(1092) Birds of a feather flock together

Many years ago, my husband and I owned a house in Kuala Lumpur. It has been sold. While we stayed there, I had a friend with children roughly the same ages as mine.

My youngest was two years old, her younger was four. For whatever reason, I tried to tell her about my interest with dyslexia. Whatever little I learned about it in the States, I tried to intervene in my children. She was absolutely not interested and probably thought that I imagined up the whole thing.

At some point, my family moved away to Silver City. There I spent 12 happy years poking my nose into the lives of a few children who came to my house to be taught. Most of them have already missed the academic train and were failing miserably in most subjects. I had some successes and quite a few did not stay long enough to be helped.

Meanwhile, my friend's younger child had a tough, tough time from Standard One to Four. It was really in the pits, apparently the child could not even see words in lines. For her, words flew all over the place. She could no more learn the letters nor could she read in English or Malay. Both of these languages use the letters a to z and the phonetic sounds vary totally.

My friend was tortured by the entire situation, she tried to help. She went to school to talk to her child's teachers. We must admit that the educational system is still comparably backward here. Though we inherited an excellent educational system in 1957 from the British, by the 1990s so much detrimental changes had been made that the entire educational landscape had altered for the worse. Many teachers had never heard of dyslexia. Instead, children were thought to be disobedient, lazy or trouble makers. While the child struggled on, the mum was suffering from an autoimmune disorder that caused great physical pain daily.

She asked me how did I know she would need the kind of knowledge I was trying to impart to her, though she didn't take me seriously. Well, I had to think for a while before I could answer that question. Well, I know she excelled in Chinese primary school. She struggled valiantly in English and did reasonably well in her O-levels. But she failed her Malay and retained a whole year in order to pass one subject. In the process, she took the entire examination again before she joined pre-university. That, in itself said a lot to me about her whole educational history and her linguistic abilities. While I compromised and scored c5 in Chinese, c3 in Malay and a2 in English, She scored a1 in Chinese, a2 in English and f9 in Malay. Later I heard that her daughter majored in psychology. That often happened among children of my friends who tried to make sense of their earlier struggles.