I sat in an auditorium last night listening to four adults talk about learning to read ... as adults. I knew the program was going to be a combination of Literacy KC students and featured authors. I thought it would be interesting. I didn't expect that it would make me cry, would make them cry.
Christina Jones, Greg Ballard, Mona Taylor and Jim Dowler talked about why they enrolled. Greg was diagnosed with cancer and told he had a year to live, so he decided to learn to read. That was two years ago. Christina Jones watched all her kids go to college and finally gave herself permission to finish high school. Mona Taylor came here from Jamaica, learned to read and is at UMKC enrolled in pre-law now. Jim Dowler found himself functionally illiterate when he failed a test for work. He's back in the driver's seat of his semi truck.
That all sounds nice typed out like that, doesn't it? Nice little success stories. But listening to them describe what they had gone through to get there, voices trembling, talking about how reading is power, being able to understand newspapers and contracts and signs without help is freedom, how writing is independence ... I tried to imagine what it would be like to flounder through life never quite getting it, how terrifying and frustrating that would be to not comprehend the world around me in written form.
Christina talked about being a kid: "Now, we call it 'dyslexia.' In the fifties, they called it 'dumb.'" As I do with everything now that I've gone and become a mother, I pictured the little angel in that situation, abandoned as a reader.
There were authors, too. I was particularly struck by Gabriela Lemmons, the founding member of The Latino Writers Collective. Gabriela is the daughter of migrant workers with only a second-grade education. She spoke of growing up reading the side of cereal boxes as her literature, of not discovering Latino writers until college. Of the need to read something by someone who looks and sounds like you.
"Tell me whose company you keep, and I'll tell you who you are," she said. "I am among writers."
I am among writers.
There are 225,000 functionally illiterate people in Kansas City. One in five.
One in five people in this normal, mid-sized American city can't read a newspaper. Can't write well enough to be understood.
What would it be like if I were one of them? If my daughter couldn't read or write?
There is a tendancy among the degreed to think everyone has a degree. As of 2008, a mere 27% of the American population had a BA or higher. It blows my mind to think two people in the same city driving the same roads and buying coffee at the same convenience store and pumping the same gas and paying the same taxes could be either a PhD or functionally illiterate.
With the exception of Mona from Jamaica, the Literacy KC adult learners grew up in America. Went to school in America. Couldn't read.
The last author, Natasha Ria El-Scari, talked about her parents buying the World Book Encyclopedia. I remember when my parents bought their encyclopedia. I remember hearing over and over that my father had read the entire encylopedia when he was a kid. I wanted to be like that. Natasha also talked about encouraging children to write, to find their voices, to own their words. Giving ourselves permission to do the same.
It's hard for me to imagine anyone not wanting to write, though I realize it's because I'm so hard-wired to do so. I don't really comprehend why I need to share my thoughts with the world. I've wished in the past I could not feel this way, because it seems so much easier to keep to yourself. People who don't write don't get people criticizing them all the time publicly for what they think. But on the flip side, what if I couldn't articulate my thoughts at all in writing? My sphere would be limited to who could hear my voice. I would feel tiny.
My daughter is gifted. She was chosen for her school's gifted program in first grade after a test she was flagged to take after kindergarten. I always joked when she was a baby that she was very smart, but who knew if she would actually turn out to be a good learner? It wasn't my stellar parenting, for sure. We read to her, of course, but her brain functions as it functions due to genetics that Beloved and I got from someone else upstream.
She is no more responsible for her giftedness than she would be responsible for a learning disability. But it doesn't cease to exist, either. She is responsible, in my opinion, for using that brain of hers. Responsible as those of us who write are for articulating the world around us, for questioning it, for gathering information and synthesizing it and inviting discussion about it.
Every day I am thankful so far school has been easy for her. I have more friends than I can count whose kids do not have this experience for one reason or another.
I have never fully appreciated until last night how thankful I should be that she can read and write.
What her life would be like if she got spit out of the system on the other end not able to read her cable bill.
How that would impact her choices in life.
How that would impact her ability to find friends, find a mate.
How small her world would be if she could only communicate with those who could hear her voice.
I heard those four adult learners' voices last night. I heard them shake with frustration at the memory of being illiterate and pride and hope now that they aren't. Two of them learned to read in their fifties -- children raised, a life lived not being able to read the news headlines.
Right here in America.
Mona said you can move mountains if you can read and write, that nothing can stop you.
I wiped my eyes and drove home to find Beloved and the little angel reading in bed. I kissed her head and listened to her little voice so confident and animated reading a story about a cat.
I will tell her later that she can move mountains because she can read and write.
I will tell her how very lucky she is.
And I will demand that she use her words.
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