Teaching to Learn (6) decision time

I was at this desperate spot in my life. I wanted to tell somebody and I wanted to get help and one day in the grocery store I was standing in line and there were two women in front of me talking about their adult brother who was going to the library. He was learning to read and they were just full of joy and I couldn't believe it. So one Friday afternoon in my pinstriped suit I walked into the library and asked to see the director of the literacy programme and I sat down with her and I told her I couldn't read.

That was the second person in my adult life that I had ever told.

I had a volunteer tutor - she was 65 years old. She wasn't a teacher, she was just somebody who loved to read and didn't think anybody should go through life without knowing how to.

One of the things that she had me do in the early stages was to try to write because I had all these thoughts in my mind and I'd never written a sentence. The first thing that I wrote was a poem about my feelings. One of the things about poetry is that you don't have to know what a complete sentence is, and you don't have to write in complete sentences.

She got me to about sixth-grade-level reading - I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. But it took me about seven years to feel like I was a literate person. I cried, I cried, and I cried after I started learning to read - there was a lot of pain and a lot of frustration - but it filled
a big hole in my soul. Adults who can't read are suspended in their childhoods, emotionally, psychologically, academically, spiritually. We haven't grown up yet.

I was encouraged by my tutor to tell my story to motivate others and promote literacy, but I said, "No way. I've lived in this community for 17 years, my children are here, my wife is here - she's a professional, my parents are here, I'm not going to tell this story." But eventually I decided I would. It was an embarrassing secret and it was a shame-based secret, so it was a big decision.