The Pain and Pride of Adult Illiteracy

On the flip side of being a geek is being illiterate. One third of America is illiterate. As I graze through research on the web to fill in the blanks for my site http://www.mysterymika.com, I am grateful that I fell in love with words to communicate my thoughts and emotions. With the ability to read, I have freedom, I have hope and I have a strategy for upward mobility. I know adult people who are not so lucky. They live in shame and and fear that someone will find out that they can not read.

Vision Therapy may be helpful to children who are having trouble reading due to eye problems. Check out http://www.planovision.org for detail explanations and options on how eye training can help improve a child’s reading. I’ve spoke to Dr. Stephanie of Plano at length and they do assist adults as well as children.

My demons can’t bind me in the recesses of their heartless fortress. Poverty can’t hold me within its parched, crumbling mask of decay. I am a poet and thinker who can share those incredible moments of life with others…

As I watch people who can’t read avoid situations that would put them on the spot to read, I can sympathize because I know that I made a narrow escape from the choke of illiteracy. I was not taught to read using phonics. I learned to read by memorization. The down fall of reading this way means that I can’t read or spell words correctly that I’ve never seen before. This gets embarrassing.

Over the years I’ve tried to learn Phonics. My eldest son is a Phonic Wizard because I constantly brow- beat him about how important learning Phonics was to his deeper usage of vocabulary.

Hopefully this will be the magic summer that my son will be able to successfully teach me phonics without me becoming frustrated and storming out of the room.

There is Pain in my memories. When I am trying to learn a thing that I should have picked up as an eight year old I revisit the suffering that my daily abused-life harvested. It is as if the lesson itself-is a trigger to the events that I don’t want to remember. I wonder if it is like that for others.

My bones rub uncomfortably at the joints as the sweet sweet adult baby…looks for way away from the words on the menu that can’t be read…

Because I was able to control my own path, Adult Illiteracy defied gravity in my mind until faces around me became surprising illustrations for the ‘handicap’. Not only is my brother a functional illiterate but some of my closest friends can’t read past a fourth grade level.

One of my younger brothers was completely illiterate until his early 30’s. He is extremely handsome and thought that he could get by without reading!

Finally he got sick and tired hiding the problem from his growing children. Out of the blue, he began to teach himself to read by looking at the titles of movies on VHS covers. His spelling still sucks but his penmanship has become almost pretty- curls accent his t’s or anything with a tail. However the damage has already been done to his social standing. He’s been in and out of jail since adolescence.

Meanwhile I keep learning to do new things.

So go ahead Gang… Geek out! I’m choosing to do the dog geek thing. I will be learning from scratch to train my dogs and posting short fun videos on my http://www.youtube.com/mysterymika

When you take time out to help out the next generation do so by picking up a book. Read to a kid. You might be the reading chaperon that makes the difference in her world.