Jip's page is a personal narrative of dyslexia.
This webpage tells about my experiences with dyslexia and how it influenced my schoolcarrier. I studied astrophysics at the University of Utrecht from 1999 until 2002. But I was 6 years older then the averidge student who started that year. This storie explains why.
Note: To give the reader an impression of the spelling errors I make as a dyslexic, no one helped me correct the spelling errors in this document.
Here's a snippet
During primairy school my reading and writing didn't progress very well. I kept making the same errors and nobody knew why. I also was very slow in preforming other tasks. I could never finish my work in time. It gave the teachers the impression that I was stupid. But the most frustrating thing was that I didn't understand it myself either. I started to believe that I was stupid too. Why couldn't I do all the things other kids could ? Why was I so slow with everything ?
Just befor it was time for me to decide what type of school to go to next my mother heared about the existense of dyslexia and got me tested. The relief I felt when I was diagnosed dyslexic was unbelievable. Finally I knew why I was different. Finally I knew that I wasn't as stupid as everybody had thought. But I still didn't know what dyslexia really meant. And nobody knew how my dyslexia would develope. The answer to the question which type of school I should go to wasn't really answered. My mother decided to play it safe and send me to the type of school which I would be capable of doing in a worse case senario. So I went to an ivo-mavo.
At that age I didn't really understand what my options were and what the consequense might be. Studying below my level didn't realy boost my motivation. Some subjects were far to easy for me and the theorie was repeated over and over again. And other subjects were far to difficult for me. I felt like I was an alien in the classroom. All the other childeren could easily reproduce all the words and terms we had to learn, and I didn't understand how they did that. That felt terrible. It confused me even more.
I lost all my confidence. I didn't get any joy from learning. I used to be a very anxious to learn new things, but school had become something where you were constantly confronted with your limits and the real interested topics were to difficult to discuss. I nearly failed to get my mavo diploma due to this growing lack of interest. So when I got it it was clear that learning wasn't made for me. Later on I discoverd that it wasn't the subjects which were to difficult for me but the learning method which was used which made it all much more difficult for me. But despite of the personal guidance this school provided my teachers couldn't see my potential.
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