Yesterday we had a training day about Special Education Needs. Part of this involved a talk by an outside speaker but there were also several workshops. The one I attended was called 'a mile in their shoes', the basic premise being that we got to suffer being dyslexic for an hour by writing with our left hands, covering our rights eyes and wearing rubber gloves coated with vaseline.

When I heard about this on Thursday I was geuninely excited about the whole idea of the session, it's always much better to actually be doing something than just sat there listening. But there was so much innuendo about gloves and vaseline. Frankly it went completely above my head, and people even took my enthusiasm as being innuendo in itself, when in reality I'm far too innocent to have a clue what anyone was on about.

The whole experience was incredibly frustrating, which was the whole point. I struggled to write anything remotely legible and took ages to write each word, even though I was trying my very best. I'll certainly have more sympathy for the pupils when it looks as though a drunken spider has crawled across their page.