My Dyslexia Life Story – By Antonio Farruggia-Bochnak VIDEO STORY

I felt really honoured when Goga, my fellow Co-founder of Dyslexic Brian, asked me if I would be happy to share a bit about my dyslexia life story on video.

Goga was keen to get some of my story on video (videos posted below) and put it on the website to help set the scene for the type of Dyslexia Coaching that we offer at Dyslexic Brian.

The timing for this couldn’t have been better as we are just about to release a FREE Dyslexia Coaching programme called “How to Become a Black Belt in Dyslexia” that is based on my doctoral research on dyslexia. (Keep checking the ‘Dyslexia Dojo’ tab in the menu bar on DyslexicBrian.com to see when the programme has been released, or, join us on Facebook and Twitter for updates).

I’ve always been so proud to be dyslexic and I’m always really happy to share my experience of dyslexia, especially with dyslexic people who may be struggling to understand and overcome their dyslexia related difficulties.

I’ll stop writing now and let you get on with watching the video – I hope you enjoy watching it as much as Goga and I enjoyed making it.

It will be great to hear your views on this – please post a comment in the box below or on Facebook or Twitter.

All the best,

Antonio Farruggia-Bochnak
Dyslexia Coach and Co-founder of Dyslexic Brian

Making Reading Right | Dyslexia Inspirational Story

The Bristol Evening Post , October 31, 2005

Dyslexic academic Antonio Farruggia-Bochnak has made the leap from dunce to doctor. Now he wants to help others overcome the condition which proved such a handicap in his childhood. TOM HENRY reports on the self-help dyslexia website he has set up with his brother.

When he was young, Antonio Farruggia-Bochnak was labeled a dunce by a teacher who placed a cone on his head with a large ‘D’ scrawled on it, and made him stand in a corner for three days.

His crime? To fail to keep up with his class during a reading lesson. While others were forging ahead in the literary stakes, Antonio was still on ‘Peter and Jane’ books. He could barely spell his name and he was ten years old. While still in short trousers he had been written off by an education system which couldn’t understand why he couldn’t understand.

 

Overcoming the odds: Antonio Farruggia-Bochnak has set up a website to help people with dyslexia

Fast forward 30 years and Birmingham-born Antonio is coming to the end of a PhD study into dyslexia., the condition he suffers from and which was barely recognised in mainstream education until relatively recently.

From dunce to doctor is quite a leap, but it is one which Antonio has been determined to make since he pulled himself back from what was turning into a life of crime and violence – and realised he had more to offer than he ever thought.

Now he wants to share the skills and knowledge he has built up through years of study with other dyslexic people and with his younger brother, Alessandro, he has set up a website to do that. It was called previously: beesthewrongwayround.com [now known as DyslexicBrian.com] and the name will be familiar to dyslexics who are often asked ‘do you get your b’s the wrong way round?’

“It’s also a bit ungrammatical” laughs Antonio.”I think it should be ‘bees the wrong way around’. Typical dyslexic eh? Maybe it’s because i’m from Birmingham. We’d never say ‘around’, always ’round’.

Such technicalities might not matter in the grand scheme of things, but they do to Antonio. He has had to work hard to achieve what many of us take for granted -basic literacy and numeracy – and he’s determined that others should succeed where he once struggled.

The website which Antonio runs from an office in the Fishponds Trading Estate has been in the development stage for about six months and now, in its fourth version it has finally gone live.

Beesthewrongwayround.com is a highly-comprehensive source of information, both for dyslexics and non-dyslexics, and as well as sections detailing his own and other responses to the condition, the website offers paid one-to -one tuition for those who need real-time help and support via means of a webcam.

“We’ve done a test of this method,”says Antonio, “and it’s worked very well indeed. You can be anywhere in the world and if you are dyslexic and struggling with something- an essay or a dissertation or whatever it may be -we can help you. Dyslexic students in the UK can pay for support or tuition using their DSA (Disabled Student’s Allowance) and this is something we’re keen to promote.

 

“Of course, there’s no substitute for face-to-face tuition in the same room and the website is not going to replace that, but there are many people out there who for one reason or another can’t access the kind of specialist support they need, which is a sham. This is where we come in.”

Antonio knows how it feels to be confronted with what seems an enormous and frightening pool of words. When he was completing his first degree, the worry of writing essay sand dissertations used to cause him to loose sleep.

“I found it very hard to express myself,” he said, “and just couldn’t get my head around simple things like paraphrasing or quotes or references.

“I had a real understanding of the subject I was writing about and i really wanted to express something about it, but couldn’t get it out.”

In his youth Antonio had joined a boxing gym and the coach there became a mentor to hi, encouraging and supporting him through difficult times. Now, Antonio sees himself in that role, coaching and nurturing those people with dyslexia who feel like he did when confronted by words.

“I have a lot of empathy with other dyslexic people,” he said, “because I’ve been through it. And believe me, if I can learn to read and write and study for a PhD, anyone can.”

In addition to running [Dyslexia Support Service], Antonio is also keen to take his skills out on the road. He is looking for a venue, either a school, college, university building or a youth and community centre, in which he could facilitate a discussion group for dyslexic people, students, parents of dyslexic children or anyone else with an interest in the subject. He says there would be no charge for this; it is his way of sharing his knowledge and experience.

He also wants to become involved in the training of dyslexic employees on behalf of companies, and is already working with one company, HL Training in Fishponds, to help train forklift drivers who feel that their levels of literacy and numeracy may act as a barrier when they seek future employment.

“I’d be very keen to work with other training providers or companies to help them deliver a better service to dyslectics,” he said.

[...]

“As the research for my PhD has progressed I’ve become so much more aware of my own dyslexia,” said Antonio, “and I’ve come up with a seven-stage overview of how an individual first becomes aware of their literacy and numeracy difficulties to the stage where they have accepted it and are not frightened to deal with it.

“It’s a long process – it took me more than 20 years -but I’ve got there. And so can others, if they’ve got the determination to do it.”

 

Tell us Your Dyslexia Story

We all know about famous ‘dyslexics’, but what about every-day people that have overcome barriers despite dyslexia?
Send us your story, along with a photo or video, for Dyslexic Brian’s Inspirational Stories section.

Proud to Be Dyslexic | Dyslexia Inspirational Story

Bristol Evening Post ‘Seven magazine’ 4th April, 2003Share

Having been branded a dunce at the age of six, Antonio Farruggia left school virtually illiterate. He’s now close to completing a PhD on a subject close to his heart – dyslexia. Tom Henry meets this remarkable man who has embraced dyslexia and made it his great strength.

As names go, Antonio Giuseppe Farruggia is somewhat harder to commit to paper than John Smith. Even as I write it, I’m not entirely sure if I’ve got the Giuseppe right. Is the ‘I’ before the “e”, or the “e” before the “i”?

He laughs about it now, but this is the sort of scenario 38-year-old has had to face ever since he started school. When other kids were clumsily learning to spell their names, Antonio was drawing a blank over his own, and eventually it has to be abbreviated to “Tony” to make it easier for him. When elementary reading lessons began, Antonio could not grasp the differences between the “ch”, “th” and “sh” sounds and he began to fall behind“

The one person who should know is Mr Farruggia himself – but even he, I feel, is not entirely confident. Recently, he was asked to write out his middle name at an office counter, but he just couldn’t remember how to spell it. With a queue of increasingly impatient people behind him, he had to ring his dad to ask him.

That was it from then on,” he says. “When I was 10 I was still on the Peter and Jane books. I just couldn’t get it, and yet when I was about six years old I went to Sicily one summer with my parents and I came back speaking Sicilian. Instead of the school recognising and encouraging me, the teacher folded up a piece of paper into a cone, wrote a ‘D’ for ‘dunce’ on it, put it on my head and made me stand in the corner for three days.

“I was crying and crying, and it was a horrible feeling to know that you’re missing out on what the rest of the class is doing. I fell badly behind after that, and by the time I came to take the exam for secondary school, I had a definite knack for trouble.”

Antonio was dyslexic, of course. He was one of the unlucky generation which the education system failed because his difficulties with reading and writing were not spotted by teachers who considered he was “thick”, “unteachable”, “backward”, “slow”, “remedial” or, in one phrase Antonio vividly remembers, had “bad blood”.

“It was because my dad is Sicilian,” he laughs. “I think they’d been watching too many episodes of the Godfather!”

Nonetheless, leaving school almost illiterate was no laughing matter, his frustration at falling behind resulted in him becoming extremely aggressive. He joined a gang in Birmingham, and violence became a way of life for several years to come until he eventually channeled his energies into boxing, and through a boxing coach who became a sort of mentor, he went on to train other youngsters.

Remarkably, Antonio is now in the middle of exhaustive research for a PhD in the condition which disrupted his early life. He is now able to see that dyslexics are not “handicapped”, but instead have talents, abilities and ways of learning that are different from what we might describe as “normal” and it is this positivity that will eventually lead to him being called “doctor”, not “dunce”.

“After I left school I ended up in the building trade and I moved around the country doing flooring for new Sainsbury’s stores,” he said. “I could get the concept of the design in my mind very easily, and I was able to create come lovely flooring which really gave me confidence.

“I eventually set up in business on my own, but the recession came and I lost a lot of money. I decided to change career and because I’d had experience coaching boxing to youngsters I applied for some youth work jobs. But I needed a qualification and so I applied to a college. The entrance exam I took was scribble, but to my surprise I was offered a place.

At first, Antonio felt like a “fraud”. Although his literacy had improved since school, thanks to his own effort, he still struggled with the written work, and would still misinterpret what he was told. “We did quite a lot of role play,” he said, “and one of the assignments was to act out a scene which involved working in Paris . I had all these images of France going on in my head, but when I was figuring out what I was going to do I looked around the class and everyone else seemed to be doing something different.

Eventually, the penny dropped. “I was supposed to be working in pairs, not Paris! I’d completely misread the instructions.”

Despite such elementary mistakes, Antonio’s determination to succeed saw his marks go up. He passed the course, then went on to take a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in education and community youth work. Now there was no stopping him. Although he wasn’t sure himself, a friend in the world of academia encouraged him to go on a PhD course.

As a result of his research Antonio is now of the opinion that dyslexia is something to be embraced, not overcome. “I’m not broken and I don’t need to be fixed,” he asserts. “I have got confidence in the fact that I have a different way of expression than other people. We can’t all play or read music, for example, and if you cannot so it is accepted and understood. However, we are only taught to read and write in one way, and it’s a case of ‘one-size-fits-all’.“But we are all individuals and we all do things in different ways. A lot of my research is based around the ‘person-centred’ approach to the teaching of dyslexics, which finds out what the child is interested in and teaches skills based around that core interest. “The perception a person holds of their own dyslexia is far more important than what a professional tells them it is. Personally, I’m proud to be dyslexic. It’s something special, something different, and for me it is about exploring that difference and celebrating it.”

Tell us Your Dyslexia Story

We all know about famous ‘dyslexics’, but what about every-day people that have overcome barriers despite dyslexia?
Send us your story, along with a photo or video, for Dyslexic Brian’s Inspirational Stories section.

Dyslexia Through An Artists Eye – Lerato Motau Inspirational Story

I never tire of reading inspirational dyslexia life stories – they touch a place within me that makes me feel proud to be ‘dyslexic’.

The following story about the brilliant South African Artist, Lerato Motau, is a great example of a ‘dyslexic’ person using their preferred medium of self-expression to externalise the richness of their inner world.

Dyslexic Brian would like to wish Lerato Motau all the best with the exhibition – we are sure that it will be a massive success.

~ Antonio G. Farruggia-BochnakShare this story on FacebookShare

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Dyslexia Through An Artists Eye

As a young girl in Soweto, South Africa, Lerato Motau dreamt of becoming a fashion designer when she grew up and made dolls clothes and shoes from cardboard boxes and plastic packets. Her creativity hid a deep inner pain.

Throughout her primary school years, Lerato struggled to read and write, and was considered a ‘slow learner’. During the apartheid years, many children with learning disabilities who lived in the townships never received remedial education. At the age of 14, Lerato was finally taken for an assessment and discovered that she was dyslexic. By that time however, it was too late to enroll her in a remedial school.

She hid her dyslexia from others by drawing and doodling instead of writing. It was her secret that she never shared… until now. Lerato has bravely drawn on her life’s journey and is embracing her true self.

She has created a body of artwork that reveals her story of overcoming dyslexia by expressing herself through the visual arts, culminating in this exhibition entitled, Dyslexia Through An Artists Eye. Lerato has developed her own unique multi-media technique fiber art. Circles represent the wholeness of her life, symbolic of the full circle she has journeyed, finally finding closure to all the jumbled letters, numbers and words she cannot juggle. She is celebrating the courageous, joy-filled woman she is.

Lerato dedicates this exhibition to her two daughters. They inspired her to face her dyslexia as she did not want them to experience the same struggle she had, feeling inadequate and not coping. This is Lerato’s first solo exhibition.

She is proud to reveal that she is touched by dyslexia but does not intend living her life under the label, dyslexic.

Story written by Stacey Rozen of www.storyscarves.org
Dyslexia Through An Artists Eye Lerato Motau – Solo Exhibition