He was bad, really bad. He would not look his teachers in the eye. Never looked to the front in class! He would not concentrate.

He was bad, really bad. He would not look his teachers in the eye. Never looked to the front in class! He would not concentrate.

Actually he was looking forwards!

Yes another one last week, actually there were two! What often happens with people diagnosed as dyslexic and slow readers is that you can look back on common episodes in their lives.

A very common experience is that they have to hold a book at a greater and greater distance from their eyes until their arms are too short!  This is often described as a ‘convergence insufficiency’. It is one of the things that along with slow reading, somewhat limits their reading stamina. (Especially if they are short-sighted as well!)

A way the visual system sometimes tries to deal with this appears to be turning one eye sideways, so that it not looking at the words being read. This leads to the person’s other eye being pulled to the same side as well and the person finds that they are turning their head sideways in order to look forwards!

In school, this can be very awkward. There you are struggling to get on with the job of reading that book or in your examination, when suddenly you are in trouble…

‘Turn round. Face the front’

‘Don’t cheat. Stop copying. Face the front’

So you look up, puzzled because that is what you were doing, only to be confronted by statement like…

‘Don’t you turn away when I am talking to you! Look at me when I am talking to you!’

Of course if you are really unlucky, you have one ear which does not work very well... the one which is on the side of your face ‘looking forwards’ when you turn your head to read.

So on the instruction to ‘Look at me when I am talking to you’ your head suddenly turns through nearly 180 degrees. Now you can hear the ‘teacher’ but you cannot see them!

No wonder his ‘dumb insolence’ got him into trouble!  He brought it on himself. Didn’t he? Didn't you........

This happens in every country in the world, with every language.

Read the rest of the blogs make some sense of what happens and is happening now.