Free The Hardest Test by Scott Quinnell Page A

gut-wrenching to be separated from the friends you’ve grown up with and to move away from the security of a school where the teachers know you almost as well as your parents. Leaving Five Roads School was no different – and I really wasn’t prepared for the struggle that secondary school would bring.

Chapter Two
    My next school was Graig Comprehensive School down in Llanelli itself. I used to catch the bus from the village square just outside The Stag’s Head with my friends each morning but, instead of spending all day together, as soon as we got to school we’d all have to go in our different directions.
    Arriving at secondary school can be an isolating as well as a daunting experience – for a start it’s the first time in your life your academic ability is truly measured, and by being put into streams or sets you get labelled. I found this particularly difficult.
    I’ve always liked the idea of learning and, looking back, I think how great it would have been to be one of those people who could devour all the new information. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t. My poor concentration made this impossible.
    I was keen to make an impression, but it wasn’t long before I began to fall behind. It was very hard to deal with the fact that while my friends were doing well I was slipping to the bottom of the class. I couldn’t understand why, even though I was trying all I could to keep up, I still kept falling further behind.
    I tended to keep myself to myself in classes, not wanting to attract attention to the fact that I was struggling. I’d sit at the back waiting for the moment when the bell would ring and I’d be back out in the yard with my mates, where once again I could get involved.
    The teachers tried everything to help – looking back I realise how frustrating it must have been for them to work with me, one week, to the point where I seemed to grasp some aspect of a subject, only to see me return the following week with little or no idea of what we’d gone through previously.
    I was to learn later that this inability to retain information is one of the key signs of a learning disorder like dyslexia. My short attention span meant that much of the lessons was spent staring out of the window, daydreaming or counting the bricks of the building opposite. Maths was the only subject I grasped to any extent. In others I just kept repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
    I’d find things like copying text from a blackboard very difficult. I now know that it was my dyslexia which caused my eyes to jump around the board or the page of a book, meaning I’d miss sentences. This meant having to read things several times, so I was much slower than everyone else at completing the tasks.
    One of the major things I remember is feeling sick at the thought of being asked to read out loud. It terrified me – all the more reason to keep a low profile. Some teachers shouted at me, calling me lazy, and the constant rows upset me very much.
    It is important to understand that back then little was known about learning difficulties. I really don’t blame the teachers – I guess they had exhausted every method they knew, to little reward. But I couldn’t understand why I was being punished. Slowly I began to realise I had problems of some sort. The fact that the other children seemed to move on easily left me feeling very alone. Soon, I was bottom of every class – that’s if I was in the class at all!
    My wife Nicola remembers finding a box full of my school books from this time when we moved in together, all the pages empty save for the date and the title. That about sums it up, I guess.
    My parents began to realise that things weren’t going well. There were the concerns of teachers in the form of reports and letters in the post. I’d often get home from school in tears and lock myself in my bedroom. They found it hard to understand why