My Personal Experience: My Experience In My Life

The next few years flowed by of just passing things and playing up. I did whatever I liked to fill the time until I could leave school. I followed a crowd of older misfits I smoked and sniffed funny things. I did my best to fly under the radar and not be noticed; sometimes this included doing a little work here and there but most of the time it involved simply pretending I was doing the work. By age fourteen my mother had me assessed by a learning disability group. I was officially diagnosed with Dyslexia, with numbers and a little bit with letters. I was now allowed to use my computer in class but I never did at the time. A while after I was diagnosed I was playing up in my year ten maths class assessment. “Rachel, why aren’t you writing anything?”

My mother thought they didn’t challenge me enough but somehow it gave me space to gain some footing. Perhaps it was the room to goof around a bit, or how the teachers didn’t just stand at the front but actually helped you out and treated me like a human. Or maybe it was that I couldn’t feel the shame of being unequal anymore. I had missed quite a few basics and these classes gave me a chance to catch up and once I got the basics, other things I had learnt began to make sense. I remember passing my first few NCEA assessments and thinking. ‘Hey I can do this.’ I even got merits; in fact I was the top of most of my classes that year. Being in the lower grade classes enabled me to see one simple thing. I could be brilliant, in my own way and in those classes the teachers were willing to accept brilliant in every way because they were hoping to just make sure we passed. The next two years of high school I was put back into mid and high streamed classes. I excelled in things like Biology and English. I enjoyed Art and the challenge of Chemistry, though I wasn’t very good at the Maths part, I enjoyed it. I found beauty in colour coding things and making massive mind maps on my walls. I spent hours on the internet researching topics and teaching myself things about my topic that didn’t always apply to the actual assessment content. I remember my first excellence

I asked my sister to help me edit it. She took my computer form my hands and said “Here, let me teach you how to do it and then you can do it yourself.” She taught me how to edit spelling and grammar properly. With her teaching me like that it gave me the opportunity to ask questions as we went and apply it in ways the made sense for me. That same week at school my teacher taught me how to figure out to structure sentences in a very similar matter. Two weeks later on my desk landed the first of many excellence grades in English. It took me all that time to realize I wasn’t necessarily wrong at all; it was like I had grown up being taught to see things in squares when I saw things in circles. Once I had learnt one skill and saw it work, I picked it up and applied it vigorously. Only when I was given the tools and time to figure it out in my own way did I excel.

A long time has passed since the days of school, since the scholarship they gave me that I never actually spent. A long gone is the offer of place into a Nursing degree; I’ve forgotten what grades I got and probably the login passwords to find them out as well. But those defining high school moments that rewrote my earliest schooling experiences, have never left me. I would like to say I figured it out on my own, but that’s not true. Before I was diagnosed, no one knew what to do with me; it was the smallest