Playing Dumb

By Harriet Corke

I have always been stupid. It was my first revelation, a fact I realised when I was six and never thought to question.

When I started school I was placed in the lower ability group. This was only displeasing to me because my best friend was in the higher ability group.

But as I moved through primary school, more reasons for why this might be difficult emerged. From the time I was five, I failed every test put in front of me. A particularly painful one was a weights and measures test in year 1. The class teaching assistant asked me three questions about a set of scales in front of me. Which object was heavier? Which object is lighter? I pointed at the correct scale, then watched as she added another cross in the boxes next to my name, shaking her head in disappointment as she did. I felt oddly scared.

The reason why I was placed in lower sets is down to my lack of language. The reason why I stayed there is because I didn’t have the tools to ask for help. But the reason given was because I didn’t understand, that I was a “stupid” and “ridiculous” girl who couldn’t even answer her own name on the register.

One of the funniest assumptions made about people who are non-verbal is that they also can’t hear - even when it’s been proven to you on multiple occasions that they can, in fact, hear. They can hear you just as well as when you comment on a nice drawing they’ve done as when you’re slagging them off. The assumption that afflicted me falls into the same category: the presumption that, just because I couldn’t speak, I had nothing to communicate.

Simultaneously, I was living in a vibrant inner world. My logical, fantastical, thoroughly nonlinear brain was making connections and observations. I remember straining desperately to make myself understood - to no avail. When I pointed things out (unfortunately just literally), I was ignored.

Sadly becoming verbal does not mean becoming verbally dexterous. I joined secondary school a speaker, but still as articulate as I always had been. Except this time, I was doing well in pretty much everything. In what can only be described as an atomic blast of creativity, my friends gave me the affectionate nickname “Nerd.”

But still, my opinion of myself didn’t change. A decade on I was still stupid: still not as good as all my friends in any sense. I struggled to believe that I was equalling - or even bettering - the achievements of my peers. The early correlation that was made between my intelligence and my ability to speak had ingrained in me the belief that I was irretrievably, hopelessly dumb.

It is often forgotten that language is not the only method of communication. In fact, communication and language - not just language - is a foundational area of the Early years curriculum. If we consider communication a purely linguistic phenomenon, we erase thousands of people who, for one reason for another, cannot communicate verbally. In doing so, we reinforce the stereotypical view of non-verbal people having inferior intelligence: a perspective that reverberates, ricochets, and falls into the ears of those who need to hear it the least.

One afternoon when I was five, I was given a visual reference book. Each page had about 20 squares, all stuck down with velcro. They were illustrated and labeled with colours, shapes, animals, all kinds of things. I remember standing at the front of the class and helping the teacher pick out the right colours for our class painting. For the first time in my life, I felt smart and important.

I didn’t see the book after I left my reception class, but I thought about it often. And about how life would be so much easier if I had it back.

The one sad memory I carry around from being mute is that it made me disbelieve my natural intelligence. Perhaps, if there had been more velcro books, I may not have so fragile an ego. Or just been a better artist.