"....About six months ago, I had an on air ding dong with BBC London 94.9 presenter Jeni Barnett. One of the topics she was discussing on her show was dyslexia. She made a comment that dyslexia should be treated as a wonderful gift and how lots of dyslexic people she knows have "special talents". I was livid.
This is the sort of ignorant claptrap which is at the root of all the problems people with dyslexia have to endure.
What did my "special gift" give me? It gave me 14 years of misery at school. Every test I ever did was a major source of anxiety. If you are not dyslexic, you won't understand what it is like to do a test, think you've done well and then get a low mark because your brain has meddled with the answer you actually wrote down. It made me endure years of pisstaking and humiliation at the hands of teachers, who would use such encouraging phrases as "were you dropped on your head when you were born" or the even more motivational "I taught your brothers and sistes and they were quite intelligent, what went wrong with you?..."



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