Jim was working as a janitor. He had been working night shift but had changed to the day shift. He’d had a few problems at night because he couldn’t always read the notes his boss left. After he told his boss, he was getting up early instead of sleeping late.
“I came to him and said, ‘Hey, I don’t know how to read.’ At first I thought he was, you know, ‘well, you can’t read so goodbye. But he was g-g-good about it and said ‘well, you’re a good worker. You keep this place clean, and that’s more likely what I’m interested in.”
He was proud of his decision to sign up for reading lessons at the public library, something that motivated him to come out of the closet at work, and was eager to tell me his story. He agreed to my making a voice recording of our interview and sharing it publicly with the promise of anonymity.
*****
Two months earlier, Jim met his volunteer tutor at the library for the first time. She was a high school dropout—left in ninth grade—who had been trained in the Laubach method1, a basic phonics approach. She started him in Laubach Book 1, but not until they made a human connection:
“She asked if I was married, had any family, what was my interest in life, how come I’m here to learn to read. I told her I want to learn. That’s the main purpose. She got me to open up right away. Then we just started going through day one.”
Jim’s wife and his two daughters were his pride and his joys. He longs for the day he’ll be able to trust his reading skills enough to read the notes and papers teachers send home with his daughters.
Within a few weeks Jim had picked up some phonics skills. He discovered residual learning stuck somewhere in his brain, surprising himself with how much he could do with help. He was excited about his progress. His approach to life in a paper world was forever changed.
“I wouldn’t look at the mail. I would just touch it. I would put it on the t-t-table whatever and then my wife would open up all the bills. Now I’ll take the paper and… I’ll read it. I’ll try to figure it out. If I can’t, then I’ll say to her ‘I don’t understand this word. Help me break it up.’”
*****
He had no memories of books in his childhood home, though his parents read a newspaper. When he was a toddler in the 1950s, they likely read about the first In-N-Out Burger in Baldwin Park and about the Minneapolis Lakers relocating to Los Angeles.
“My dad was a buffer. He buffed parts, you know, like a machinist. My mom never bought any books… because she kept on making the excuse that she was saving all the bucks for, you know, milk, whatever.”
Elementary school didn’t take, though he acknowledged recovering misplaced knowledge of print prompted by tutoring. It had to have come from somewhere. But classroom practice of the times didn’t produce sustained learning.
“I guess what really scared me from the big deal of reading whole words is that we had a first grade teacher and every time I’d miss a word or every time I was daydreaming she would pull my hair. I guess I didn’t want to read because of that, because I was afraid I was going to get my hair pulled.”
Unfortunately, Jim enjoyed none of the advantages but all of the disadvantages of ability grouping in reading. He carried indelibly in his metaphors his feelings about being in the bad reading group.
“The teacher said all of the kids that were bright in reading she had in front of the room, or he did, and then the kids who were middle-class readers he had in the second row and all the kids that couldn’t read they stuck’em in the last row and forgot about ‘em. By then, I said, hey, who needs to read. I made a big mistake.”
As near as I could tell, Jim had been classified for special education in elementary school, reclassified for regular education in junior high, and then redesignated for special education in high school. His memory of his early experiences is a bit jumbled in the interview.
“It was more likely when I was in the younger grades that I was more often in special ed classes, and they said, well, if you don’t want to learn your spellings, well, they had a work program for you…well, you were never going to get me interested in school. They sent me out to sweep the sidewalks.”
*****
Jim described freaking out in junior high school, calling it weird, making him wonder what he was doing there. He went from class to class aiming to survive the day. He had never seen such a place before. He had a vivid memory of breaking a broom in rage.
“When they put me in junior high school, they said, well, you’re gonna make it on your own. It came to a point where I got to know the kids and they got to know me and they taught me how to cheat. And we had teachers that, well, they said if I come to class, sit down, they’d give me a ‘D.’ The rest of the classes were easy, shop and PE.”
He described a teaching strategy several of his teachers used beginning in sixth grade and into junior high—
“They’d give us a bunch of spelling words. Then they’d say, ok, if you missed a word, you’re gonna write it 25 times. Came Wednesday they said, ok, if you missed it, you’re gonna write it 50 times. Then Friday they’d say ok you’re gonna write it a hunnert times.”
As so often happens when human beings are asked to engage in rote, purposeless work, they create shortcuts—
“Let’s make it ‘the.’ So I would write tttt, you know, 75 times or a hunnert times, hhhh it didn’t matter to me because I figured I wasn’t going to learn to spell that way. Big deal, writin’ it down.”
*****
Jim remembered being left out in the cold in high school. The logic of the factory metaphor—the famous factory model of education—must have forced the urban school district to allocate finite resources according to principle of efficiency. As children got older, those with the least—or no—chance of profiting from reading instruction were removed from remediation to make room for those with a better chance.
“I took classes where they said if you were working at the school, is all you have to do is say hi and goodbye to the teacher and walk out. I was working on the school campus, you know, gardening work, janitor work, stuff like that. I started that my freshman year and kept at it all four years.”
After he graduated from high school, he tried to learn to read at a private reading clinic in Los Angeles. That fell apart, he married at 21, began having kids, and tried again to learn. He took a reading course at a community college.
“I needed more than sitting there with fifteen people. We had these little books that had these little dots on them, red or purple. I can’t remember anything but the colors.”
*****
The past summer Jim and his wife saw a booth at a county fair set up by a community-based literacy project.
“My wife called the next day and said ‘Hey, my husband has trouble reading,’ and the first question she asked back was ‘Are you sure he’s interested?’ Then a few weeks later they called back and asked if I was still interested and I said, hey, you bet.”
Jim credited his tutor’s consistent focus on monitoring him and making him do the work of turning print into speech as key to his development. If I had been more on the ball forty years ago, I would have asked to observe a tutoring session. He also praised the Laubach materials.
“When I see the picture and then maybe two or three pages later, you no longer have the picture, you have just the word, and I have to try to sound the word out or figure out the parts of the word—my tutor, she’s pretty good on it because she won’t tell me what the word is. And that’s what I was getting at the college.”
****
Jim had high hopes. I read him a quote from an activist non-reading adult printed in an adult literacy newsletter on a table at the library (“The Ladder,” PLAN, Washington, DC, nd). Lewis, a black adult, “took a turn”:
“Our biggest problem is we aren’t doing the talking for ourselves. The people who do talk for us make us seem like dopes, going into the wrong toilet or missing the bus or not being able to function or survive. It’s not like that. I could show some reading people how to work the system.”
Jim validated Lewis’s comment and went on to talk at length about his embarrassing experiences being exposed, ranging from childhood through adulthood. It seemed a bit cathartic for him; the idea of political action on behalf of people of his kind energized him.
I had been reading and rereading Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed for about a year at the time, keeping a reflective journal, and noted that Jim was on the cusp of a milestone: When the oppressed pivot from asking “How do I read?” to asking, “Why was I not taught to read?” the pedagogy is taking.
*****
The 1970s produced historic research in defining and elaborating the construct ‘adult literacy’ in a way that dug more deeply into the X standard of the 1920s. The Adult Performance Level (APL) study federally funded and carried out at the University of Texas reported its findings in 1977 with a big splash in the collective consciousness of the times2
The core finding had staying power. Whether you agree with the conceptual framework of the APL regarding what behaviors count as evidence of “functional illiteracy,” the published finding that “21.7% of American adults are functionally illiterate” became the default position. The Illinois Association of School Board’s news service published an editorial in 1984 reprinted in the Napa Valley Unified School District newsletter offering up a defense of the status quo:
“No one, it seems, has any idea how this inflammatory statistic originated. It is, undoubtedly, a mere projection made by some pencil pushers who wanted to dazzle and shock the Commission by making it seem as though things were really worse than they really are [sic]. And it worked.”
Functional literacy had real, not inflammatory, meaning for Jim—
“I want to be able to read comfortable, where I don’t have to nudge my wife and ask ‘What’s this word?’ I think it’s going to change me where I’ll be able to go on to more school, maybe to the college. Writing and spelling is a little bit difficult, but we’re working on that. Two of the words she’s teached me are my own kids’ name, Susy and Jennifer. The street I live on. Just little things.”
*****
I’m in the dark about the state of adult literacy today as I write this revision of a decades old unpublished paper written by a guy I knew for such a short period. I knew when I was doing the interview and writing it that is was important for me to do. I need to update my knowledge of the consequences of technology on conceptual frameworks for adult literacy as distinct from academic literacy.
Perhaps this post will evoke some commentary from readers on this topic. There is a lot to be said. My bet is the numbers of adults hovering just above the X standard in the 2020s is considerably less than in the 1980s. But the criteria for what functional literacy is have gotten much more challenging. Feel free to comment.
https://www.proliteracy.org/Blogs/Article/261/Celebrating-the-International-Laubach-Literacy-Legacy
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED185113