What I wish my teachers had known

By Aaron Leung · Newcastle upon Tyne · October 2026

I was seven, in Primary Three, in Hong Kong. The teacher was working her way round the class, asking questions. She picked different children each time. When she picked me I didn't know the answer. She explained it. I still didn't understand.

She carried on. She asked me again, a different question. I didn't know that one either. She explained it, slower this time, and I still sat there with nothing.

Then she lost her temper.

"Aaron Leung, you're so stupid. You don't belong in Primary Three. You belong in Primary Two. Leave now. Go to the next door classroom, knock on the door, and ask the teacher if you can join their class."

I didn't know if she meant it. I sat still. After a few minutes she said, "Go."

So I went out. I didn't knock on the door. I sat on the floor in the corridor with a few tears coming out, and I stayed there. I can't tell you what I was thinking, because I don't think I was thinking anything. I think I was in shock.

Fifteen minutes later she sent one of my classmates out to fetch me, and I went back in and sat down.

I'm forty-four now. That's the memory that stayed.

What happened next

At the end of that year they held me back. The vice principal, or someone from the office, brought me in and sat me on her lap with my mum there, and told my mum my reading and writing weren't up to standard. I wasn't moving up to Primary Four.

I don't think anyone asked me how I felt about it. I don't remember being asked.

All my friends went up. I stayed where I was, in the same school, and the children who used to be my friends were now a year above me and laughing at me in the corridor. I had to start again with the year below.

And here's the part I want teachers to hear. Being held back didn't fix the reading. I still couldn't keep up. Same boy, same problem, one year lower.

Secondary school

In secondary school I was taken out of the ordinary class for English, maths and science and sent to the special education class. Nobody explained why. Nobody said there was a reason, or a name for it, or anything that could be done.

In Form Three we had homework: write a story about yourself. I didn't know my grammar. I didn't know question marks. I didn't know when to breathe and when to pause. And I didn't know what those little ticks were for, the ones you put around a phrase at the start or the end. So every time somebody spoke in my story, I put the sentence in brackets. The whole page was full of little phrases in brackets, with brackets to close them.

My teacher had already marked it. She knew what was on the page.

She said, "Why don't we read Aaron's letter today?" And she read it out loud to the class, and she put the emphasis on every bracket. She made sure everybody understood that I didn't know what they were for.

She used me as the example. That's what it was. I was the example.

Everyone laughed. My face went bright red. I can still feel it.

The naughty one

In Form Four the principal ordered me to attend homework club. I can't remember whether it was every day or twice a week, but I think twice. All the other children went home at three. I stayed until four and did the work I'd been given that day.

The reason wasn't only that I couldn't spell. It was that I never handed my homework in.

I'd get it, and put it off, and it would get to Sunday night at half past nine, and I'd give up. I never dared ask my mum, because I knew what she'd say. Why didn't you bring this up days ago? What do you want me to do about it now?

She'd have been right. It wasn't laziness. I didn't know how to start, and starting late is what you do when you're frightened of the thing.

The room they put me in was full of children with severe disabilities, some of them with no speech. I've got no problem with any of them. But I sat in there thinking, this is the wrong room for me. Because I could talk, I could argue, I could make friends. What I couldn't do was the work, and nobody had worked out yet that those were two different problems.

Every school report I ever got said the same things. Naughty. Easily distracted. Distracts other students from learning.

My ADHD is the inattentive kind. I wasn't hyperactive. I was a daydreamer, and I was easily distracted — I'd talk to the child next to me, or ask them for help, because I didn't know what was going on. I couldn't keep my eyes on the board. I couldn't read to the standard I needed, so I got further and further behind and hid it better and better. And I couldn't stand up and read aloud in front of a class, because I knew I'd stutter and they'd laugh.

So I played up instead. That was easier than being thick.

I'm not claiming I was an angel. I was an adventurous kid who made mistakes. I stuck Sellotape on a classmate's arm once and pulled it off, and I got sent to stare at the corner of the room for the rest of the lesson. An hour, staring at the corner. I probably deserved to be punished. I didn't mean to hurt him, but I did hurt him, and that's fair.

And after a while the teachers stopped trying. When the class got bored, they'd get me to read out loud, for entertainment.

The word nobody said

Nobody ever said the word dyslexia to me as a child. Nobody. Not a teacher, not a doctor, not an adviser. Not once, in twelve years of school.

I found out as an adult. Everything about my childhood makes a different kind of sense since then, and I'm angry about it, and I don't think that's unreasonable.

What home was

I want to be fair, because school wasn't the whole of it. Home was good. Home was safe.

There was one evening when I had to read a few paragraphs out of a book and I couldn't do it. I sat there sweating, anxious, feeling stupid. That is the only time in my whole childhood I felt stupid in my own house. Nobody said anything. Home was comfort. I never felt judged there.

School was where I was judged.

The thing nobody talks about

Everyone talks about reading, and attention, and sitting still. Nobody talks about memory.

My memory has been bad since I was born. I could not tell you what the teacher said ten minutes ago. I forget whether I've taken my tablet. I forget what the GP told me, sometimes while I'm still standing in front of him.

I carried all of it in my head for years, because there was nowhere else to put it.

A child who can't remember the instruction gets told they weren't listening. A child who can't remember where they put their homework gets told they don't care. Neither of those is what is happening. The instruction went in and fell straight back out, and the child has no way of explaining that, because nobody has given them the words for it.

If you want to help a child like me, do two things. Write it down for them. And then check they've still got it an hour later, without making it a test.

Why it followed me

The label is the part that lasts. I left that school at seventeen and the word naughty came with me. For years, when I got something wrong, my first thought wasn't "I need to learn this". It was "here we go again".

I did well at the things nobody marked. Talking. Selling. Getting on with people. Those don't appear on a school report, so for a long time I didn't count them either.

Five things I wish they'd known

One. Test the reading, not the behaviour. I was disruptive because I couldn't read the board, not because I was badly behaved. Every year, somebody looked at my behaviour and nobody measured my reading.

Two. Never use a child as the example. Not for a laugh, not to teach the class a lesson, not to show them what a mistake looks like. The child remembers for thirty-seven years. The teacher forgets by lunchtime.

Three. Don't hold a child back without asking them. They discussed my year group with my mum. I was in the room. Nobody asked me. The emotional cost, the friends, the corridor, the laughing — none of that was in the decision.

Four. Notice the quiet one. I never put my hand up. Not once. I didn't have to — I knew they'd ask me anyway, and I knew they knew I didn't have the answer. So I'd sit still and hope they didn't see me. I was no trouble at all. I was trouble, and quiet was how it looked from the front of the class.

Five. Say the word. If you think a child has dyslexia, say the word out loud, to the child and to the parents, and write it down. Being told at eight would have changed my life. Being told at forty-four didn't give me my childhood back.

Now

I'm forty-four. I've got two businesses. I've built an app for people like me, which reads letters out in plain words and keeps the deadlines where I can see them.

I don't tell this story to be told I did well in the end. I tell it because there is a boy in a classroom right now who is being called stupid, and who believes it, and who will be forty-four before anybody tells him he isn't.

If you teach one child like me, say the word. That's all I'm asking.