The world through wobbly eyes – a diary

When I was a baby a doctor told my mum I was blind.  I wasn’t blind, of course, but I did have nystagmus.  Now I’m ten and I’ve still got nystagmus.  This is how I see the world through wobbly eyes …

I can spell!!!  Hooray!!! I used to have such terrible problems with spelling.  We get spellings to learn every week for a test at school.  We use the ‘look, say, cover, write, check’ way of learning them.  I don’t really like this method, because I’m not very good at copying, but all the teachers at my school use it.  I could just about remember the spellings for the test, but the next day I had completely forgotten them again.  It was very annoying.  When I write stories my spelling is really bad, too.  I’m supposed to check through my work when I’m finished before I hand it in, but it’s such hard work, because I’ve forgotten what I’ve written by then and I can’t read my writing anyway!  But just before Half Term Nicole came to see me.  Nicole is an Educational Psychologist.  Mr Parker, our Head Teacher, asked Nicole to come to see me so that she could tell the teachers how to help me with my work.  She gave me lots of exercises to do and asked me lots of questions and then she discovered that I learn by listening, not by looking.  So now I learn my spellings out loud.  It’s brilliant fun, because you can learn them while you’re going round Sainsbury’s or in the car with your mum.  We just say all the letters of the word out loud and try to make up a pattern.  I’ve learnt some quite big words this way, like astronomy and aquarium.  I’ve still got to check my writing carefully, but now I do it one paragraph at a time, so it’s not quite so bad as before.

Extract of a diary first published in FOCUS magazine in December 2001.

Find out more about nystagmus from the Nystagmus Network.