Keira Knightley OBE - Made By Dyslexia Interview

school when i was about five was amazing because i was absolutely top of every class well top of my class and i was reading in front of people and i thought of myself as being unbelievably intelligent and then when i was six they realized that i hadn't been reading at all and that my mum and read to me all the time we had lots of books at home and i'd memorized them and it was only when somebody finally gave me a book that my mum hadn't read me that they realized that i hadn't been reading at all and couldn't read at all so when i was six i went from being the top of the class to the absolute bottom of the class and i still remember what a shock that was and i still remember how i saw myself completely differently from that moment i was really really lucky i was at a brilliant state primary school and also my brother had been there before and he'd been diagnosed with dyslexia so they'd already dealt with him and the teachers there said to my parents you need to find a carrot to dangle in front of kira there's no reason that she shouldn't be able to read and there's no reason that she shouldn't be able to you know do well at school but you need to find a carrot and really fortunately for me i wanted to act so it was my head teacher who is a brilliant man called david cooper who said to my mum if she wants to act then you let her act but she's only allowed to do it if her grades either stay the same or go up if she drops a grade then you take the carrot away i think i've always been very creative you know i was always it was art it was drama it was music i was always very good at creative writing i was top of those classes it's just my spelling was awful again the teachers that i had recognized how important it was that i knew that the points that i was making and the pieces of creative writing the stories that i were telling were great and were valid and were interesting and that they gave me a mark for that and that the spelling and the punctuation was entirely different because when you split them up you're not saying you're in you're not intelligent enough what you're saying is hey you're not very good at this bit and that's fine that's fine deal with that bit but well done because that was a great story because actually you know confidence is the most important thing and if you tell a child that they're not good at something and you tell a child that they're stupid then they'll feel like they are um and and so i think it's really important to say you're not stupid um your brain simply works differently than other people and you can find different ways around it and you'll be good at other things you may not be a brilliant speller you may not be a very fast reader but you will learn how to read and you will learn as much spelling as you need to you know but you'll be better at different things and i think that's unbelievably important to know as a kid my spelling makes people laugh it makes me laugh actually and my reading if i'm sight reading oh it's a complete joke i mean i'll make it'll mean something else completely it won't make any sense at all which you know for what i do for a living was quite difficult because if you give me a page of dialogue now i can just about do it but but i mean it jumps about and you know it takes me a while i really need to learn it i need to sit with it i always have to say you cannot give me a rewritten scene on the day and think that i'm going to be able to perform it well if you give me a rewritten scene the day before and i have a night to work on it i will be able to do it well i think i was really lucky that it was diagnosed when i was six so that early diagnosis was key to absolutely everything um so i think probably because of my dyslexia my work ethic has always been really high you know um i think it's vital that teachers are trained about dyslexics about dyslexia about about spotting it and about working with dyslexic kids it's absolutely vital because the world is changing and and imagination is key to everything and there's going to be a lot of kids whose potential are lost unless we train our teachers to effectively teach them

Channel: Made By Dyslexia

Views: 604,389

Keywords: Dyslexia, famous dyslexics, imagination, kiera knightley, actress, actor, creativity, home schooling, special education, learning disability, learning difficulties, LD, teaching, dyslexic strengths, madebydyslexia, think differently, Pirates of the Carribean, Star Wars, pride and prejudice, atonement, silk, bend it like beckham, david beckham

Id: OLb6ehPPc4E

Length: 4min 4sec (244 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 01 2018