and coaching, parallel to the verbal process. Being a very visual thinker, the the visual system always has a lot of my attention.
Independent of Being Dyslectic
There doesn't seem to be a clear link to my learning difficulties for following things I developed.
Mere feedback learning. No drilling, no repeating, not asking pupils to try and do better. Pupils just receive feedback on how well they performed at that moment. I started trying this when I noticed the difficulty a big part of my Brazilian learners of English have to pronounce the word world. Not only do they have difficulty to pronounce the word world correctly but the harder they try to pronounce it better, the worse the result gets.
Giving feedback indicating the level of learning success, non-verbally and verbally.
Providing learners with just enough help to enable them to take the next step. This makes them more active in the learning process which increases learning efficiency.
