Teaching to Learn (5) the silver lining

I got married while I was a teacher. Getting married is a sacrament, it's a commitment to be truthful with another person and this was the
first time I thought, "OK, I'm going to trust this person, I'm going to tell her." I practised in front of the mirror: "Cathy, I can't read. Cathy, I can't read." And one evening we were sitting on the couch and I said, "Cathy, I can't read."

But she didn't really understand what I was saying. She thought I was saying that I didn't read much. You know, love is blind and deaf. So we got married and we had a child and years later it really came home to her. I was reading to our three-year-old daughter. We read to her routinely, but I wasn't really reading, I was making the stories up - stories that I knew, like Goldilocks and The Three Bears, I just added drama to them. But this was a new book, Rumpelstiltskin, and my daughter said, "You're not reading it like mama."

My wife heard me trying to read from a child's book and that was the first time that it dawned on her. I had been asking her to do all this writing for me, helping me write things for school, and then she finally realised, how deep and severe this was. But nothing was said, there was no confrontation, she just carried on helping me get by.

It didn't relieve anything because in my gut I felt dumb and I felt like a fake.
I was deceitful. I was teaching my students to be seekers of truth and I was the biggest liar in the room. The relief only came when I finally learned to read. I taught high school from 1961 to 1978. Eight years after I quit my teaching job, something finally changed.

I was 47 going on 48 when I saw Barbara Bush - then Second Lady of the US - talking about adult literacy on TV. It was her special cause. I'd never heard anybody talking about adult literacy before, I thought I was the only person in the world that was in the situation I was in.