Grandmother’s Success
A READ RVA student has a large family with 23 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She smiles widely as she speaks of them. There were times she wanted to help them with their homework, but realized that she could not. One day, her daughter gave her a flyer from a local community college. It was an ad for The READ Center. “I called and a nice lady answered the phone and had me come in and take an assessment. Another lady told me she would be my teacher. And she was the sweetest thing, too.”
While in school as a child, the student recounts her experience with a teacher whose name she still remembers, saying “I was in the 3rd grade and had a teacher…she told me that I was going to be a dummy, because my sister was a dummy. And I said [to myself], that isn’t right, because my sister went on and graduated and went to college. So, [the teacher] used to put me in the closet, and she told me to put on these big ol’ headphones on my ears so I couldn’t hear anything. And I stayed in there all day until my mama came to get me. [The teacher] would get me out of the closet and say, ‘Your mama’s here.’ Then I went home and told my mama about it, but I don’t think she knew what to do. [The teacher] was mean to me.” She recalled the teacher’s words, with the snide intonation she remembers, “‘Your sister is going to be a dummy and you’re going to be a dummy. No need for me to waste my time.’ And she put me in a closet all day.”
After that, she says, “they just kept passing me, passing me because I was too big for my age…and so they just kept passing me all the way to the 9th grade.”
For the student, the destructive message she received from that teacher burrowed inside her. All these years later, she told herself that she would show them.
“They start with baby steps. They find out what part stops you from getting it right, and they show you the right way to do it.”
Working with teachers and tutors over the last four years has helped her improve her reading skills and continue to grow more comfortable with the technology that has proliferated in our daily lives. It can be especially intimidating for those with low literacy. “There are so many machines. If you don’t know how to use them, you’ll be sitting there all day.” Before she came to The READ Center, “I wouldn’t have known how to push those buttons or anything!” Now, she is able to check-in at the doctor’s office using the computer, recounting the steps: “name, address, birthdate, telephone number, reason for the visit.” One teacher took the class to the store to learn how to use self check-out, something she previously avoided.
The student feels that she is a lot more independent now. She can pay bills online and use CashApp. She drives and can read signs; before, she would stay at home “because she didn’t know what to do, but now you can catch me out there at the store…and I can use self check-out!”
She also enjoys reading on her own. “I have an app on my phone…it’s Bible stories, and I read it every day.” She reads to her young grandson, too, who is learning to sound out words. “And,” she says with pride, “I can show it to him the right way.”
The teachers and tutors, she says, are very patient and encouraging. “They start with baby steps. They find out what part stops you from getting it right, and they show you the right way to do it.” She was especially excited to learn about the parts of a story. “You’ve got to know the beginning, what happened at the end, the main idea. I didn’t know what all that was about, but now I know what I’m doing.”
For someone who was belittled and shunned, and then passed along, she certainly has shown others what she can do. And, perhaps most importantly, she has proven to herself what she suspected as a child, that she could learn and that long-ago teacher was, indeed, very wrong.