It is quite possible that there are students in my classroom of five- and six-year-olds that display learning behaviours resembling dyslexia. But I remain deliberately equivocal about my assessment of these children, for two reasons.
Firstly, I know that some education systems do not even start teaching literacy or numeracy in any formal way until the children start school at seven years old. That's because there is a lot of essential pre-academic learning to be done before then.
Secondly, I have spent many years as a teacher reading about dyslexia, trying to understand it, and applying that to all my other knowledge and understanding of how children best learn. As a result, I have grown to appreciate that teaching and learning is more about people and emotions than we often care to acknowledge. This has led me to conclude that it is our education system, not the dyslexic child, that needs to be the focus of our attention. There is a better way.
I'm still not sure about dyslexia. I'm not a scientist, but I know that this thing called dyslexia is not a new thing. It's always been around. It's just that we are now getting better at recognising it, and braver at advocating for the children who 'suffer' from it. For me, the biggest shift has been in the way we now acknowledge the condition without labelling dyslexic children as 'failures'. We have moved on. Thank goodness for that.
The next step in the journey is to help improve the learning experiences of all these children. My experience in the classroom tells me that there are some immediate, simple, and effective changes that could be made right now that would make a world of difference.
