After a meeting with one of my tutors, we got discussing my work and how I have been very open in my account of how things happen.
We started talking about our differences to our feelings about books. How I would rather watch the film of a book, than actually go through the hassle of reading it. Where as my tutor would love to sit down with a cupper at the end of the day and read, she finds the whole thing relaxing and it is a part of her daily ritual.
This conversation got us onto films about books and she set me the task of watching a film, that she had seen and that she thought that I would like. The film was called The book thief.
The film was set in the Second World War and is the story of a young girl who lost her brother travelling across the country, he dies in a small town and the young girl picks up a book that she thought was her brothers.
We soon find out that the young girl can not read, the story is about her learning and falling in love with the ability to read and write, the young girl ends up stealing books to feed her new found love of reading.
I have to admit that my dyslexia is not as bad as the girl in the film but there was parts of the film that I was able to connect with the girl. one of which is when she is asked to write her name on the bored and you can see the look of dread on her face. this is a moment i know all to well being asked to stand up and write on the board. I soon learnt ways to get out of this task.
I remember being in primary school, year 3-4 maybe. We had a substitute teacher come in on one summer’s day. This teacher wasn’t at all smiley and had apparently thought in a boarding school before she became a substitute teacher. (we still had chalkboards ever side of a white board at this time ) she cleared her voice saying I am Misses V. The class fell silent, with a feeling of tension in the air, it was at this moment I knew it wasn’t going to be my day. she pushed out her orders in a very strong proper British accent, ( you know the one, the sort that is in old films, or when a American tv show gets an American actor to play a British person.) Stand. Then Misses V, progressed onto a monolog about how we will all read 4 pages of a book, no exceptions and we are not leaving until we have all done this, we will then proceed onto writing on the chalkboard spellings until we get it right.
that was needless to say one painstaking hard days of my childhood. not to take into consideration the fact that i’m left handed and every time i wrote anything on the board, my hand was rubbing it off. looking back on it i can see why she was properly getting a tad annoyed with me.
