Two Tickets To Canada (...one for dyslexia)

Growing up in Edinburgh, Scotland, Ross McDiarmid recalls his childhood as being, in his words, “Pretty standard, really.”

He went to school just across the road from where he lived, had a lot of friends, and, while he didn’t get straight A’s, did fairly well academically. By the time he was around eight, however, he did notice that some of his friends were receiving interventions to help bring up some academic areas that were lagging.

“The vast majority of my friends had learning disabilities. Well, we didn’t know they were learning disabilities at the time, but they went to, like, the specialist portion of the school for certain portions of their lessons. I suppose it would be like a resource teacher or a Reading Recovery teacher now. So they were going there and doing some more remedial learning, focusing on spelling, penmanship, things like that.

“I would go periodically for additional spelling help, but it was never a consistent thing.”

Ross continued to do well enough to get by all through high school, but was acutely aware that certain tasks and assignments were much easier for him than others. Being able to demonstrate his knowledge verbally or in broad terms was a breeze, whereas more rigid writing assignments and essays were a struggle.

“I suspected it, seeing the problems that my friends had, that I might have had something,” he says.

After he had finished high school, he enrolled in college as a pre-cursor to university, and that was when he really began to struggle.

“Everybody keeps on telling me how smart I am, but I just don’t seem to be able to, like… I tried to do engineering, but just could not do the maths.”

Frustrated, he dropped out of college and took a year off from school before he decided to try again when he was 19.

“I was mostly going there to make more friends and stuff like that, expand my social circle a little bit,” he recalls, chuckling. “I really got into literature, I had a really good lecturer, but I flunked English completely. But at the same time I had really developed this love for reading, for writing.

“I think it was just, the types of questions that you were doing for [the exam], were the types that really stress people with dyslexia. So, instead of it being a question of expression or comprehension, it was all very technical, like, ‘How many clauses are in this sentence?’ And I just found that kind of very specific rule-based learning very difficult.”

Because of his passing grades on other assignments, Ross managed to complete the course and went on to fall completely in love with literature and reading during a year abroad in New Zealand. But still, found himself in need of a pocket dictionary to sufficiently understand everything he was reading.

“I realized that maybe there was something else happening here with my relationship with this medium,” he says. “And obviously, knowing all of the challenges that my mates had gone through – swapping letters around, mispronouncing vowel sounds, not remember language rules – when I went to college again, I went to see the resource teacher about some of the difficulties I thought I was having.”

Now wanting to attend university after college, Ross was assessed and diagnosed with dyslexia. The diagnosis opened up a number of accommodations for him that instantly allowed him to realize his potential, and he graduated with a degree in English Literature.

But not before meeting his partner Jenny, who was visiting Scotland from Winnipeg. And when she needed to return to Canada, Ross decided to go with her.

Now, he’s finishing a degree in Social Work from the University of Manitoba, and muses on some key differences he’s noticed between getting accommodations for school in Scotland versus Canada.

“I had to do it all by myself [in Canada]. Whereas in Edinburgh, my application said that I’d had supports in college. My resource teacher at the college arranged the meeting for intake at the university, and the university contacted me to set up a meeting. We negotiated a time to see a psychologist, and I saw the psychologist, got the results, and then they put all of the supports in place. They set up my laptop, got me a technician to explain all of the technologies on it and show me all of the different things I could do on it.

“They paid for a dyslexia tutor. I didn’t really need that support, but for someone who’s just found out they’ve got a learning disability, that arena where you can discuss with someone your learning style, and how that’s maybe going to apply to the type of learning you’re going to be doing at university, would be great.”

Ross is planning to move home to Scotland with Jenny at some point after graduating, and ultimately aspires to be a novelist. He’s proud of what he’s accomplished, but says it’s time for schools – not just in Canada – to make some changes that give people with learning disabilities an equal opportunity to be successful.

“For people with learning disabilities, you’re explicitly testing them in the most narrow way possible, as if you’ve chosen to design a test to make these people crumble,” he says. “Whereas if you just widened the scope of your analysis, you’d see that most people with learning disabilities are perfectly intelligent. They just maybe need another medium to show that skill.

“We need more accommodations, and less bleeding the stone to get them. Not having to self-advocate all the time. People maybe actually noticing that you’re having a certain set of difficulties and then suggesting, ‘Why don’t we screen you for this, and see if we can make sense of this.’ Rather than having to just rely on personal insight. Because if you don’t have any experience with learning disabilities, or you’ve only ever been told it’s because you’re not smart or lazy, it isn’t until you’re at university and failing and in danger, seeking out mental health supports, that it’s like, ‘Well why don’t we test for this…’

“Gosh, it’s because you’ve got dyslexia. Or dyspraxia. Or ADHD. Done. Problem solved. Well, not problem solved, obviously, but… problem clarified.”