The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan

In which I start something new... I've been keeping this pretty quiet until now because I wanted to quietly get on with it: late last year I applied to do my teacher training. This week I had an interview and despite it not going particularly well I have been accepted. That's typical me in critiquing my performance in an interview despite very quickly being told I'd been accepted. I'll start the course in September and by this time next year will hopefully be within weeks of completing it. It's taken a long time to get here. For those that don't know, I studied primary education at university and was making good progress. Then I had a horrific final placement which was the most awful period in my life and it took me a good few years to deal with the trauma of that time. In hindsight, I was set up to fail. I'd never taught children that young before, it was an inner city school where ninety-five percent of the children had English as an additional language (E...

In which I discuss a hatred of Physical Education... I hated PE at school. I suppose there was a time at primary school that it probably was quite enjoyable but I found over time it became less and less fun until the point I reached secondary school and actively hated it. There's lots of dyspraxic reasons for this which I'll go into but I come from a family of sport lovers and have always spent huge amounts of time outside so it feels to me that actually I could really have grown to love PE.  First of all, you'd have to get changed. When I was very young I was very slow at getting changed as I attempted to put things the right way round and struggled with various fastenings. Often you'd have to wear some sort of footwear with shoelaces and that immediately led to a problem for someone who couldn't tie their shoelaces until I was about seventeen. Most of the time I'd get my Dad to tie them at home and then just slip them on and off at school without touching the ...

In which I get annoyed at lockdown parties... The other day I was walking past my local corner shop and I watched a man pull up. He parked three quarters on the footpath, a quarter on the road with double yellow lines and then proceeded to walk into the shop without wearing a mask. He managed to break three laws in about ten seconds.  I've recently concluded that there are two types of people in the world- law-breakers and law-abiders. That man was clearly a law-breaker. He didn't give a shit about the rules. Sure, his offences were relatively minor but if one is willing to break lesser rules than I can't help but wonder just how serious a law has to be for him to follow it. I use laws in a general sense here. There are laws set out by the government, then there's rules set out by an organisation and there's also ethics, unwritten rules if you like, which include things which are technically allowed but are frowned upon like having an affair or putting pineapple on ...

In which I try to explain my brain... I've talked here before about the idea of co-occurrence when it comes to neurodiverse conditions. I know I have dyspraxia but I have some traits of other related conditions like autism and ADHD. It doesn't mean that I have those conditions but neurodiversity is a huge spectrum which still isn't really that understood.  For many years people with autism have been fighting to get researchers to understand that whilst they might face challenges with interacting with other people, actually it's sensory overload that is their issue that most affects their everyday lives. A similar thing can be said of dyspraxia. Research on dyspraxia is still pretty limited, especially in adults, but nearly all of it focuses on motor control. Yes, being clumsy is annoying but it's actually a pretty minor thing compared to other ways dyspraxia affects my life.  If you look at the symptoms listed by the Dyspraxia Foundation , the motor control stuff is...