Mapping a way through
Bestselling children’s author Abi Elphinstone tells us how she used her dyslexia to evolve writing strategies including imaginative thinking and creative courage
A t school I was branded ‘unteachable’ and ‘prone to spasmodic outbursts of tiredsomeness.’ Yes, I was a bit naughty. I see, in hindsight, that setting traps for your French teacher is unacceptable and stealing out of Maths lessons to run wild in the forest is unwise. But at the heart of this wayward behaviour was another issue, one that didn’t get ‘detected’ at school.
When I joined my senior school in September 1998, I was in the top sets for most of my subjects. But by Christmas I’d managed to slide down a set in every lesson except English. It wasn’t my teachers who urged me to make the swap – they were confused as to why I wanted to switch classes when my grades sat comfortably with my peers in the top set. But what they didn’t know was that for every hour of homework my friends put in, I had to sit there for three. I didn’t understand a word of what my science teachers taught me in class so when I finished school every evening I had to read over all the notes, at snail’s pace, to make sure they sank in. I wrote history essays littered with spelling mistakes. I spent ages trying to decode simple explanations in physics. And when trying to copy a number in maths I would invariably write it upside down or select a completely different number altogether. English lessons, though, were my haven. The wonderful Mrs Johnson didn’t draw attention to my spelling mistakes and she never made me read aloud. She knew I adored annotating Wuthering Heights and talking long past the bell about how Cathy should have run away with Heathcliff but when I tried to read aloud while concentrating on the story, the words and sentences jumped around and all that came out was a stutter of incoherent words.