Today I'm going to be using skills that I formed after being utterly humiliated at school, English.
I basically went from Junior school (ages 7 - 11) unable to spell, form structured sentences or really converse in writing. Plus my handwriting was appalling; it's still bad.
The reason? We didn't really get pulled up on writing, Maths we had a focus on, we had to learn times tables and stuff - more about that next time, but writing and spelling wasn't really bothered about, I can only recall two times my writing was questioned.
The first was with a supply teacher who noticed that myself, and a bunch of other kids, started writing in the top left of the page, and we would rotate just our wrist around, so our writing went in a rainbow like arc across the page from top left corner to nearly bottom right... Then we'd flip the page over.
I can recall this vividly as she was just utterly perplexed at these 10 year olds not being able to write along a straight line, she made the whole class make a lined page we could use behind our actual writing page and guide our hands. She also showed us to use a few other sheets below to make our pen/pencil strokes more formed. Our actual teacher was genuinely annoyed with us "wasting paper" when she returned to find us writing on one page with two or three below. But the lined pages remained.
The second was when writing about a visit by the police to the school, they showed us a police dog and engaged with us, it was the police being a friendly force and to this day I trust the UK police because of efforts like that (no matter how ineffectual they can actually be, they try). But we were writing about little the day in little events and had to write out the phonetic alphabet.
I got the alphabet wrong... I was like 7... but I got the alphabet wrong!!!
Just take that in, you can see this blog, how long I've been writing, at 7... I did not know the alphabet.
My teacher, a male that year, was more bothered about us being quiet and well behaved, he was actually busy planning a road trip across the USA that year, and that's what I remember more than any teaching, he left at the end of that first year; which must have been his first year after graduating as a teacher.
All this problem built throughout my time at junior school and at 11 when I walked into senior (comprehensive) they immediately identified I could not spell, could not form sentences, could not really write. And my mother set about an intensive scheme at home of fixing this (we'll ignore she hadn't noticed before hand). The school certainly hadn't noticed before 1989.
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