“Are they retarded?”

Why can’t I figure this out? This question follows me through the day like an accusing, toxic cloud. How can I so casually possess this magic dust that opens doors and illuminates dark corners and transforms my world – reading– and not be able to share it? I try not to meet their eyes as I rush past the students, increasingly ashamed of my inability to help them.

 My administrator doesn’t want to help. “Are they retarded?” she asks me when I meet with her to discuss them. “No? Are you sure? Well, maybe they just need to work harder.”   

I can’t find anything on the internet about how to teach adults to read. There are some doctoral theses, but I can’t even make sense of the abstracts. I find a woman on YouTube who teaches reading in Africa. Her videos are set in a tent and filmed by lantern. She is doing something complicated with many, many letter tiles, which I don’t understand, and there are only three videos.

I contact experienced adult literacy pros I’ve met at workshops and ask them how to teach reading to adults. I am stunned to learn that no one seems to know. 

“Yeah, that’s tough,” one of them says. “I wish I had a good answer for you.” 

Others make dour, hopeless predictions: “It has not been shown conclusively that you actually can teach adults to read. There’s a window, like age 6-8. If you miss the window, it’s too late.”

When I mention a worn-out curriculum from the 70’s that I’ve found deep in our classroom’s collection of ancient education texts, a woman who has been in adult ed for more than 50 years — she reminds me of an old socialist warhorse like Mother Jones and surely she knows what I should do — says, “Those books are dated. Don’t use them.” But she doesn’t know what else I can use.

Can teaching methods be dated? I wonder. I use the books anyway. They don’t work.