The story of the purple glasses
The year was 1992 – a young boy aged 7 (yes it may be myself again) was sat at the far end of the class room.
Reading time – All the other kids were loving there new reading skills which they had been learning over the last few years.
The room was awash of nouns and-pronouns, smashing out adjectives and throwing out verbs like they were making it rain with £50 notes!
One girl was so good that she was quoting the current financial climate referring the the Financial Times!
Whilst this array of word crunching was taking place in the class room, little Sam was sat reading the very hungry caterpillar (#GreatBook).
The teachers realised that Sam was well behind in the reading game. The words just seemed to be all jumbled up on the page. It was decided that he was to be put through a special colour filter test.
The next week a man came to the school with a dark brief case. The case opens and out came a list of words and a number of different transparent coloured filters.
“Nothing to worry about old son, all you got to do is read until I say stop”. Sam hated reading. He really did think the Egyptians had the right idea with there cool picture words.
It said something like “the cat was wearing a hat whilst he had a chat with pat”
Sam was getting it well wrong from the start “the tat with the part had a hat and a rat”
Each colour not really making much of a difference UNTIL the man put a purple filter on.
It just clicked and for the first time the words seemed to be lined up together in readable sentences.
Success you would of thought reading this! Well what the school didn’t say was that they were not just giving him the filter but making him a pair of purple framed glasses.
Not just run of the mill pair… we are talking huge thick brown framed glasses. They were that big that the top of the lance levelled with his hair line and the lower was most of the way to his chin!!!
To top that the lenses were dark purple and you almost needed a backpack as a case for them!
Picture Elton johns mini me siting in a room full of other children all starring and lathing.
Well at the end of the first day little Sam was so upset and peed off that he had been made the lathing stock of the class that he took the glasses, threw them on the floor and stood on them.
It felt so good to do that!! The only down side was sams mum had to pay for those glasses and as a family they didn’t have much money at the time.
She went mad, proper mad! To which my hatred for the glasses slipped to an emotional pit whole as I new we had little money and maybe being bullied wasn’t the lesser evil.
It’s a story looking back makes me smile (my work lot think it’s hilarious) but actually was a really vunrable moment in my growing up.
I hope my experiences in life make people realise that being dyslexic is not just about not being able to spell but actually has a real emotional impact.
Does this still happen?