When Learning is Trauma: Martin Bloomfield, Lisa McCarty, Lois Letchford

Welcome. I am delighted you're joining us again for our 2021 When Learning Is Trauma series. We've made it, even with COVID Martin lives in the UK and has worked in the field of intercultural ethics and dyslexia awareness for over 20 years, speaking in front of the British government, the Swiss— British Swiss Chamber of Commerce, Commerce and Departments of International Trade and international conferences worldwide. He holds visiting lecturer positions at universities in Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Switzerland, trains teachers from around the European Union, and is currently authoring a chapter for a major publication on innovative teaching for early years education. Martin, when we talked to you last year, you told us about your appalling schooling Your failure in school and high school being like torture. But what I took away above all was that when we treat children so appallingly, what are we saying to the society and to the other children in the class? That's what struck me.

Lisa's from Pennsylvania Dyslexia.

Yep.

And a nurse and working in— tell us, Lisa, what you're doing.

So now I work as a nurse in an inpatient drug and alcohol rehab center, which is something I've always wanted to do. And it's been really interesting for me because there are a lot of, I would say, dyslexic characteristics. I'm not going to diagnose them as dyslexic, but I can tell that they are. And there are a lot of folks in there. So one of the reasons that I do this work is because we bring awareness to the schools. We're also trying to work in the field of counseling to get this information into the hands of counselors who are working with these people. I primarily work with adults.

And today our topic, Martin, is life after death by education. I love it. Because Lisa and I were both curious to know what stopped you from self-destruction.

Fascinating question. And the answer, I think, is a little bit more complex. when you believe this, that, or the other. I think one of the things we have to ask is, what do we mean by self-destruction? So, um, for instance, one of the, one of the, the hangovers I've had from education— and I, I'm very aware of this, and my awareness of it doesn't stop me doing it— but one of the hangovers I have from education is an ability to take a compliment. Um, people were trying to be nice to me recently and I was rejecting that compliment. I was trying to make jokes about it. I was making light of it. And I'm aware that when I refuse a compliment, I'm actually insulting the person who's complimenting me. And I'm very acutely aware of this. And it's not a pleasant thing. But let's go back a little bit further. What do we mean by self-destruction? Here's the thing. I couldn't hold down a relationship for years and years and years. Certainly in my 20s. Because my— as I mentioned last week, that last time we talked, my childhood was not devoid of love from my family. So I had love in my childhood, but at the same time, my childhood was very, very painful, very, very difficult. And for many years, for most of my young adulthood, until I was about 30, 31, I would associate love and pain.

Yeah.

And therefore, if a relationship was not painful, it wasn't in my mind loving. And so if it wasn't painful, I'd walk away from it. If it was painful, it would, it would self-destruct. So there was this aspect of sort of collapsing. Also, let's be perfectly honest, I don't want to say that I did avoid self-destruction. Depending on how you view self-destruction, I went through periods of excessive drinking, self-abusive drinking, to the point where I had a major issue for a while. Thankfully not alcoholism. I wasn't physically addicted, but I was, as it were, psychologically addicted, and I was damaging myself with it.

Hmm.

I went through periods of hard drugs and sort of damaging myself like that as well. And there were periods in my life— this is really strange, it's difficult to sort of put into words what was going on— but there were periods in my life, again sort of mid to late 20s to early 30s, this sort of period where I would physically punish myself by sleeping rough for short periods of time. So there were periods of anything up to about 1 day to 4 days where no one would know where I was. And it turned out I was sleeping in a shop doorway, or I was sleeping in a toilet cubicle, or something like that. And often it was because there was this feeling on the one hand of deserving pain, and this genuinely came through from my childhood, this feeling of deserving pain. And on the other hand, it kind of came through as a panic. I remember the last time I did that. It was in Germany. I was living in Germany and I was shopping with a girlfriend and we went to a shop. I think it was Galerie Kaufhof, actually, I can't remember. But we went shopping and I was in one sort of section and she went and had a look at another section and I couldn't see her. And I left through one of the doors to look for her and I didn't know where she was. I didn't know where I was. And that was the key. I didn't know where I was and I tried looking for her. Before the days we all had mobile phones. 2000, it was. I tried looking for her, couldn't find her, and suddenly realized I was lost in this city. And I'd lived in the city for 6 weeks, 8 weeks. I shouldn't have been lost by that point. I was lost. I didn't know my left from my right. I couldn't find where I was. I couldn't find her, couldn't contact her. And suddenly this guilt and shame of not being able to know where I was and not being able to navigate left for a ride collapsed in on me and crushed me. And I had— I can only describe it as a miniature breakdown.

Yeah.

Where I ended up walking the streets for hours and hours and hours and sleeping in a shop doorway in the middle of, well, not quite winter but early spring. And it just, it strikes me looking back on this time that it's not It's not unconnected, the dyslexia issues that I was having, as in not knowing left from right. And by the way, this is at the time when I've just discovered I was dyslexic. So I found out when I was 30, and I was 30 at this point, and this inability to find left from right filled me with shame, filled me with self-loathing, filled me with this sense of I should be able to do this. And I couldn't, and I was letting those around me down like I used to at school. And so we say, you know, how did I avoid self-destruction? It depends what we mean by self-destruction, to be honest with you. I mean, I'm now an old geezer, you know, this is hopefully long behind me, but there was a period between, I don't know, leaving school at 17 when I had a problem with authority and I couldn't accept a boss telling me this, that, or the other, and I was getting fired every time I got a job. Through into my 20s when I started to get girlfriends— at 23, I was really late, girls hated me— my 20s when I started to get girlfriends and couldn't hold a relationship down, into this period of heavy drinking and then a period of self- self-enforced punishing myself by sleeping rough. It stays with you in ways which, in ways which are, I suppose, for me, we look at the figures for dyslexia and mental health issues and self-abuse and self-punishment. We look at the figures for dyslexia and poverty And I didn't go down that route fully, but I was teetering on the edge. I really was teetering on the edge.

Yeah.

And it took a long time of sort of wrestling with myself. And I think in a way, and this is a really interesting realization, so I gave this some thought round about the time, I know what stopped me from going down that route. It was the fact that I'd just discovered I was dyslexic and I was finding out what that meant for me and the problems it gave me, my inability to find my left and my right.

Yeah.

And I was, I was realizing, ah, I was also coming to terms with who I was. And this is really interesting because I just moved from a tiny village in Wales, really small village in Wales, Wales to Germany's 4th largest city in Cologne. And so you have to reassess who you are. You know, you lose your social place, you lose your friends, you lose your lifestyle. You have to rebuild it and reassess who you are. Now, in one respect, I say fortunately, although clearly it's not fortunate, my father died round about And a couple of months later, my stepfather died. And so I lost 2 fathers within a very short period of time when I was, when I was 30 to early 31. And it sent me into a bit of a depression. And one of the interesting things about going into a depression is that one of the things you can do is you withdraw from people. You find human interaction very difficult. And in this rather dark, lonely place, it suddenly felt like the perfect time to examine who I was, examine why I couldn't hold a relationship together, examine why I was punishing myself, and just sort of look back on my life and sort of reassess my behavior in relation to the circumstances and the context surrounding me. So I suppose that's the That's the fullest answer I can give to that.

You said so many things, I have so many questions, but one of the things I was going to ask is if you knew that you were dyslexic at that point where you felt like you were really sort of, I guess, sliding down into what, some sort of— and you answered it to say it was about the time Or you had found that out. So my question now is, what do you think would have happened if you never found out that you were dyslexic and been able to research that? What do you think would have happened if you had never known that?

Fascinating question. Let's contextualize this a little bit. When I found out I was dyslexic, I went through a period of about 6 months— I remember this— a period of about 6 months of being ashamed of myself, feeling shame. I believe it's not massively uncommon for people to feel shame when they discover their dyslexia.

Yes.

And so I guess this feeling of shame kind of gives the groundwork for what was going on inside me whilst I was judging myself massively harshly for not being able to tell left from right. If I hadn't felt that shame and I just couldn't tell left from right, I'd have just— this is really interesting— I would have just laughed at myself. And this is really interesting, like I had always done throughout my life. I would have just laughed at myself. Now, I was talking to somebody fairly recently I was thinking fairly recently about this, that when I was at school, I sort of transferred to this state school, as I said, when I was 13 years old. And there was only a number of roles you could take within a class. There was only a number of roles on the shelf available to pick. You could be the clever one, and I wasn't the clever one. You could be the aggressive bully, and I wasn't an aggressive bully. You could be the shy introvert, and I wasn't the shy introvert, or you could be the clown, and that was me. Now, one of the interesting things about being the clown is it's a survival mechanism because that's the roles that you take in school. But it also— and this is really important— when teachers play along with this, and they did, when teachers play along with this, they teach you that you are to be laughed at. They teach you that your mistakes are comical. In other words, they teach you that you are comical, that your inability to tell left from right is a joke, that your, your slow reading speed is something that everyone can laugh at. And they're not doing it cruelly, they're not doing it in a cruel way, but they're hammering down this idea that you are a figure of comedy, a figure of fun.

Yeah.

And, and, and so I suppose I was undergoing a, a moment in life where I was reassessing this sort of self-opinion of myself as a figure of fun, but I was going— I was reassessing it through this period of feeling ashamed of myself, finding out I was dyslexic. And so it was— I don't know, to be honest with you, either I felt ashamed or I would have laughed at myself, and I'm not so Yeah, yeah, because then you had also mentioned that you went on to get a degree.

It took you a while, but you persisted.

Yeah, I mean, I got my degree by then. So I dropped out of school, you know, I sort of held back a couple of years, dropped out of school, went back to sixth form, college, dropped out again. And I got to university when I was— I don't know, my birthday's in October and the academic year starts in sort of late September, so I was 22, nearly 23 when I went to university. And I took— throughout my 20s, that's what I was doing in this tiny village in Wales, I was at university. And throughout my 20s I was at university, took a degree and then took a master's degree. And I found out I was dyslexic as I was handing in the master's degree. But yes, it took persistence to even be there, to even get to university, to even assume that I could go to university. It took persistence and just some really happy coincidences meeting people who said, you're not stupid, that kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which is—

yeah, because I I thought that, like, I didn't know all the rest about some of the issues that you had when you were younger, but one of the things that we were interested in is how did you persist? How did you make it? How did you, you know, keep on going in college as opposed to just throwing your hands up and forget it, I can't do this? A lot of the folks that I know, they get to that point. And how did you? How did you get there? That's what we're so interested in.

I got there because it's a series of sort of coincidences that come together. One of them is that I went in the first place because I wanted to be something in the theatre, and it didn't, it didn't happen, and I didn't know what else to do. And I was unemployed, and I'd been unemployed for 3, 4 years. And I was on an employment training course with a woman, girl, a woman called Nikki, Nicola Ball. I remember her very well. And she was my first adult relationship, not a girlfriend relationship, just friendship. The first friendship I'd ever made as an adult. And so I respected her tremendously. And she was on this sort of employment training course killing time. Well, she got herself a maths degree, or a maths O-level, I think it was. GCSE, we call them now. So that she could go off and teach English as a foreign language. That was like a requirement for some reason, to have a maths qualification to teach English. And so she was spending time at this employment training place so that she could get her qualification. And I was there because I had nothing else, really. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was effectively unemployable. And she just said to me, Martin, you're not stupid, you know, because I'd always referred to me as though I was. And she said, why don't you try university? And because I respected her so much— she was my first adult friend, you know, I was still very much a child in those days— because I respected her so much, I thought, oh, I'll try it. And Interestingly, I chose philosophy, and very interesting reason to choose philosophy. I'd always been good— the one thing I was good at at school was English. Not the writing bit, but the interpretation of text, even though I never read the text properly. But the thinking. I had that ability to be good at interpreting English. And I loved— I started to love etymology. And the reason I loved etymology was that I couldn't spell until I was about 16. And the way I taught myself to spell was to teach myself etymology and sort of morphology and how words are put together and how words from a Greek root are put together and how words from a Latin root are put together and how words from a Germanic root are put together. And this was fascinating me. And I thought, I'd love to go to university and do English, but it wasn't English, it was something like linguistics, which I really wanted to do. I didn't know that there was a course called linguistics because I wasn't sure, and no one was there to teach me or to tell me that it was linguistics. I just thought English. And I looked and looked and looked and couldn't find a university degree that didn't involve a lot of reading.

Yes.

And it was as simple as that.

Yes.

And I didn't know I was dyslexic. but I knew I couldn't read.

Yes.

And so I couldn't find a university degree that didn't involve a lot of reading, but I had this interest in sort of philosophical issues, so I chose philosophy. But even again, I didn't know I was dyslexic, but I chose the philosophical subjects that I could spell. So I didn't study Nietzsche, I didn't study Schopenhauer, I didn't study Merleau-Ponty, I didn't study the Ecumenical Synod because I couldn't spell them. So I chose things like, um, John Locke and David Hume and Immanuel Kant, easy-to-spell philosophers. And, and that kind of guided me, this, this, this sort of limitation of what I could do and what I couldn't do, not knowing why, but what I could do and what I couldn't do guided me to, to get to a point where I just ended up doing philosophy. It just so happened that the same kind of interpretation that I would use for interpreting a theatre show, interpreting text, came in quite useful with people's arguments or, or some things. So I, I, I could do philosophy, but I didn't read any philosophy. So I was getting really good grades, and then the exams would come down and I'd go, good God, what, what are the facts? And for years I had that trouble. So did I answer the question correctly?

There's no right or wrong, Martin. But it's the persistence that somewhere deep inside you hasn't— yes, you know, you're still here, one. That's, that's a start.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that word, let's pick up on it, that word persistence. I've always called it bloody-mindedness, I suppose. Persistence, it's a really important thing. Why I am so persistent, I don't know. I think it was because I was pushed by my parents. I think it's because they pushed me. They didn't give up on me. And they— I came from a background where persisting was the right thing to do. And what it means is that you'll end up through school persisting through constant failure. And if you persist through constant failure, then at those moments of failure, your default setting is persistence. Here's an example. I mean, I, I'm doing my doctorate at the moment. There was a period where, for one reason or another, it all went a bit pear-shaped, and I had a year and a half where my work was quite substandard, and my supervisor was very open about that. And there was a moment which was touch and go where I effectively continue at the university. That was psychologically hard. That was emotionally very, very hard. And what do you do in those situations? You persist, because that's what you do. That's what happens when things get hard. You persist. You go through it, because you're taught to do that. Because academia has always been hard at whatever level, and it's never been a surprise that I can sometimes struggle academically. So yeah, it's persistence, and because it's drilled into you, drummed into you, you're formed through persistence. And when you're at school, you fail, and you either sink or you swim. It really is that simple.

I have so many questions. Lois, do you mind if I ask another one?

Keep going!

Because this is running in my mind.

Yes.

So, Martin, you found out you were dyslexic when you were in school during your master's program, correct?

Yeah, yeah.

Somewhere around there. So, I would imagine, because what I'm hearing is that you felt badly about not being able to do certain things, especially in school. When you found out that you were dyslexic, from that point until now, after having gone through a period of finding yourself, Do you look at yourself now as though you're very strong, like very strong-minded? Do you see yourself as, or do you still see yourself as a failure? Do you feel less of a failure now because you understand dyslexia and you see how far you've come and how much you've persisted? Or do you still feel like that failure that you used to? I don't feel like a failure. Do you feel stronger or do you feel like a failure?

Yes to both of those questions. And this is the thing, I think, yeah, I have a sense that I know what I've come through to get where I am. And I'm not, you know, and I know that I'm not in a great place, you know. I'm not rich. I'm not, you know, I'm not— I don't have 3 cars, 2 houses, You know, I don't, I don't have the riches, I don't have the material wealth. And the material wealth isn't a bother because it's material wealth. The material wealth in our society is a marker of how much you're worth, which is really important. This is why pay negotiations for so many people are so important. It's not because they want money, it's because it's a marker for how worthwhile they are, how valued they are.

Yeah.

And so yeah, I don't have material wealth. In many respects, you know, I, I've spent more time unemployed than employed, and so you kind of feel that you're a failure. I mean, I, I, you know, I mean, I've spent so much time on, on the dole, as we used to say in England, claiming benefits and welfare payments. You don't feel great. You walk into these offices And you, you feel like a failure when you're in these offices. Even, even now I have imposter syndrome, they call it, all the time. And, and I'm telling myself it's imposter syndrome, but actually when you tell yourself it's imposter syndrome, you're, you're kind of making a value judgment that I'm not a failure, you know, because imposter syndrome is for people who can, who think they can. So if you say I've got a syndrome, constantly say, yes, I can do these things. But yeah, I constantly suffer imposter syndrome all the time. And I suppose in a way, the fact that you keep going through that is the proof of the pudding. The proof of the pudding is, can you keep going when you feel that you're not worthy, or that you're not very good, or that you haven't achieved, or that, you know, that you're not able. And this is where it counts. I remember a girlfriend I had— actually, yeah, I remember when it was. It was about 10 years ago, 11 or 12 years ago. And we were on and off for a little while, and then when we were finally over, her parting shot to me, her parting shot to me was, not exactly verbatim, but close enough. Martin, you're not rich. You don't have a stable job. You don't have a stable income. You couldn't support me. You couldn't support a family.

You're not a man.

That's basically what she said to me. If I didn't feel like a failure, I wouldn't have cared. But when she said it, she hit that vulnerable part within me. You can't do this, you can't do that, you're not worthy, you're not. And it really hurt. It really hurt.

Yeah.

And it sent me into a spiral of, again, self-doubt and self-loathing. And it was, it was, it was quite a dark place from which, by the way, I came out doing a doctorate. You know, that was my midlife crisis, I suppose. And my yellow Ferrari was the doctorate. It's like, because you, again, you reassess what it means to be yourself.

Yeah.

But yeah, that, that parting shot of hers hit me where it hurt because that's what, what deep down often we feel about ourselves.

Yeah.

We are, we are made to believe when we're at school that we're failures because you're judged by your grades.

Yeah.

And as an adult, you're judged by your money.

Yeah.

And so, and it's the same thing. And of course, if you don't get high grades, chances are you won't get a lot of money as an adult either.

Yeah.

You know, so, you know, you're judged as a failure because you get low grades at school. You go into the world of work, you don't necessarily get a great, well-paid job, well-respected job as an adult, and therefore you are judged by And so, yeah, it's a self-perpetuating cycle. Wow.

You know, to me now, it's not even the income, but it's job stability, which, you know, can you— do you have to work when you're sick? You know, can you buy a house? Can you live in a place without being forced out. I mean, it's all sorts of roll-ons that happen because you don't have a stable income, isn't it?

Yeah, I mean, fortunately not recently, but it was a few years ago. I suffer from, and this is a horrible thing for anyone probably, because it makes me sound like I live in the 18th century. I suffer from gout.

Yeah.

once or twice a year I get an attack of gout and I can't walk. And for anybody who's ever suffered gout, anybody who's watching who's had gout, you'll know how painful it is.

Yeah.

I mean, you know how painful it is. And I remember once going into work and having to climb a number of steps on crutches, squealing in pain as I was doing it. And one of the clients clients at this place where I was working turned to a colleague of mine and said, what's he doing here? And the colleague said quietly, well, he has to come.

Yeah.

The question wasn't, what's he doing? The question was, why is he here? And the answer was, because he has to be. And it's like, if I don't go, I don't get paid. And not only do I not get paid, but I might not get asked back. And so you have to put yourself through this. Yeah, and I remember that week, by the way, I was delivering a course to a group of people, and I mean, it's ridiculous the pain I was going through. I knew I was doing the wrong thing, but when you're having a bad attack of gout, you don't care. I was gobbling tablets like they were Smarties, and then occasionally I'd have to go up and be sick because they were messing with my stomach.

Yeah.

And so not only was I in such enormous pain. So I was making myself physically sick and nauseous because, because that was the only way I could keep a lid on the pain. And, you know, you're going home at the end of the week with, with really— and I'm not, I'm not in any way, I'm not in any way demeaning this—

Yeah.

With less money than you would get from working on a shop till. Now, there's nothing wrong with working in a shop. There's nothing wrong with working on a shop till. But if you've been told that your job is a skilled job, if you've been told that you need qualifications for that job, and you're still getting paid less than what a school leader could earn working the tills, yeah, there is that societal view of how much you're worth.

Lois, I see you taking a lot of notes.

No, I was going to say, Lisa.

I have a lot of questions, but I don't want to take up all the time.

Keep going, Lisa. Keep going, Lisa. Keep going.

I'm still fascinated with this sense of self, this self-esteem. And I can't help but just wonder, and I know it's like a hard thing to talk about because we don't know. You were, you know, older when you found out, but what would have happened if you knew when you were a child that you were dyslexic and what did that mean? And I just wonder about those things. What kind of difference would it make for your teachers to understand this, for you to understand this, for everybody to understand what— where your strengths are as opposed to always looking at the things that you can't do? And yet, would it have made you as tough of a person? I mean, it's a really good question. That's a very hard question to answer, but I'm curious.

Yeah, I can tell you at least what the answer would be for part of what you're asking. In terms of how would I have developed as a human being, I don't know. In terms of finding strengths, not weaknesses, I don't know. But what I do know is I grew up in the 1970s, which Still, I can't believe it's more than 30 years ago. I grew up in the 1970s, and when I was at primary school in the 1970s, there was a special class. And this is the thing, in those days there wasn't the inclusion policy that we have these days. There was a special class, and this class was called the remedial class. Now, it took me until I was 16 years old and teaching myself how to spell using, you know, understanding morphology and etc., etc., to realize that remedial and remedy come from the same root. Until I was 16 years old, I still thought remedial meant— and I'm going to use a word here, and please, please, please forgive me. I'm not using this word as I use it. I'm using this word as I would have used it as a child in the 1970s, and I hate the word. It's difficult to get it out of my mouth, so please forgive me. I don't mean to use this in a derogatory way. This is a reportage from when I was a child. Up until the age of 16, the word remedial was a synonym for the word— well, a very negative word about people who don't think properly. A very negative word. Sorry, I can't say it. It was a synonym for an extraordinarily negative word about people with physical, emotional, mental problems.

Yeah.

Those people in the remedial class were avoided by the rest of us because you might catch something. You might catch the remedial disease. And so all those kids with dyslexia who were put into the remedy class, into the class, they were all looked at as though they had some form of contagious mental disease.

Wow.

And that we would get it too if we went too close to them. And this is one of the problems of what you might call non-integrated education.

Yeah.

Where if you have a special class for certain kids, those kids are all pointed at. And we all know that we've all done it as children. Every single one of us will have done it as a child, because as a child you don't have that kind of moral compass. You're far more sort of, basically, yeah. So if I'd known I was dyslexic, or if people had known I was dyslexic when I was a young child at primary level, I think my life would have been awful. I think I would have been stigmatized. I think I would have stigmatized myself. Far worse than I ever did as a, as a, as a, as a non-remedial child. Um, I'm not certain how I would have developed. Um, and I know for a fact that, that, that every other child would have looked upon me as, as, as a form of a grotesque. I know that 100% because that's what happened, certainly in those days, in my integrated schools and classes.

Well, here's another question. So we all know that we're social animals as human beings and we need community and friends. Do you feel— do you feel more isolated having grown up in this, like in the remedial class? Has that been a theme in your life? And if it's too personal, you don't have to answer that, but I'm wondering like how I'll just use my own kids as examples. You know, they tend to have friends that are sort of similar, with similar abilities. And I think sometimes they do— are looked upon as like those other kids. And I wonder about the sense of community that some of these kids have. Are they more lonely? And I see this. That's why I'm asking. I don't know if everybody has that same experience. feeling that you're a little bit more isolated from the quote-unquote mainstream?

Well, I mean, it's strange. I mean, I never went into a remedial class, but I know that if I had done, I'd have been isolated from the rest of the school. And yet at the same time, I wonder whether there would have been sort of an in-group collectivism within these, within these classes. I don't know. What I do know is being in a mainstream class, um, not, not the remedial class, being in mainstream class, um, with an isolating experience.

Yes.

Because, um, certainly boys' school, but I'm guessing also girls' school, is very competitive.

Yeah.

And there is very much a sort of, um, this idea that if you're not very good, then everyone makes you know it, and you really know that you're not very good at certain things.

Yeah.

And so being in a mainstream class was extremely competitive. Um, I had a couple of friends, they and I stuck together. Everyone else seemed to be against us. And, and thankfully not me, but a friend of mine, one of my best friends, and I'm still very good friends with him. A couple of years ago we were looking back at old school photographs and there was a photograph of him and we were laughing him. You could see the shoe marks all over his clothes because he'd had the living hell kicked out of him, as normal. And this is a normal school photograph, people standing there, and he was covered in shoe marks. He had his butt— this was very commonplace in my kind of— in my school. I got it, he certainly got it, another friend of mine got it.

Mm-hmm.

And this was very much because you were singled out because academically you weren't capable, which is why you defended yourself with the clown act.

I— and I misunderstood. I thought you said that you had been in the remedial class. So it sounds like the answer to that is probably yes. Either you're going to be isolated because you're in the remedial class, or you're isolated because you're in mainstream and you're not keeping up with the rest of them. And I— yeah, that's just very interesting to think. That's sad. That these kids don't have that sense of community. And, you know, not to say anything personal about where I work, but what I see is a lot of these adults are isolated. Now, that could be from other reasons. I'm not saying that's the only reason, but I do tend to see that, and I feel like a lot of that— Where these kids are going through this, and obviously not everybody who's dyslexic is going to be in that category, and there's certainly dyslexic people who would say, no, you know, I have tons of friends or whatever, but I just tend to see that they are— and again, my own family's experiences— that they tend to be a little bit more isolated from the quote-unquote mainstream.

Mm-hmm.

And they are very much like very personable kids. I have— my 2 sons are very personable, but they tend to be that class clown and that sort of thing, but that in itself, it's a little bit isolating because the teachers don't like that, and once the teachers get upset, then, you know, the rest of the class picks up on that, and everybody thinks that you're just being, you know, a pain in the neck.

Yeah, I mean, there are very few people with dyslexia that I've spoken to throughout my life who look back on school and go, oh, that was great.

Yeah.

You can count them on one finger, can't you?

Yeah, I haven't heard any.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, well, and that's how this whole thing came up, right, Lois? I mean, look, you know, you know, with your— the experience that you've had updating.

And he's— and he was one of the successful ones. He was the one, you know, once we got to Lubbock, you know, from 4th grade to 12th grade, he loved school. He was fine. You know, but it's the incidents that happened were really so dramatic that, you know, 10 years after them, he's crying about them. You know, so we don't escape from these terrible situations with no impact.

Yeah.

Irrespective of whether we've succeeded or failed. But I think it's then the degree of impact. Like you said, you know, you end up being the unemployed and the struggle to keep work and all of the other— and the implications for that in today's world are horrendous.

Yeah, yeah. There is, as I once said, there's a school-shaped bruise just there in your heart and it remains there. It remains there. And it follows you into the world of work, not only because, not only because of your grades, but it follows you into the world of work because of what you feel you deserve.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's a big thing. If you grow up feeling, because of what you've experienced, that you don't deserve top marks, you don't deserve the school trophy, You don't deserve to be made prefect and head boy. If you grow up feeling like that, then you'll go into the world of work thinking that you don't deserve to be in a management position, you don't deserve to be on that pay scale, you don't deserve to be in this area, you just need to be here and, and mind your business. And, and, and, and so it's not only the, the grades that you carry with you, it's this feeling of, of what you deserve.

What do you think would be helpful for people to not feel that way as they become adults? I mean, clearly you had, you know, you made it through school and you worked towards degrees. I mean, clearly you don't give up, and that's maybe a personal trait, but what do you say to other people so that they don't give up?

Well, I try to tell them, yeah, I try to tell I tell them, and I, I say this again and again and again, I say, look, your school grades are not a measurement of how intelligent you are. They are not. They're a measurement of how well you can do a school exam.

Yeah.

And, and that's not, that's not a terribly important point. It really isn't. I could have missed 90% of secondary school, and I don't think my education would have suffered at all. Socially, I think I had benefited.

Yes.

fortune. But I could have missed 90% of secondary school and academically I wouldn't have suffered. Yeah. Um, your school grades are not a measure of who you are. If they were a measure of who you are, then I wouldn't be doing a doctorate.

Yeah.

I wouldn't have a master's degree. I wouldn't be teaching in universities.

Yeah.

And, and so if you're like— I don't mean this in an arrogant way, I genuinely don't, but in one respect I am the proof.

Yes.

the school grades that I was getting and not the measurement of how intelligent I was.

Yes.

And all of those kids who are made to feel lowly because they're getting low grades should look to that, should look to these examples and say, actually, yeah, it's not me. It's not the measure of my value. It's not the measure of my worth. And it's not even the measure of my academic work. It's the measure of this school's ability to teach me. And there needs to be this conversation.

Yes, yes, yes. But we bear the cost of that.

Yeah, yeah, we do. I mean, and it's billions of billions of dollars, by the way. Yeah, there was a figure from my mind. I think it's It's UNESCO, UNESCO Institute of something, I can't remember exactly what it was. UNESCO figures showed that the United States loses over $30 billion a year because of its inability to deal with dyslexia effectively.

Wow.

That's $30 billion a year.

Yeah.

The cost, the financial cost is enormous.

Yeah.

The human cost, the cost of alcoholism, the cost of homelessness, the cost of mental health issues, um, is both a financial burden and a moral and interpersonal burden that a society cannot afford to continue, if you like, creating, because the society is creating it.

Yeah.

And one of the simple ways to put a stop to it is for the school system to be transparent that not succeeding in school is not a measurement of how bad you are.

Yeah.

And, you know, and for teachers to go, okay, well, this kid can't do that, never mind, I'm sure this kid can do other things, let her go off and do them, or whatever. Because I mean, I personally do not see the point in forcing a kid who can't do schoolwork to do more schoolwork.

Yeah.

It doesn't make any sense at all. And Einstein did not say— this is one of those things Einstein didn't say, but everyone thinks he said it— the definition of madness is to keep doing the same thing and expect different results. Whoever said it first, Got it damn right, didn't they? And that if we continue to say, well, this young girl, this Lois, she can't, she can't do maths, so we'll punish her until she does it, and we will give her extra maths homework. It doesn't make any sense. It sounds like a form of, of, of—

Torture.

Yes, torture.

Yeah. I was on a I was on a call on Friday with these gifted homeschoolers and a man was talking about all of the amazing activities he had to work with children doing everyday activities and that's what every child who is not learning in classroom should be doing. Not more of the same, a wider activity so that they can connect the dots. dots so that they can come into the regular classroom and feel successful.

I've been beginning a conversation with a German university, university in Berlin, and I had one of the early stage conversations this morning with them. How can we create what they call in Germany learning offers that do not restrict people to the sort of multiple choice or essay writing kind of answer? Because, by the way, I mean, let's just take multiple choice as a simple example. I mean, okay, look, most multiple choice questions will have similar sounding answers.

Yeah.

Similar looking answers. So, you know, is the answer 3.14159, or is the answer 31.14, or is the answer 314.11? And, you know, If you've got dyslexia, you can't tell the difference. You know, what's, what's that fluid in your knee? Is it synovial fluid? Is it synaptic fluid? Is it synoptic fluid? I don't know, they all sound the same. Asking me that kind of question isn't asking me what I know about the subject at hand. It's basically tricking me.

Yes.

It's basically throwing me in a pickle.

Yes.

Yes. Asking multiple choice questions is partly— it's putting pressure on phonological processing because you're reading and then respond, answer. It's putting pressure on working memory because you've then got to throw your memory back. It's putting pressure on sequencing because you've got to look at, oh, which one is it? It's putting pressure on all sorts of things that are not the things that you've been Yes, yes. And it's the same with essay writing. Essay writing, certainly in an exam, is putting pressure on phonological processing, on working memory, on executive functioning.

Yeah.

It's putting pressure on all these things that are not the skills to be taught or learnt. And therefore the whole point of testing kids in schools is— it's topsy-turvy. There's no reason to test kids like that. You're testing them on the wrong things. And there's no wonder people with dyslexia fail at school because we're not being tested on what we can do, we're tested precisely on those things we can't do.

And to me, a multiple choice question has got nothing to do with what the person's learning. It's for ease and speed of marking. You know, that's what it's for. That's why they've been designed in the way they have. And that's what— and what are we doing? There's only one right answer and all the others are wrong.

Yeah.

That frustrates me in a world where we want to teach kids to be creative, to think. Oh, don't start me. Anyway.

I mean, I'm not bad at maths, but I'm terrible at numbers. And so if you, you know, if we're discussing a maths thing, I'll explain what's going on and I'll even give an answer, but the chances are the decimal point's in the wrong place or the numbers are the wrong way around. The point is definitely there. And yet with a multiple choice question, you've just given the wrong answer, you've just got it wrong and you get marked down.

Yeah.

And I remember my multiple choice answers at school and Yeah, they were hopeless. Absolutely hopeless. So yeah, it happens a lot. And this is, this is one of the things that it's not only the schooling, but it's the examinations towards the end of the schooling that show you how good you are and how well you have done and what you are worth and what you then deserve to get afterwards.

Yeah.

This is the thing. Do you deserve to get to technical college, to university, to Whatever. What do you deserve at the end of school? That's the implicit question. At the end of school, what do you now deserve?

That's interesting. I've never thought of it that way, but that sounds— yeah, what you said sounds right on. I never thought of it like that. That's a shame.

And so, yeah, we dyslexics come out thinking, well, clearly we don't deserve Yeah. X, Y, or Z. And we know we don't because the school life— school system's told us we don't.

Well, I think it's a shame now even with the trade, uh, with the trades that a lot of people, employers, are insisting that people have college degrees. And I think, why? You know, if you're going to be, say, a plumber and you're very good at imagining all the plumbing things, what do you have to be doing exams with writing or just a college degree just to say you have a college degree? Like, it seems like that doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and it actually holds people back and out of those fields.

Yeah.

And I hope that we can, you know, stop doing that and insisting everybody has this college degree for what? You know, a lot of the trades, again, you need to have that practical, visual, hands-on, can-do stuff. What do we need this piece of paper about.

And the way to do it is— sorry, Lois— but the way to do it is to stop telling ourselves that, okay, a college degree is the ultimate, the college degree is the top, and that anything that's not a college degree isn't as good. You guys, you don't need a college degree because you can go off and become plumbers. But in a way, if we keep this narrative that the college degree is the top, we're telling the plumbers that they're not at the top.

And I don't agree, I don't think that they're not, yeah. Like, I don't think a college degree is any better than somebody who can do plumbing. I can't do plumbing, there's no way. You could teach me all you want, I'm still not going to get it.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I think it was The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, because there was a TV show when I was a kid and I watched the TV show, hadn't read the books. In the TV show there was a planet and on the planet there were 3 rockets and one rocket, um, I don't know, one rocket contained scientists and one rocket contained, um, business people and one rocket contained electricians and plumbers and cleaners. And the people on the electricians, plumbers, cleaners rocket lived and everyone else died. Because you, you, you can escape from a planet, but it turns out who are the useful people in society? Who are the people who actually are able to, to, to run? Who are the ones we cannot do without.

Yeah.

And it's those people who have traditionally been looked down upon because they don't have an academic education. And when we look at it like that, when we look at the idea that we look down on those people who don't have the academic qualification, you know, the ones with the academic qualifications, professors of philosophy, we don't need them. We don't. We need electricians, we need plumbers, we need people who can, who can load and unload the food that you need. This, this has become obvious during the COVID lockdown.

Yes, yes.

We've got the doctors and the nurses, what you call the key health workers. Brilliant, fantastic. Let's celebrate the doctors and the nurses. Who else have we relied on? We've relied on the people who've been taking the rubbish away. We've relied on the people who've cleaned the streets. We've relied on the people who've been in the shops. We've relied on the people who've made the sandwiches to send out to the hospitals. We've relied on these very people. Without those people, we would have all died. Simple as that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's for sure. Martin, we've talked for an hour! Have we?

Good God, blimey, we have, haven't we?

You can get it online.

You know, there's so much to unpack on this whole, you know, failure. What happens when we don't teach children to read? And Lisa, you know, you've got so much insight now. Well, most likely you always have, but it's just been expanded by working in this industry. Is there anything else you wanted to say?

Who, me? Yeah. Oh, well, no, no, no, I just want to thank Martin for talking with us again. I could listen to you all day. I love your stories, and it's so important to hear. It's important for people to hear this and, you know, how, how we can help people that are feeling this way about their educational experience. So I really honestly thank you for talking to us. I really enjoyed it.

It's a pleasure. It's a cathartic pleasure, and it really is. It's interesting, you ask the questions and I have to confront them.

Yes.

And it teaches me an awful lot, this whole idea of this discussion. It's a very important thing. And I think that the thing that has come out of it is that teaching kids that they're not worth it through the school system, and that has to change. Not necessarily at school is itself a bad thing, but the way we do it is we're teaching kids that they are different, they're not as valuable as other people, they are somehow pariahs, that they can be ostracized, they are great, that they are valued on their grades. And this, this carries through into adulthood.

Yeah.

To the point where, um, if I hadn't been so lucky Yeah. I would have continued down this path of alcohol and drugs and sleeping lots and, and, and, um, and yeah, God knows what else.

Yeah, and where can we find you? You do something called Dyslexia Bites, which I think is so cute.

Yes, yes, thank you. Yeah, um, you can find it online. You can find it on www.dyslexiabites.com. B-Y-T-E-S, dyslexia-bytes.org.

I think it's clever.

And you can find me on YouTube, Rowntree, as well.

And on LinkedIn. And are you on Facebook as well?

I am, yep, yep. And in fact, there's a— I run the Dyslexia Bytes Facebook group, right? So people can join the group on Facebook.

Right.

You can find me on Twitter, @bytesdyslexia, so bytes dyslexia, just look at dyslexia bytes and you'll see me there. And you can find me again on LinkedIn with a book pretending that I can read. You can find me on LinkedIn under Martin Bloomfield.

Oh, Martin, thank you so much for talking with us today because next week we're going to be talking to Joe Brummer and he has a book out called Building a Trauma-Informed Restorative School. So it's going to be an excellent follow-on from you, you know, trying to break down— he comes from a different angle, but it's trying to create a community, I imagine, at the beginning. So I am Lois Letchford. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Martin. Look for us on Facebook, YouTube, and I thank my son Isaac for all his technical support because I couldn't do it without him. And for the people who have commented, thank you so much. We haven't— I haven't read them out, but thank you, and I'll answer them when I look at them.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Thank you, and we'll talk to you next week, Lisa, and Martin will be in touch over the time. Yes, thank you. Exit. What do I have to do? Exit, exit, exit. Ah, there I am. Thank you. Oh, I've got to talk to these people. Now we've got to edit this first, haven't we?