The Adventure of the Dyspraxia Delights
It's the final day of Dyspraxia Awareness Week and today I thought I'd talk about dyspraxia in a different way. It's very easy to consider the many ways dyspraxia negatively affects my life from clumsiness to awkwardness and manifold other ways. But dyspraxia doesn't just help to define the worst parts of who I am, it also contributes to the best bits.
One recognised trait of dyspraxia is empathy, the ability to interpret and understand other people's emotions. I'm not always the best at actually dealing with them because I often lack the confidence to do so but I can sympathize and adapt my approach to people in a way many people struggle to do. I always think it's a really important quality to have when working in education too because understanding how pupils are feeling can have such a huge impact on student's learning. Working with children with autism adds another layer to this- many students struggle to communicate how they are feeling and so being able to sense it through other means can be really useful.
People often praise my organisation and this is because of dyspraxia. It's not a trait, indeed if anything dyspraxia makes your life chaotic and it's because of this that I have always tried to be organised. I neatly plan out everything in my life with every event appearing in my diary and electronically on my phone (and by extension Alexa reads out my daily calendar every morning after waking me up). Everything I own has a very set place where it is stored and the things I carry with me on a daily basis have a set section of my bag to stay in. I have to be like this because otherwise my life would be chaos- I'd rarely be where I am supposed to be and I would lose everything that is not physically attached to me.
I also love a routine. Some people will state that routines make you boring and that you should vary your life as much as possible. I say that's a recipe for disastor and it's by following routines that I remember everything I need. It's when my brain has to think about something that it will struggle but if you follow a routine everything becomes a process that you do automatically.
People always praise punctually as an important quality and because of my organisation I am early to virtually everything. I'm very rarely late and I always set off way earlier than is necessary because I want to insure that traffic doesn't stress me out and that I can park somewhere which won't make me anxious for the whole event. Seriously, if I have to park somewhere which might not be that easy to get out of, I will spent most of the time I'm there worrying about leaving. The point is, it's not unusual to find me lurking outside a venue because I've turned up with huge swathes of time to spare.
I have a creativity that's caused my brain being wired differently to most people's. This is enormously helpful when planning lessons because I come up with creative ways to teach, like this week when I demonstrated that sound travels in vibrations by putting rice on a drum and sending it flying across the classroom (sorry cleaners). It also works well when it comes to managing challenging behaviours because I sometimes come up with ideas which other people don't think of. I'm just generally a creative person and I'm always have stories running around my head which I'm concocting. Coming up with a subject to write a blog post on every week also requires a level of creativity I suspect some people would struggle to muster!
There's also the fact that having dyspraxia inevitably leads to building up resilience. I grew up constantly being told I couldn't do things and being criticized and verbally attacked by others because I came across as different from the norm. As I grew into adulthood I learnt to ignore this and me by own person. I'll always remember a tutor at university telling me how awful I was and then saying I didn't seem that bothered and it was almost as if I didn't care. It wasn't the case that I didn't care about what she was saying but I had developed the ability to be strong in the face of criticism and not have a breakdown when some witch is horrible to me.
Alongside this is a determination. I know there are some things I can't do but I have also realised that I can do most things that other people can do, it just might take me longer to learn how to do them. I remember doing work experience at a falconry centre and was tasked with learning to tie a falconer's knot. The other student mastered it in minutes but I spent two days in a workshop learning how to do it and it paid off because I did it. Similarly it took me an age to learn to drive and pass the driving test, not least because I found the manoeuvres especially difficult. I kept taking lessons though and on my fourth attempt I passed my test, including perfectly parallel parking.
I felt weirdly uncomfortable writing about some of the positive parts of my life here when I'm so used to being self-deprecating about my many faults. Thanks for reading and if you haven't already do check out my other Dyspraxia Awareness Week post here.
One recognised trait of dyspraxia is empathy, the ability to interpret and understand other people's emotions. I'm not always the best at actually dealing with them because I often lack the confidence to do so but I can sympathize and adapt my approach to people in a way many people struggle to do. I always think it's a really important quality to have when working in education too because understanding how pupils are feeling can have such a huge impact on student's learning. Working with children with autism adds another layer to this- many students struggle to communicate how they are feeling and so being able to sense it through other means can be really useful.
I also love a routine. Some people will state that routines make you boring and that you should vary your life as much as possible. I say that's a recipe for disastor and it's by following routines that I remember everything I need. It's when my brain has to think about something that it will struggle but if you follow a routine everything becomes a process that you do automatically.
People always praise punctually as an important quality and because of my organisation I am early to virtually everything. I'm very rarely late and I always set off way earlier than is necessary because I want to insure that traffic doesn't stress me out and that I can park somewhere which won't make me anxious for the whole event. Seriously, if I have to park somewhere which might not be that easy to get out of, I will spent most of the time I'm there worrying about leaving. The point is, it's not unusual to find me lurking outside a venue because I've turned up with huge swathes of time to spare.
I have a creativity that's caused my brain being wired differently to most people's. This is enormously helpful when planning lessons because I come up with creative ways to teach, like this week when I demonstrated that sound travels in vibrations by putting rice on a drum and sending it flying across the classroom (sorry cleaners). It also works well when it comes to managing challenging behaviours because I sometimes come up with ideas which other people don't think of. I'm just generally a creative person and I'm always have stories running around my head which I'm concocting. Coming up with a subject to write a blog post on every week also requires a level of creativity I suspect some people would struggle to muster!
Alongside this is a determination. I know there are some things I can't do but I have also realised that I can do most things that other people can do, it just might take me longer to learn how to do them. I remember doing work experience at a falconry centre and was tasked with learning to tie a falconer's knot. The other student mastered it in minutes but I spent two days in a workshop learning how to do it and it paid off because I did it. Similarly it took me an age to learn to drive and pass the driving test, not least because I found the manoeuvres especially difficult. I kept taking lessons though and on my fourth attempt I passed my test, including perfectly parallel parking.
I felt weirdly uncomfortable writing about some of the positive parts of my life here when I'm so used to being self-deprecating about my many faults. Thanks for reading and if you haven't already do check out my other Dyspraxia Awareness Week post here.
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