Dear Andre,
I am afraid we haven't spoken openly enough during the last
6 and half years. As you know I am dyslexic. I don't want you to jump into
conclusions or consider this as an excuse, please finish reading this email
before you make your mind up. The truth is, I have been able to live well with
it and got used to not thinking of it as a limiting characteristic. However,
life hasn't always gone this way.
My most difficult year of schooling was by far the second grade, this
includes your course I'm afraid. During the first grade I was unable to make
two lines of the same character without making it mirrored at a certain point.
I must confess that I still have some difficulties with "b"s and
"d"s, “p”s and the “q”s, the “2”s and the “5”s, …, fortunately like a
very used pin code you let your fingers and muscle memory decide, I can do the
same. But then the professor just thought that it was normal for 1st graders to
not pay attention for long. She couldn't be interpreting the reality of facts
worst, I was paying attention, I actually had a very long attention span, I
couldn't really tell the difference between the characters at the moment, and
many times after a few minutes I couldn't still notice. Of course if I compared
the upper line to the lower line of "a"..."a"s I could tell
they didn't look the same, but these tricks I didn't have by then and I didn't
even really know why or how I was doing it.
During my second grade the professor's patience ran thinner,
as I couldn't do the simplest tasks, like copying things from the board. The
truth is that was by far the hardest task she could request of me. She couldn't
understand how someone that was intelligent and well developed in every other area
couldn't copy simple words from the board and decided that I was doing it out
of spite or pure carelessness. I tried really hard, I knew I was hurting her,
but worst of all I was hurting my mother. She felt helpless when I couldn't do
my homework well, she tried pushing me and making me repeat as many times as
needed, but tiredness only ever made it worst. Things got better when we moved
to France on my third grade. I had an excuse, not knowing French and I actually
controlled better my writing, because I learned word by word, instead of
joining characters into sounds. And when I got back I had the excuse that I had
learned French and my writing was a merge of it. I still almost flunked at
Portuguese every year and I always had extra classes and worked hard on it,
much harder for sure than in the areas I had some ease like maths and science
and things that made sence. But the fact that people didn't see it as neglect
or an affront to them allowed them to measure my effort in other areas, like
creativity and contribution in the class room.
Until my 8th grade I didn't know what dyslexia was, I just
thought I was bad in languages and had extra classes in English and Portuguese.
I was then diagnosed and gained some perspective. Until then I didn't know what
I was doing wrong or how to improve, I didn't like reading because it took me
forever to do so, it was real troublesome and that didn't help either. 4 years
ago, when my work was going well and I realized I was going to have to write a
thesis I started forcing myself to read as much as possible in English. I had
read until then about 10 books (I counted them), have read since then over 100.
I have started early to write the thesis because I knew this would be a big
challenge for me and I tried constructing it with calm and all the info I
thought relevant. I gave it for your appreciation as soon as I had a draft so I
could have some pointers on structure and content. But I understand that it
might have been too hard to understand or read.
I continued improving it in my own way. By the time my
scholarship ended I really thought it was the best I could/knew how to do. What
for you and the other phd supervisors was seen as careless mistakes and rude
thoughts was me focusing on writing a readable text, which I know how to do for
creative writing but was lacking significantly in technical writing. I didn't
learn much with your corrections (of all supervisors), I must say, because to
me they didn't make much sense. When you geve me specific corrections I could
tell at times that it read better, but couldn't figure out why. I have been
trying to improve it and learn it, for which Paulo has been a great help. He
had a similar problem but cracked the way of writing technical writing, and his
mind works in a very similar way to mine. I don't want an excuse, I don't want
to defend a worst written thesis, but I do want you to understand that at every
step I was never neglecting the manuscript I was trying to learn to do better
and had a hard time understanding your feedback.
Greetings
me
