“You’ll never be able to learn foreign languages. You will never make it here. You are dyslexic.”

“You’ll never be able to learn foreign languages. You will never make it here. You are dyslexic.” I was twelve (on the left in the picture below). And this is how secondary school in The Netherlands started for me.

We had to learn four languages at once: Dutch, German, English and French.
At home I spoke Limburgs, my province’s language.

So they sent me to remedial teaching after school. And during school hours they started discussing a new plan:
“Should we allow Rob to drop a few hours of the subjects he was good at, like math, P.E., geography or history, so he could spend more time practising language?”

It sounded reasonable.
But what it really meant was fewer hours in the things that gave me energy, and more time in what made me feel small. I still had to follow the same curriculum and pass the same tests, just with less joy left in me.

That’s not how you help someone grow.
You don’t strengthen a learner by pulling them away from their strengths. You build from them.

The result? My secondary school years were miserable.
I hated going to the building, and I started to believe what they said.
I even started to embrace their fact that I couldn’t read and signed up for the library for the blind to get my books on cassette tapes. While just a few years earlier, in primary school, I was reading encyclopedias for fun.

And still, somehow, I became a teacher.
Today I help schools do better, not by fixing children but by fixing the conditions around them.

Because the biggest lesson I learned is simple.
When we start from where someone is, and create the right circumstances for them to grow, everything else grows with it.

Yet most systems still work the other way around.
We build schools around a standard of where learners should be instead of where they are.
And when they don’t fit, we call them behind, label them, and make them believe they are the problem, when in truth they are exactly who they should be: themselves.

I never passed a single English exam in secondary school.
Now I write, teach and speak in English to audiences around the world.

My ability didn’t change.
My circumstances did.