The Dyslexic’s Dilemma

Glimpse of Boat On Way To School

When I finished my 5^th grade, we had to shift to my dad’s place, which was a village was called Byndoor. I had a tough time leaving behind my grandmother, grandfather, uncle and aunty. Before moving over, my mother promised me that she will keep me happy over there. And if I missed her family a lot or had tough time adjusting there, then she would move me back to Bangalore. She kept that promise, as  I was quite happy there.

TEMS, Gangolli

I did miss my family but then I had lots of freedom in Byndoor when compared to Bangalore. That made up for other losses. My grandmother never let me go out for long or alone, because she was worried that I may hurt myself. She was very nervous even about my grown up uncle. Here in Byndoor, my Mom allowed me to explore the world and learn about it myself. The problem of my languages was still there with me. The school I joined was a little far from my village so I had to travel for nearly two hours every day, but I did not mind the travel. Every day as we traveled, we all enjoyed sights of rivers, bridges, mountains, animals, birds and many other amazing scenes. Marvanthe beach always excited me though I saw it every day. 

Marvanthe Beach

I really had great classmates, but at first I didn't make many friends there because I was very shy and quite different in every aspect from them, but as days passed by I got used to that place, the people and the environment. 

As for the languages I had a bigger problem because I had to learn a new language, and that was Urdu. I took the challenge because; any way I was no expert in Hindi, so learning Hindi also required much effort. Another attraction was the assumption that Urdu might be easier then Hindi.  I was wrong!

Having fun after exams .. whew!!

It was more difficult than Hindi, and all I could remember was some kind of weird shapes. I named them, heart, 1, b etc and wrote the exams recalling sentences of which I created visual images in mind.

The situation of exams did not change much in my new school either, I would score poor marks in languages and teachers would try hard to give me passing marks so I could go to the next class. The real challenge came in 7^th grade when we had public exam, which meant the papers would get corrected by other school teachers, therefore my teachers couldn’t help me. They were more worried about me than me.

Beautiful Scenes on way to school..

View from the terrace of our school

We would cross many such rivers to reach the school

Lucky for me the year I was supposed to write the public exam, the system changed and it got cancelled. It was made compulsory only for 10^th from then on and somehow I managed to go till 10^th without being fluent in reading or writing Urdu and Kannada, but scraping enough marks to pull through. Now to pass the SSLC exam I had to do well in the final exams. I and my mom talked it over and decided that I will work really hard for 5-6 months and pass the SSLC exam .So I started getting up at 5:00 in the morning and started studying. I started going to our neighbour’s home, who tried teaching me Urdu. The lady was very eager to teach me, but she did not have experience in teaching children and also she could not understand my dyslexic problem. I worked very hard but it was like running fast to stay on the same spot.
It was then that my mom decided to take the reins in her hand. She learned Urdu so she could teach me (she was new to that language), that was an inspiration and hope for me that I could do it. After 5-6 months of hard work I could write a full chapter, could write letters, one word answers, but the funny thing was, I didn’t know what I was writing. My mom was more of a smart worker than hard worker, so she found out all those questions that had chances of being repeated and had plan made for me to learn those, and one world answers etc.  So with all the effort somehow I passed in those languages.