I didn’t know how much I didn’t know
December 31, 2018 10:04 PM   Subscribe

My mother learned to read at 63 - she was still the smartest woman I know “Honey, your mama never went to school a day in her life,” she said. “I don’t know how to read or write. And I don’t want nobody to know but you.”
posted by ThePinkSuperhero (15 comments total) 39 users marked this as a favorite
 
Great article, thanks. Most of us had no idea what it’s like to traverse a world that we don’t understand .
posted by HuronBob at 10:25 PM on December 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


My Grandma got her high school diploma in her 70s. We were all so proud of her.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:58 PM on December 31, 2018 [11 favorites]


What a loving loved momma.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 11:51 PM on December 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


What's a brilliant fucking person. A survivor and a winner.
posted by liminal_shadows at 11:59 PM on December 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


When he was not with Angevine (times that stayed in his head like dreams), Shekel was in the library, moving through the towers of children’s books.

He had made his way through The Courageous Egg. The first time it had taken him hours. He had gone back over it again and again, picking up his pace as much as he could, copying the words that he couldn’t at first read and making the sounds slowly out loud, in order, until meaning wrestled its way through the separated shapes.

It was hard and unnatural at first, but the process began to come more easily. He reread the book constantly, more and more quickly, not interested by the story, but ravenous for the unprecedented sensation of meaning coming up at him from the page, from behind the letters like an escapee. It almost made him queasy, almost made him feel like spewing, it was so intense and unnerving. He turned the technique to other words.

He was surrounded by them: signs visible on the commercial street beyond the windows, signs throughout the library and across the city and on brass plaques in his hometown, in New Crobuzon, a silent clamor, and he knew that there was no way he would ever be deaf to all those words again.

Shekel finished The Courageous Egg and was full of rage.

How come I wasn’t told? he thought, searing. What fucker was it kept this from me?
--from The Scar, by China Mieville
posted by foxfirefey at 12:12 AM on January 1, 2019 [14 favorites]


My friend's grandma got her GED at 80, having only completed eighth grade when she was young because that's all the school they had near to her. She got graduation cards with twenties tucked inside from all of her (adult) grandkids, just as she had sent graduation cards to them in previous years.
posted by which_chick at 5:13 AM on January 1, 2019 [34 favorites]


This was a beautiful read.
posted by XtinaS at 5:52 AM on January 1, 2019 [2 favorites]


Yes. A beautiful read. But also depressing.
posted by notreally at 7:15 AM on January 1, 2019 [2 favorites]


This is both beautiful and crushingly sad. I've gotten to work with a number of illiterate adults in the course of doing disability work, and it's so hard on people. Most of the people I've encountered have had serious learning disabilities, but some have stories that are along these lines although honestly the ones I've seen are generally less severe - people who had to leave school young for family or survival reasons, rather than adults who had literally never been to school. The people I see now who have never been to school before are folks who came to the US as refugees, and who spent their early lives fleeing horrible situations, living in refugee camps, hoping to get out, and often have a complicating health condition that kept them out of whatever limited education might be available.

There's no excuse for what happened to this woman. I'd like to think that stories like this are becoming less common but it's a kind of information that's so hard to track, information about who is falling through the cracks.
posted by bile and syntax at 8:08 AM on January 1, 2019 [8 favorites]


.
posted by carmicha at 9:00 AM on January 1, 2019


I really appreciate this story. Thanks for posting.
posted by vignettist at 11:43 AM on January 1, 2019


Thank you for posting this--it is a beautiful piece. It reminds me of the empowering but very difficult journey my literacy students travel.

Up until about a decade ago, I had only taught college level courses. Then I had a literacy course added to my teaching load, and let me tell you there's nothing to make you realize you're taking your own literacy for granted until you start working with people who can't read and write very well (or at all). Jury summons, medical instructions, insurance forms, funding applications: it's so disempowering not to know how to navigate these things, especially if you don't have someone whom you can trust to do it for you, like the author of the Guardian piece did for her mother. I think most people don't realize what a privilege it is to be literate from an early age.

When people find out I teach adults to read and write they are flabbergasted. How can someone reach the age of [20, 40, 60] and not know how to read, they want to know. It happens, I tell them, for a variety of reasons, usually poverty tied to some kind of structural oppression (race, class, gender, ability).

A year ago I had a literacy student who was 58, indigenous, raised in poverty by a father who abused the whole family, and a mother who had her own trauma as a residential school survivor. This student had dropped out of elementary school to work and gotten a job on the pipeline as a teenager, but then got injured and had been on disability pittance ever since, getting very depressed. He summoned up the courage to come back to school and ended up in my literacy class. Though it was hard for him, he learned to read and write, and it was amazing how much this opened up his world. He kept saying he wasn't smart, but that is definitely not true. As the author of the Guardian piece points out, the coping and covering strategies employed by most people with low literacy require quite a bit of intelligence, and learning to read as an adult takes enormous brain power. I do have some very smart students in my college level classes, but it's my literacy students who make the biggest leaps in their learning.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:31 PM on January 1, 2019 [13 favorites]


My great-grandmother, who was a generation older than the author's mother, also never went to school and didn't learn to read until she was an adult. She was also a white, Southern woman, although she was an immigrant who moved to the US as a child. A couple of years before my grandmother died, I interviewed her about her childhood, and I asked her if her mother ever learned to read. My grandmother said that when she and her siblings started school, her mother would make them teach her what they learned every day, and she learned to read that way.

There was a thing on Black Twitter a while ago where someone asked people how many generations removed from illiteracy they were, and a lot of people were not very many generations away from people who never learned to read. For a few people, it was their parents, and for a lot it was grandparents. I think this story is probably not that rare.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:39 PM on January 1, 2019 [13 favorites]


That was worth reading. And how lucky I am to be able to read it so effortlessly.
posted by Savannah at 9:53 PM on January 1, 2019 [1 favorite]


One of the things I think is important to remember about illiteracy is that most languages have never had a written form, and literacy has often been quite limited and a mark of privilege. We're in a time now when it's become so common, but on a larger scale this is relatively new.
posted by bile and syntax at 5:54 AM on January 2, 2019 [1 favorite]


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