The Adventure of the Dyspraxic Teacher

In which I discuss how dyspraxia affects my job...

The 9th-14th of October is Dyspraxia Awareness Week and as I have for the last few years I'm sharing my own experiences as a way of spreading awareness.

For quite a long time I worried that dyspraxia would be a barrier to me becoming a teacher but the past year has taught me that I can find ways to manage the difficulties it can bring. I didn't feel that it affected my qualification too much, other than a period where I had to learn how to write in cursive handwriting and write it on a whiteboard at a sensible speed that was also legible and big enough for students at the back of the class to be able to read. I have largely found that with small practical things like this the solution for me is just lots of practice. A neurotypical person could probably master this without a lot of effort but if you'd have wandered into that classroom of an evening for a couple of weeks you may well have found me randomly writing the alphabet or random words on the whiteboard. Practice makes, if not perfection, at least competency and an improvement was noted by my mentor. 

Every now and then in the classroom, a practical skill is presented to me. When I know such a challenge will likely prove difficult for me I feel my heart begin to race and a real sense of the flight or fight instinct kicks in. The primitive part of my brain wants to either walk off and leave the task incomplete or throw it to the floor in frustration. It's an instinct that can be difficult to reign in and certainly when I'm alone in the classroom after school there are occasions when you might hear some extremely strong language directed at an inanimate, fiddly object. My favourite solution for this type of scenario is to pass the problem on to someone more competent. I try to remember that everyone has different skills and passing on something I found difficult to a teaching assistant who can do it with ease saves time and anxiety. 

Being a teacher is a job where you are on your feet all day and though my classroom is well organised, for a clumsy person like me there is a seemingly endless list of things I can bump into or trip up on. I usually have at least a few bruises on my legs caused by bumping into furniture that has always been in the same place. I seem to constantly be catching my clothing on drawer and door handles, leaving me dangling like the worst trapeze artist you have ever seen. On occasion I manage to really mess up; there was one memorable moment in a PE lesson before the summer where I somehow tripped up and landed flat on my face on the hard hall floor- I'm not quite sure how I came out of that relatively unscathed. I have one dramatic fall about every three months with my most recent being falling off a stile that led to me having the biggest and most purply bruise I've ever had. 

This stuff all feels relatively obvious though. It's something of a misconception that dyspraxia only means you have difficulties with gross and fine motor skills. Dyspraxia is actually an information-processing disorder- it's this that is the cause of the issues with coordination. It's this aspect that is the biggest challenge in terms of teaching, for me anyway. Colleagues often mention how organised I am and I always find that odd because I do not in any way consider myself an organised person. I do try my best to have very clear systems and routines though because otherwise, I lose what I need to do. The chances are that at any point in the working week, I'll be doing nearly the exact same thing as the same time of the week before because it's only by having a clear routine that anything gets done. 

Lessons often require huge amounts of information processing and I've had to work hard to try to manage this. It's generally good practice to have resources pre-prepared and for me, it's vital because if it's not ready, the chances are that I will forget it. Using visual supports is good practice to support students with autism but I have also found that using interactive whiteboard software helps me to give myself prompts to ensure I've included everything I've planned to teach. It drives me mad when in the moment I forget something I wanted to include in the lesson- I've had some positive lesson observations in the past that I've still felt very negative about because I missed out something I planned to include. This is another case of practice makes perfect and carefully laying the seeds ahead of time so that when I am in the heat of the moment and trying to process a million things I'm prepared enough to ensure the lesson goes as planned. 

It's really only over the last few months that I've realised just how rubbish my communication skills are. I can hold a reasonable conversation on an informal level but I find it much harder to have a professional conversation. I always feel like I can't process what I want to say quickly enough to deliver it accurately verbally. It seems to be becoming a regular thing as someone asks me a question and it takes me an age to process what they've asked and form an answer. This leads to an awkward silence and the asker usually tries to help just as I have constructed an answer, meaning I then have to process what they've said and then it all starts all over again. This feels like the area I need to work on strategies to improve on.

Students with autism require lots of visuals and clear routines and I find that these strategies are often very useful for me as well. There is many a time when I forget what lesson I am supposed to be teaching next and the visual timetable comes to my rescue! I proved to myself that I can actually teach a mainstream class pretty well earlier in the year but I like to think I have particular skill in teaching students with autism. I think a large part of that is that my brain and my student's brains are wired in similar ways and that enables me to connect and support them. 

I've focused a lot here on the challenges that dyspraxia creates but actually, the way my brain works is part of what makes me, I hope, a good teacher. It comes with the skill of empathy and using this to develop relationships with the students I work with is something I consider a real strength of mine. Dyspraxics are good problem solvers and I like to think that enables me to come up with solutions to issues that someone else in my position may not have come up with. Over the last few years, I've come to understand myself a lot better and whilst dyspraxia presents its challenges it also presents opportunities. Dyspraxia doesn't define me but it's an important part of who I am.