Maths, the lesson from hell. I hated maths, why? Because when I sat down, got out my pencil case and opened my exercise book, there were red marks all over the page in an x shape. When my maths teacher was teaching us a topic in maths everybody else would understand and absorb what the teacher said. My head was like a block of cement in maths; nothing went in or out of it. The questions she gave us looked like an alien language. They had no meaning to me; they were just symbols on the paper.
Why couldn't I be like the others?
Why couldn't I learn?
What was wrong with me?
Things got so bad, that in my second year at secondary school I had some extra lessons after school. My progress didn't change; it still stayed the same. I went to maths clinics at lunch break, but I still couldn't grasp the maths, even when I went over it again and again.
"There must be some way I could learn to understand maths", I kept thinking to myself.
Then one day, one of my teachers who had done the Davis Dyslexia Correction® Programme with Jane Heywood who is a Davis Dyslexia Correction® Facilitator. He gave me an idea on what the course was about. It sounded as if it could really help. I spoke to Jane on the phone and she told me all about the sort of things I would be doing with her.
On the first day of the course I was amazed what I could remember by making a picture and the corresponding word out of clay. She taught me about Disorientation, Symbol Mastery, word mastery, time, place-position-order and disorder and everything else in the course. Jane was brilliant; I couldn't believe how much I learnt when I think back to it now, my knowledge had enhanced and grown so much.
We then went on to maths, Jane was great and she was really understanding. For the first time ever, I started to absorb maths. It was like Jane had smashed the concrete block stopping information from getting into my head, the information started slowly flowing in. The best way for me to learn maths, I found was to make pictures of the different topics out of clay.
Jane had done it; she had broken through the barrier and now was teaching and showing me things that made no sense to me before. The symbols, numbers and everything else were starting to make sense and mean something.
I was now starting to become like the others!
I could now start learning how to do maths!
Thanks to Jane's understanding, support, guidance and the Davis Dyslexia Correction Program, I have now been able to advance forward, learn new things and break the barrier!