I used to tut internally at people who couldn’t spell. How could you not notice you’d written ‘your’ instead of ‘you’re’? It was so bloody obvious. If a quick scan didn’t flag up the error, you must be a little bit thick.

Then I had kids. And the older one couldn’t spell for toffee.

My daughter can’t spell for toffee

By the time Maya started in reception, she was a thoughtful and articulate child. As her debut school year progressed, she filled her handwriting book with creative tales and wistful personal accounts.

Unfortunately for the reader, it was all penned in an impenetrable cipher, with line after line of evenly spaced letters and much of the alphabet facing backwards.

She often wrote from right to left, as if she was struggling to shake the echo of a former life as a Damascan scholar.

Kudos to her teacher though, who was able nonetheless to pick out stories of bunnies, chicks and rainbows and a baby sister who had ruined her life.

Her writing took a long time to improve. Letters and numbers resisted attempts to coax them round the right way. She hated phonics. Spellings wouldn’t stick for more than a day.

But spelling wasn’t Maya’s only challenge. She said the letters jumped around when she was reading and I knew that was a dyslexia thing from a module of my psychology degree.

When I bought her a yellow overlay for dyslexic readers, she reported that the words stayed put.

Working memory was a problem too. She was beside herself when school put her in a different class from her friend Hannah in Year 3.

It turned out that as well as being one of her true besties, Hannah was remembering Maya’s sentences for her during writing tasks. Maya couldn’t hold them in her own head long enough to get them down on paper.

Her processing speed is slow as well. She compares school with being stuck at the back of a traffic jam with no chance of ever catching up because the cars in front of her always move first. That breaks my heart a bit.

She’s now ten and in Year 5. We’re getting her assessed for dyslexia.

Is it my fault?

Like most mothers, the first person I blamed for my daughter’s problems was myself. Other mums, it was clear, were drilling spellings over Weetabix and working diphthongs and digraphs into fun family outings.

How dare they? What was wrong with them? What was wrong with me that I didn’t care enough to do the same?

Luckily, a quick informal WhatsApp survey revealed I’d completely made that up. Most other kids were learning to spell with minimal help from their parents. There was clearly something going on.

It didn’t help when Maya’s dad insisted it was just a matter of practice though. As if I hadn’t thought of that. And the grannies decided there was no way Maya could be innately bad at spelling because she was otherwise bright and articulate.

Accidental nail on head, grannies! Well done! Because that’s the thing about dyslexia. Its trademark symptoms in no way reflect a person’s overall intelligence. You won’t know that from your grammar school days because dyslexic pupils are unlikely to have made it through the door.

You should be good at this

It’s painful to be told you’re bad at something that everyone’s meant to be good at.

I don’t want my daughter to feel less than other kids because she finds a few things hard. And the more I think about it, the more I question where we get the notion of a tick list of things that ‘normal’ people should all be able do.

Why would we all be good spellers?

We only test kids on their spelling because modern life requires it (although less and less so with speech recognition software). For most of man’s existence, we’ve been telling stories orally.

Until a couple of hundred years ago, no-one would have given a shit if the best raconteur in the village couldn’t spell ‘library’. It was completely immaterial. They probably couldn’t hold a pen.

Dyslexia is obviously a challenge because it makes reading and writing harder. I’m not denying that. But having a child who finds spelling difficult has slapped me round the face with an obvious fact that I knew but was ignoring: we all have different brains.

Judging all children against a rigid list of narrow skills does not sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of ability or potential. It just makes kids whose gifts lie elsewhere feel like their best will never be good enough.

Maya is great at making stuff and a natural lateral thinker. She considers things deeply before she speaks and is extremely bendy and strong.

If our system valued these skills as much as it does good spelling, she would be smashing it and some of the kids who are sailing through would have ‘special educational needs’.

Difference, not deficit

So I’ve been thinking about my mean-spirited mockery of poor adult spellers and have remembered that some of my very favourite exes didn’t know ‘too’ from ‘two’.

I found them super-attractive because they were creative, tenacious and original, unlike me. How could I have forgotten that where one skill is lacking, others make up for it tenfold?

Einstein and the fish

We’re probably all inclined to assume that the things we find easy are inherently so. But maybe we need to wise up to the fact that no one skill is a barometer of worth or intelligence. I certainly do.

As Einstein apparently said: ‘Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.’ Well said, Albert. I couldn’t agree more.

Everyone’s a stickler for something, I guess. I’ll no doubt always go around correcting people’s language in my head.

But I’ll never again think someone’s thick for spelling something wrong.

Believing you’re the bollocks because you find something easy? Now that’s the definition of stupid.