Source A: The numbers I could hear

An original contemporary non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

At college, the measurement sheet made me feel slower than everyone else. The numbers were small, the boxes close together, and the clock above the board seemed to move whenever I looked down. I could explain how a cabinet should fit into an uneven alcove, but the written calculation on the sheet often came out wrong. After the third test, I stopped offering explanations. A wrong answer with a long explanation looked, to me, like a more embarrassing wrong answer.

In the workshop, I memorised what competent people looked like. They held the tape firmly, wrote a figure once and moved on. I copied the movement even when I needed to check the figure again. Sometimes I remembered the size as a rhythm before I could trust the digits on the page. I did not mention that. It sounded like something a person would say if they had failed to learn the proper method.

One afternoon, my supervisor asked me to describe how I had worked out a set of shelf positions. I thought she had found another error. Instead, she listened, then asked me to say the measurements while she wrote them in separate lines. The figures matched the explanation. We checked them against the drawing and the available space. Nothing had become easier about the arithmetic itself; the route between my reasoning and the record had become less crowded.

She did not announce that I had a special gift. She said that the current sheet was making it difficult to see what I knew, and that we should discuss a clearer working format with the tutor. That was a smaller statement than the reassurance I had secretly wanted. It was more useful. I could test it without having to become an extraordinary person first.

We began using larger spaces and a spoken check before I copied the final figures. I still made mistakes. Some were the ordinary mistakes of learning a trade, and some came from difficulties I had spent years hiding. Separating them took patience. It also made correction feel more precise: this line needed checking, rather than my entire future needing to be reconsidered.

Last week, a new apprentice watched me read a measurement aloud twice. He asked whether that was necessary. I said that it was necessary for me. Then I showed him the drawing and asked where he would place the next shelf. We talked about the space, which was the part of the work I had always wanted people to hear.

Source B: Young and dyslexic? You’ve got it going on — Benjamin Zephaniah

Read Source B in the official Pearson anthology (printed pages 12–13).

Compare how the writers present their ideas and perspectives about the effects of being judged through a narrow measure of ability.

Support your answer with detailed examples from both texts, including brief quotations.