Matthew's Story: The effect of bullying on a young man.

When I first met Matthew (This is not his real name.), I found that he could well converse in the matters of the world, and knew his position on the things we discussed. He appeared to be an easy going intellectually minded 17 year old, about to be of great use to his society.

At least, that was the impression I gained, until he took a pen in his hand and began to lay out what, until that moment, had been a clearly presentable mind on a piece of paper. As the pen jerked from letter to letter, the form of each barely decipherable ink character dispelled whatever hope I had of his potential. 

As I watched words take form, it was not the bad spelling which drew my attention, but the inconsistency in the form of each letter. As one followed the other, there appeared to be no recognition by Matthew for the need in conformity of character. One letter could be twice the size of the one it followed, and selected from a different model to the one it preceded. 

Watching the stress build up in Matthew as he struggled in the task of writing, I noticed how the end letters to a word would be hastily scribbled as he urgently strove to conclude them. White patches in the surface colour of the skin, where the fingers pressed hard upon the pen, gave signal to the imposition he felt of this labour, and how much he resented the paper and pen that gave testimony to the uselessness others would see in him.

He would always be this way, he was told. His parents had taken him to specialists who said he was beyond the critical period for motor relearning, and that it was too late for him to change. Teachers had raised him in the belief that he would never be able to write, and so should not bring stress to a task he could never accomplish. His mother had told me how he was the problem child in a class, the burden of every teacher. Yet, why was this I wondered?

I was not interested in the account of his class behaviour. I understood that his resistance to the system that limited him was obviously a tactic to explain his poor performance as an act of self-defiance, rather than one of inadequacy. Yet, what was the cause of this inadequacy?

The first insight came when I asked him which type of mathematics he had difficulty with. “Algebra !” He told me. So, I gave him a simple equation, and asked him to show me the value of one of the variables. As he tackled this, it became obvious that he did not understand the rules of algebra. Algebra, as all mathematics, is merely to know the rules, learn to recognise the use of information, and how to arrange this to work with the appropriate rule. Yet, this bright and alert 17 year old did not know the elementary rules of mathematics. 

He was fascinated, as I explained that the = sign was merely the point of balance between two bodies of information. As I explained that any change could be invented to one side, providing an equal change was made to the other, he came to realise how and why one character could be transposed with another. Within an hour, he was handling levels of algebra that he previously could not have done. 

How, I sought to reason, could poor teaching in mathematics give explanation to his inadequacy in writing, and how may his equally difficult scribe of numbers give excuse for this teaching? As he wrote numbers and the symbols that gave them their relation (the plus and minus etc.), all were as much without uniform as his writing of letters. His mother had told me that he had a motor tremor, and could not write because of this. However, I had noticed that this tremor only occurred towards the end of a word, and was in someway related to a meaning of stress. This aside, Mathew had demonstrated a high degree of finger dexterity in various games and tasks I had seen him involved with. Putting this tremor explanation aside, I began to study how he held a pen, and made relation to paper with this.

Now, if I were to ask you to pick up a pen with your eyes closed, you would feel for the correct position of the pen within your fingers, and make adjustment until it was right for you. Each of us has our own way of holding, and making use of a pen. When Matthew held a pen, it was so close to the tip that he retarded any operation of dexterity that he might make in describing a character. I asked him to try and accept a different hold upon the pen he was using, and while such new positioning was unnatural for him, he was more able to elaborate on the description of a character. Why, I pondered, should the form of letters be so inconsistent?

As a child, we learn how to make our relationship with a sheet of paper. We learn to know the shape of the paper, and we learn to decide how we are going to write upon it. We learn to compartmentalise it into potential lines and spaces. As we decide where the left hand margin will be, so we decide where the right hand margin will lie, and so the point at which our writing will move to a lower line. If our paper has no lines, we learn how to write across the page by constantly referring to past letters, marks higher up the page, and the potential space to the right, so that the line of our writing is even and balanced. When our paper is marked into lines, as it more often is, we create an imaginary line that sets the height of our letters, so that they appear uniform when we rest the letters on the inked line. 

This writing may seem automatic, but it is, however, learnt through the rules we have discussed. So with experience, we have trained ourselves to constantly scan for the height and the width of each character before we make it. By noting the height of the previous letter, we determine the height of the next letter we will write. If we have written the letter ‘a’, and the next letter is to be ‘n’, then we take ‘n’ to be the same height as the ‘a’. Equally, if the next letter is ‘l’, then we take the height of ‘l’ to be twice that of ‘a’, so on and so forth. By constantly referring to all the characters on a line, we visualise the size, width, and spaces of the letters, and words that will follow on that line. 

So, while we think about the words we are to write, our mind constantly seeks reference points, looking backwards and forwards, to adjust the size and form of each new character to make a uniform presentation. This is something that we learn to do, and like riding a bicycle we are not normally aware of this operation. It is a learned operation, based upon rules. Yet, Matthew did not know these rules. He did not see how one letter needed to be related to the one it followed, just as this would set the stage for those to come. 

What transpired, through our friendship, was that when Mathew first started school he was often taunted for being fat. He was not when I met him, but he explained that in the early learning stage of his school life he was repeatedly picked on and laughed at for being so. From listening to his account, it became understandable why he hated the ‘school experience,’ and why he did everything he could to escape from it and the child who were hurting him. Unable to do so, when in the class, he closed his mind to all that was happening. As we know from the principles of the brain environment complex, this did not just mean that he shunted out the behavioural experiences, but also the intellectual ones as well. Much of what he was taught, the basic rules we earlier defined, fell on deaf ears. He so much hated to be in his classroom that he could not focus on his learning, and so developed a very bad structure to engage information. Perhaps, this was purposely done to demonstrate his rejection to a world that gave him pain.

With all this understood, we discussed rules of character formation and relationships. By making a small mark at the appropriate height in between the inked lines on the right side of the paper, he learnt to devise an imaginary line that extended from the letters on the left, so that he could define a particular size for each letter he was about to write. Within less than an hour of practice, he had written abcde in joined up writing with a precision that was remarkable. Not that this was easy, but at 17 he had much to reconstruct. The important point, however, was that Mathew discovered that he could do this, and he began to learn how to do it better. How he decided to continue this redesign of the presentation of his ability in English, maths and so his other subjects, after my job took me elsewhere, is Matthew’s story. The lesson to us, however, is very clear.

As Matthew developed in age, he never let go of the pain of being bullied. The way he saw his world and the way he learnt to interact with it underlay a great sense of insecurity. This behavioural desire to be accepted and not to be rejected, was translated into the ways he dealt with intellectual information. The way he casually and half heartedly selected information, the way he developed to remember and process it, and the way he presented his mind to another and so they way they judged him all stemmed from the treatment he had received from other children. Thus, while his later teachers judged his poor performance and so the low grades they gave him as related to some inborn ability, the reality was that he never let go of the painful experiences of other children laughing at him when he only wanted to be loved. That experience maladjusted the chemistry in his brain. While it happened to Mathew when he was very young, it can happen to any human being at any age, because the mind and the brain continually adjust to how they are caused to perceive the world. Behaviour and intelligence are not as separate as we believe they are.

This is an extract from the 5 books written by Roy Andersen on children and school. Buy the books the cheapest at www.andersenroy.com or mail me at [email protected] Kindest wishes Roy