Matt Damon speaks before Save Our Schools March 2011 - YouTube video

"I had incredible teachers. And as I look at my life today, the things I value most about myself — my imagination, my love of acting, my passion for writing, my love of learning, my curiosity — all of these things came from how I was parented and taught.

And none of these qualities that I’ve just mentioned — none of these qualities that I prize so deeply, that have brought me so much joy, that have brought me so much professional success — none of these qualities that make me who I am ... can be tested. Matt Damon

Dyslexia: BoyZone Shane Lynch speaks out

Shane Lynch has bravely revealed that when he left school at the age of 15 he couldn’t read or write.

As part of a new Channel 5 documentary called My Secret Past (due to air on Monday at 10pm), the Boyzone singer has admitted that his teachers thought he was a bad student and didn't realise he had a problem,

“I was kicked out of school at 15 for being lazy. I couldn’t read or write but I was too ashamed to ask for help,” Shane confesses.

The Boyzone singer was tested for dyslexia as part of the documentary and discovered that he is indeed dyslexic,

“The diagnosis makes my past more acceptable. I wasn’t lazy, I had a genuine problem,” he says.

Thanks to the help of expert tutors, Shane is now able to read to his two daughters Billie Rae, four and four-month-old Marley Mae.

Tim Roberts the Poet speaks of his Dyslexia

In this post I have attached an extract from Tim Robert's blog, describing how he discovered he had dyslexia, at the age of 45.

Tim  is a talented poet and you can read some of his poems here but for the rest, I will let Tim speak for himself.

"I was only diagnosed as being a dyslexic in January 2010. I was 45. It happened when I met a brilliant psychologist whose methods differed from anyone else’s.

When assessing me, very early on in our work, he asked me to give him an example of what made me really frustrated. I told him of a recent shopping trip to HMV. I wanted to find a DVD and its title began with an R but left the shop empty handed.

He asked me a few more questions. He then told me that his original job as a psychologist was in education in the early 1980’s and how he worked with kids with learning difficulties. He also told me that he was dyslexic.

Until then, I thought people like me ended up in the ‘stupid class’ - that is what it was named in my inner city comp in South East London. But here was a man who has this great title but is dyslexic.

​I was 7 when I was sent to stupid class. I was given a huge piece of paper and asked to write the letter S over and over again. I was asked to join the S’s together so as to join my letters up. I was told, at 7, that this was a huge failure of mine. My world would end if I could not join up a bloody letter."

You can read the entire article on Tim's blog site here