Coping with Dyspraxia - Dyslexia’s lesser-known cousin

Dyspraxia.  Even my spell-checker doesn’t recognise the word and is unable to offer any of its often entertaining suggestions, just the comment: “No guesses found.”  Until two years year ago I was aware of the term, having heard it mentioned in my teacher training, but my understanding of it was very sketchy.  Something not unlike dyslexia? Something to do with movement?  

Two years on I now find myself, not only much better informed, but also verging on the evangelical about sharing my understanding with others so that dyspraxia can cease to be such a mysterious and baffling topic and that more people, including school and university students, with the condition can be helped. 

One day early in 2007 whilst spring cleaning my desk, I discovered a sheet of paper that caught my eye: notes at an  after-school training session which included a spider diagram in brown felt pen with ‘DYSPRAXIA’ in the middle of the sheet.  Might this be useful in the future or should it be binned? Starting at the left-hand side of the sheet I read questioningly through the characteristics one might expect a dyspraxic pupil to have: “Slow processing of information: that’s a problem for me!  General disorganisation: yes, I suffer from that too!”  I continued reading the words around the central hub of the diagram, mentally ticking off each symptom in turn with growing incredulity.  This diagram could easily be describing me!  If these were all symptoms of dyspraxia then could it be that I was dyspraxic without knowing it? 

 Searching the internet, I soon discovered the excellent websites of the Dyspraxia Foundation and DANDA [the Developmental Adult Neuro-Diversity Association] and ordered a number of books about dyspraxia, including one by Mary Colley called ‘Living with Dyspraxia - A Guide for Adults with Developmental Dyspraxia’.  This book was especially interesting because the author herself was only diagnosed with dyspraxia in her mid-forties.   She explains what dyspraxia is, not just by defining it as one might in a clinical textbook or dictionary as “a delay or disorder of the planning and/or execution of complex movements” but, more importantly, in terms of its symptoms.

So what are those symptoms?  Some of the most obvious ones are problems coordinating gross motor skills such as required to ride a bicycle or take part in sports.  For this reason dyspraxia used to be called by the rather damning title, ‘Clumsy Child Syndrome’.  This is not only a clumsy and imprecise label which suggests a degree of censure, but it also misleadingly suggests that dyspraxia just affects children, and is therefore something one will grow out of.  In truth it is a condition that will always be there for those concerned but which sufferers will develop strategies to counteract.   

 Dyspraxic symptoms also include problems with the co-ordination and execution of fine motor skills such as those associated with handwriting and other tasks involving manual dexterity.  A dyspraxic may also have problems with controlling pitch and volume in speech and may repeat themselves, talk incessantly or be forever interrupting others; they may also experience difficulty in listening to and understanding speech, especially in large groups.  

The symptoms are many and varied and, as with the effects of dyslexia, will not all be present equally for different people.  They also include problems with perception, making it hard to track moving objects and resulting in a tendency to lose the place whilst reading.  As well as visual perception there can be problems of spatial awareness and a poor sense of direction, also a poor memory, especially the short term memory.  

I have experienced most of these different symptoms and over the years have, with differing levels of success, developed strategies to help me cope with them so that I seem so normal and unaffected that one colleague was prompted to say to me, “You must only be mildly dyspraxic.”  Sadly, that well-meaning person’s words really missed the point about dyspraxia - or any other similar learning difficulty for that matter.  It isn’t a question of measuring severity on some kind of scale; that can be extremely misleading and unhelpful: dyspraxia, like dyslexia and other types of neuro-diversity, is a spectrum disorder which has different complexions and implications for different people not least because we are all so different to begin with not least in terms of our personality and background.  Some will have high verbal reasoning scores, others may not, for example.  

In my own case I managed well academically, being an avid reader and a generally conscientious pupil, always anxious to do my best, especially in subjects that caught my imagination such as English, French and the Humanities, although sport was always an ‘issue’ for me, especially as things became more competitive at secondary school.  

As I moved away from school and on to study French at the University of Birmingham the terror of the sports hall and the hockey pitch receded mercifully, but it was as an undergraduate that my dyspraxia really came home to bite, although it is only in retrospect that I have realised it.  Even for those of an academic frame of mind, starting university can be somewhat overwhelming: it means new people and new places and routines as well as new academic subjects to tackle; even if one is a self-motivated student as I was.  For me it was so stimulating and I wanted to get as much out of it all as I could, socially as well intellectually. It was my innate conscientiousness that seemed to be my worst enemy, and at university one is no longer the darling of the class, constantly buoyed up by the kind of encouragement that schoolteachers tend to lavish on their star A level students who they have nurtured for so many years. I struggled to plan and organise my time: there never seemed to be enough of it to do all that I wanted to do!  I began to find myself making more and more ‘careless’ errors in my French language written work and  felt increasingly dispirited and ‘useless’.  Panic would set in and then I had problems understanding grammar points, following lectures and deciphering what I was reading whether in English or in French.  I had always loved trying to speak French but now felt totally inadequate and unable to recall the most basic tenses or vocabulary.  I can remember thinking: “Everyone else can get by; I must be stupid.”  

So where does dyspraxia fit it to this story, and why am I sharing such personal memories in an essay directed at people I will probably never meet?  

I have already described how dyspraxia is a spectrum disorder with a wide range of potential symptoms associated with problems of co-ordination and perception.  It is not just in ‘the planning and execution of complex movements’ in a physical way, as Mary Colley’s book started out by suggesting, but also as her book goes on to outline, difficulties in “planning and organising thought.”  Whilst new situations are often stimulating, they can also be exhausting for someone with dyspraxia, as they strive to make sense of things and absorb and try to remember new information.  Personally I have a strong sense of needing to understand where what I have to do fits into the bigger picture of an organisation; I need to absorb things relatively slowly and have the opportunity to write things down and reflect on them in my own time.  Even when I am confident doing something such as applying a complex mark scheme, I still find myself working at what might seem for many a fairly laborious pace; things just take more mental effort even if the outcome appears little different than that of others doing the same task.  

Having a professional diagnosis of dyspraxia, albeit almost thirty years too late, has been exhilarating.   In spite of subsequent academic and professional success, and the huge amount of pride I feel at seeing how our three twenty-something children are turning out, nagging doubts still lurked from those far-off university days about my intellectual ability and emotional stamina.  Most of the time they did just that: ‘lurk’ in the background, but they were not to be shaken off.  Now I can look back with pride at myself - at how, even without realising it, I  have over the years developed strategies to cope with my dyspraxia; I can even celebrate certain aspects of my creativity and individuality that are in no small measure, at least in part,  products of my condition, such as my spontaneity and my ability to empathise with students who I see struggling with personal organisation, spelling and handwriting, for example.

There are still people involved in education who won’t recognise the existence of dyslexia and its attendant problems, let alone dyspraxia; there are some who just see dyspraxia as being something to cause problems on the sports field.  Others who admit the existence of such conditions complain that they are simply labels that people use to hide behind, or an excuse for sloppy work.  This, indeed, can indeed be the case, but is usually only true where, from an early age, students have been made to feel stupid or lazy.  Where dyspraxia or dyslexia are recognised by a student, and by their family and teachers, there is no such reason for using their disability as an ‘excuse‘ for lack of effort.  With help and encouragement they will understand that they have to work extra hard in some aspects of their studies that seem effortless to others, and develop strategies that enable them to achieve success in their chosen fields of study. 

Another myth that needs dispelling is that only pupils whose special needs have lead them to be disruptive in class or labelled as ‘problem-pupils’ in some way, are in need of extra help and support.  Our schools are full of bright, sensitive, well-behaved pupils who are keen to learn but are often becoming discouraged, and are not achieving their potential because it has not occurred to them or their teachers that they may have a condition such as dyspraxia. 

Let’s hope that recent government initiatives to help dyslexics are not just a flash in the pan, and that these can be extended to embrace dyspraxics too, as well as any others whose individual chemistry means that they are more disadvantaged than others.  Let’s hope too that those teachers who remain skeptical or hostile to the very idea of dyslexia or dyspraxia can cast aside preconceived ideas that just because someone is a bit scruffy or disorganised they are obviously not trying hard enough. 

I can’t blame my teachers for not realising that I was dyspraxic - after all, dyslexia and dyspraxia had not been identified in those days - and, for me the real problems did not fully emerge until I went to university.  However, my experience has resulted in me feeling passionately that I want to be an advocate for others like me whose handicap remains hidden, or just dismissed as an excuse for being lazy or disorganised.