“I learned how to spell shit today.”
“I learned how to spell shit today,” one of my adult reading students told me. “And for that I will always be grateful to this program.”
Gerard was born in Barbados, but he lived in the US since second grade. When he first started school in Brooklyn, his accent was so strong that the teacher told his mother she couldn’t understand him. He also couldn’t learn to read.
Gerard is brilliant. I don’t mean he’s brilliant in comparison to other students in the program. I mean he’s brilliant in comparison to everyone I know. Extremely high IQ brilliant. Emily Hanford of Sold a Story fame thought so, too. She sat in on one of our classes and led a discussion with the students. Afterwards in a text conversation she asked about him. “I think he’s brilliant,” I wrote. “Clearly,” she texted back.
He’s also well-educated. He can barely read but he watches You Tube videos, and he has conducted a self-study of the world and history and science on his own. He follows many of the thinkers and writers that I do and loves to talk about them as much as I do.
In 3rd grade Gerard was sent to Special Ed, which is like being sent to the gulag. He would spend the rest of his school years here, and not once be taught the reading code, or phonics. “I remember a pipe that dripped water into the classroom, and all the paint was peeling,” he once mused in his professorial West Indian way of speaking. “They never fixed that pipe in all the years I was there.”
According to Gerard, reading instruction was virtually non-existent. Everything I taught him, he absorbed quickly and began using.
One day we got to the lesson on the digraph SH. Following the lesson plan, we practiced blending the sound /sh/ with the two short vowels Gerard had learned in the curriculum. When we got to ship, he stopped short.
“Wait. So if you put a T on the end, it’s shit?” I agreed that it was. He shook his head in amazement. “That’s how you spell shit?”
“You can’t imagine what it is like to be in third grade,” he told me, “and you can’t write the word shit. It’s an important word for a third grader. I could neither read it nor write it. It was devastating.” He later told me that he wrote and rewrote the word in his notebook on the way home.
Gerard appearing in my program was like discovering treasure. Teaching him the reading code was an honor. But it’s always like this. Ever since I stumbled into the world of adult basic ed almost 20 years ago, I have been finding treasure. For example:
• Marion, who read at a first-grade level but was employed, married, and raising three daughters. All of them would eventually go to college or the military. One got a masters degree. I used to ask Marion for parenting advice. My tutors taught her to read.
• Ellen, deeply dyslexic, in her 60’s, incredibly sharp. In reading classes, where students listen to and discuss literature, her commentary is always insightful and poignant. She often misreads text that I’ve written—but accidentally improves what I’ve written. In Trinidad she dropped out of school after 3rd grade. Under different circumstances and minus her dyslexia, she could have been an editor. She has an amazing ear for language and is an agile thinker although she still struggles to read simple words.
• Lester, in his 60’s, dyslexic, and possibly with a lifelong hearing impairment that prevents him from hearing the sounds and thus becoming a fluent reader. But he is the warmest, most charming person. He is a deacon at his church. If you had a man like this for a neighbor, a co-worker, or a grandfather, you would be an extremely fortunate person.
• Tonya, Bronx-born and raised, and never learned to read. One year, well into her 40’s, she decided this was the year she would learn. She stood up in church, divulged her greatest secret, and asked if anyone could help her. By chance, one of her church members knew me and gave her my number. She cried when I told her over the phone about my program; that we would start from the beginning and go step-by-step, that we would teach her how to connect the sounds and the letters. “I’ve been looking for this my whole life,” she said.
I could go on. The people I have met through this work are why I stay in this work. They’re why I wrote an entire curriculum to teach adults to read. They’re why I started a non-profit and why I’ve written several books and workbooks for adult beginning readers. They’re worth it. They’re worth everything. I’m not even being altruistic; I likethem. I love the work.
And now it’s Giving Tuesday, so I’m asking for your support. Will you help support this work?
There are 48 million adults in the US who read below the 4th grade level; and yet most adult ed programs don’t serve them. Why? Because they don’t have the curriculum and they don’t know how to teach reading. The Volunteer Literacy Project addresses this gap. We teach volunteers how to teach reading. We also create and share curriculum and resources for teaching adults to read.
If you want to help this project, there are a few things you can do:
• Donate! Any amount is appreciated!
• Ask your friends to donate!
• Introduce me to your retired fundraising/non-profit guru who still has some gas left and wants to give advice or guidance to this incredibly gratifying project.
• Become a volunteer. It’s really the most enjoyable and rewarding work. Training sessions coming up in January. Register here.
Thanks all! Donate here if you can!
Larissa
*All names in this piece have been changed.