Here’s to a Prosperous Dyslexic 2,000 & TEN!!!

We would like to wish you a Prosperous Dyslexic 2,000 & TEN – and that you have fun in the New Year overcoming your dyslexia!

We’ve got lots of exciting plans for 2010 that we hope will assist dyslexic people to overcome their dyslexic related difficulties. Here are a few things that are in the pipeline for 2010:

-    We will be delivering another batch of our ‘Parent as Dyslexic Support Coach’ workshops after the great feedback we got from the parents and special needs teachers.

-    We have designed a few competitions for school children that will hopefully help raise people’s awareness towards dyslexia.

-    We have lots of changes that we are going to make to the website such as adding our Famous Friends of Dyslexic Brian Section – we already have a few celebrates that have pledged their support so this section will be a great addition to the website.

-    Towards the end of 2010 we will be publishing Antonio’s PhD thesis online for those of you who are interested in reading Antonio’s research on the subject of dyslexia.

-    We will also be releasing an e-Book towards the end of 2010 that will give the key points from Antonio’s research – and will hopefully be useful for people who are struggling to overcome their dyslexia.

-    And from November 2010 we will be planning our 2012 Dyslexic Brian Backward Walk from John O’Groats to Lands End to raise people’s awareness of dyslexia and also to raise money for Comic Relief.

As you can see we have a busy 2010 ahead of us and we are excited about the new work we will be doing to raise people’s awareness of dyslexia. But, more importantly we are really looking forward to supporting even more people in 2010 than we did during 2009 to overcome their dyslexic related difficulties.

Once again we would like to wish you a Prosperous Dyslexic 2,000 & TEN!!!

Making Reading Right | Dyslexia Inspirational Story

The Bristol Evening Post , October 31, 2005

Dyslexic academic Antonio Farruggia 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 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 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, 2003

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.

Malcolm | Dyslexia Inspirational Story

As with many ‘dyslexics’ Malcolm’s experience of the British education system was not a good one. Before being labeled as ‘dyslexic’ Malcolm’s lack of concentration was a concern and a mystery to his parents. At the age of seven his parents paid for him to be assessed at the Dyslexia Institute. In Malcolm’s own words, his life changed from then. Each week Malcolm received lessons to help him overcome dyslexia. He believes that although it meant his parents investing a lot of money in his education each week, it was worth it.

Despite his progress outside of school, Malcolm did not enjoy the school experience. When he started secondary school, he used a laptop to help him keep up with the work load, and to help his teachers to read his work. However being different and even using a laptop meant that Malcolm was bullied.’ Sunday night,’ he says , ‘was hell’ because he dreaded going to school on Monday morning.

At the age of fifteen Malcolm prepared to sit his GCSE’s, he also made a career choice: to use his skills to become a furniture maker. His mother was thold by one of Malcolm’s teachers that he should ‘lower his expectations’. Despite this Malcolm wasn’t deterred he sat his exams and achieved five GCSE’s grade A to C.

Malcolm now attends college full time to learn furniture making. He doesn’t know if this will be his final career choice, but he does know that he is not going to give up. Malcolm’s determination to succeed is an inspiration. Malcolm stresses that anyone with dyslexia dyslexic or parents of dyslexic children shouldn’t t give up, It is worth pushing the the education system, and it is worth investing in your future. Malcolm’s message: ‘If I can do well so can you’.

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 Awareness Week 2009 – Dyslexic Brian Supporting the Cause!!!

FREE Places on Dyslexia Workshops

To help celebrate this year’s Dyslexia Awareness Week we are running three FREE dyslexia workshops aimed at parents of dyslexic children.

Benefit from:

• A deeper understanding of the dyslexia related issues your child may be experiencing

• Knowing how different theories of dyslexia may be ‘helping’ or ‘hindering’ your child’s progress at school

• Learning several techniques that you can use to assist your child to improve their reading and writing ability

• Finding out the potential benefits of you becoming your child’s own Dyslexia Support Coach

• Evaluating your ability to become a Dyslexia Support Coach to your child

1. Saturday 7th November 2009    2pm – 4pm
2. Saturday 14th November 2009   2pm – 4pm
3. Saturday 21st November 2009   2pm – 4pm

In addition to the workshops we have also been Spreading the WORD about Dyslexia Awareness Week via LIVE Radio Shows, Dyslexia Workshops, and Guest Speaking Events.

Don’t forget to do your bit too – tell the world about dyslexia!!!

To book your FREE place on workshop or for more information please contact Antonio Farruggia on +447969789893 or email him at info@DyslexicBrian.com

Assistive Technology and Training

A common outcome from a Disabled Students’ Allowances needs assessment , is a recommendation for the purchase of specialist equipment (or ‘assistive technology’). It may also include training on how to use this effectively.

Who buys the equipment recommended in my needs assessment report?

You will need to contact your funding body (e.g. Local Authority, Student Finance England or NHS Student Bursaries) to find this out. They may purchase the equipment for you and arrange a delivery date, or they may ask you to buy the equipment yourself and provide them with receipts. Individual funding bodies vary in their approach to this, so you should always ask.

What happens if it is recommended that I need a computer?

When you have a Disabled Students’ Allowances needs assessment, the assessor will recommend the most appropriate solution to overcome any study-related disability difficulties you may have. This is to allow you to have the same level of access to your study as other students.

If your assessor decides that the most appropriate solution is to recommend a computer (either laptop or desktop) they will include this in your report. It is up to your funding body to decide whether they agree to purchase the recommendations made in your assessment report however.

You are strongly advised to keep to the original recommendation made in your report. This will be the best solution to your difficulties and complement any other recommendations made. However, you may be able to negotiate with your funding body about whether you receive a laptop or desktop machine.

How is my need for training identified?

Your need for training is normally agreed as part of your needs assessment. A copy of your assessment report is then sent to your funding body (normally your Local Authority, NHS Grants Unit or Student Finance England). The funding body will then confirm whether they agree to fund the recommendation made for you to have training.

How is my training paid for?

Your training will normally be paid for from your Disabled Students’ Allowances. You will need to arrange payment between your funding body (e.g. Local Authority) and the trainer that is identified in your needs assessment report.

Source: UWE