[Pages S9445-S9447]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

MAKING UP FOR LOST TIME

<bullet> Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, a former staff member of mine, Alice
Johnson, now with the National Institute for Literacy sent me a copy of
an article by Richard Wolkomir that appeared in the Smithsonian
magazine.
It tells the story of Richard Wolkomir and another person teaching
Ken Adams how to read at the age of 64.
In some ways it is a sad story, looking at his background and looking
at all the years that could have been enriched.
But it is a story that ought to inspire all of us to do better.
We ought to have a national effort on literacy.
Mr. President, I ask that this article from the Smithsonian be
printed in the Record.
The article follows:

[From the Smithsonian, August, 1996]

Making Up for Lost Time: The Rewards of Reading at Last

(By Richard Wolkomir)

I decide simply to blurt out, ``Ken?'' I ask. ``Why didn't
you learn to read?''Through the Marshfield community center's
window, I see snowy fields and the Vermont village's
clapboard houses. Beyond, mountains bulge. ``I was a slow
learner,'' Ken says. ``In school they just passed me along,
and my folks told me I wasn't worth anything and wouldn't
amount to anything.
Ken Adams is 64, his hair white. He speaks Vermontese,
turning ``I'' into ``Oy,'' and ``ice'' into ``oyce.'' His
green Buckeye Feeds cap is blackened with engine grease from
fixing his truck's transmission, and pitch from chain-sawing
pine logs. It is 2 degrees below zero outside on this
December afternoon; he wears a green flannel shirt over a
purple flannel shirt. He is unshaven, weather reddened. He is
not a tall man, but a lifetime of hoisting hay bales has
thickened his shoulders.
Through bifocals, Ken frowns at a children's picture book,
Pole Dog. He is studying a drawing: an old dog waits
patiently by a telephone pole, where its owners abandoned it.
He glares at the next pictures. Cars whizzing by. Cruel
people tormenting the dog. ``Looks like they're shootin' at
him, to me!'' he announces. ``Nobody wants an old dog,'' he
says.
Ken turns the page. ``He is still by the pole,'' he says.
``But there's that red car that went by with those kids,
ain't it?'' He turns the page again. The red car has stopped
to take the old dog in, to take him home. ``Somebody wants an
old dog!'' Ken says. ``Look at that!''
This is my first meeting with Ken. It is also my first
meeting with an adult who cannot read.
I decided to volunteer as a tutor after a librarian told me
that every day, on the sidewalks of our prim little Vermont
town. I walk by illiterate men and women. We are unaware of
them because they can be clever at hiding their inability to
read. At a post office counter, for instance, when given
forms to fill out, they say, ``Could you help me with this? I
left my glasses home.''
Ken Adams is not alone in his plight. A 1993 U.S.
Department of Education report on illiteracy said 21-23
percent of U.S. adults--about 40 million--read minimally,
enough to decipher an uncomplicated meeting announcement.
Another 25-28 percent read and write only slightly better.
For instance, they can fill out a simple form. That means
about half of all U.S. adults read haltingly. Millions, like
Ken Adams, hardly read at all.
I wanted to meet nonreaders because I could not imagine
being unable to decipher a street sign, or words printed on
supermarket jars, or stories in a book. In fact, my own
earliest memory is about reading. In this memory, in our
little Hudson River town, my father is home for the evening
from the wartime lifeboat factory where he is a foreman. And
he has opened a book.
``Do you want to hear from Peter Churchmouse?'' my father
asks. Of course! It is my favorite, from the little library
down the street. My father reads me stories about children
lost in forests. Cabbage-stealing hares. A fisherman who
catches a talking perch. Buy my favorite is Peter
Churchmouse, a small but plucky cheese addict who
befriends the rectory cat. Peter is also a poet, given to
reciting original verse to his feline friend during their
escapades. I cannot hear it enough.
My father begins to read. I settle back. I am taking a
first step toward becoming literate--I am being read to. And
although I am only 2, I know that words can be woven into
tales.
Now, helping Ken Adams learn to read, I am re-entering that
child's land of chatty dogs and spats-wearing frogs.
Children's books--simply worded, the sentences short--are
perfect primers, even for 60-year-olds who turn the pages
with labor-thickened fingers and who never had such books
read to them when they were children.
``Do you remember what happened from last time?'' asks
Sherry Olson, of Central Vermont Adult Basic Education, who
tutors Ken and hour and a half each week.
I have volunteered as Sherry's aide. My work requires too
much travel for me to be a full-fledged tutor. But I am
actually relieved, not having sole responsibility for
teaching an adult to read. That is because--when I think
about it--I don't know how I read myself. I scan a printed
page; the letters magically reveal meaning. It is effortless.
I don't know how I do it. As for teaching a man to read from
scratch, how would I ever begin?
Sherry, a former third-grade teacher, gives me hints, like
helping Ken to learn words by sight so that he doesn't have
to sound out each letter. Also, we read stories so Ken can
pick out words in context. Ken reads Dr. Seuss rhyming books
and tales about young hippopotamuses helping on the family
farm. At the moment, we are reading a picture book about
Central American farmers who experience disaster when a
volcano erupts.
``The people had to move out, and put handkerchiefs over
their noses!'' Ken says, staring at the pages. He starts to
read: ``They . . . prayed? . . . for the . . . fire? . . .''
``Yes, that's right, fire,'' Sherry says. ``They prayed for
the fire to . . . go out?'' ``That word is `stop,''' Sherry
says.
I listen carefully. A few sessions ahead, it will be my
turn to try teaching. ``They prayed for the fire to stop,''
Ken says, placing a thick forefinger under each word. ``They
watched from the s . . .'' ``Remember we talked about
those?'' Sherry says. ``When a word ends in a silent e, what
does that silent e do to the vowel?'' ``It makes it say
itself,'' Ken says. ``So what's the vowel in s-i-d-e?'' she
asks. ``It's i, and it would say its own name, i,'' Ken says,
pronouncing it ``oy.'' ``So that would be `side.''' ``Good,''
Sherry says.
Ken reads the sentence: ``They watched from the side of the
hill!'' He sounds quietly triumphant. ``They-un,'' he says,
in backcountry Vermontese. ``That's done it.''
After the session, I stand a few minutes with Ken in the
frozen driveway. He has one foot on the running board of his
ancient truck, which he somehow keeps going. He tells me he
was born in 1931 into a family eking out an existence on a
hardscrabble farm. His trouble in school with reading is
puzzling, because Ken is intelligent.
For instance, he says he was late today because he had to
fix his truck. And now he launches into a detailed analysis
of the transmission mechanisms of various species of trucks.
Also, during the tutoring session, we played a game that
required strewing

[[Page S9446]]

word cards upside down on a table and remembering their
locations. Ken easily outscored both Sherry and me in this
exercise.
Ken described himself as a ``slow learner,'' but clearly he
is not slow. Sherry had told me he probably suffers from a
learning disability. People with these perceptual disorders
experience difficulties such as seeing letters reversed.
Although their intelligence may actually be above average,
learning to read is difficult for them. they need individual
tutoring.
``It was a one-room school, with eight grades, so I didn't
get much attention there,'' Ken tells me. ``It was just the
same as the folks at home were doing when they kicked me
along through the grades, and when you got to be 16, that's
when they kicked you out.''
After he left school, he left home. ``Then you knock
around, one farm to another,'' he says. ``I'd get $15 a week,
and room and board.'' Besides farming, he worked in bobbins
mills and sawmills and granite quarries. ``Then I was at a
veneer mill in Bradford,'' he says. `` After that I was
caretaker at a farm for six years until I had to give it up
because I had heart attacks.''
Now he subsists on a $400-a month Social Security
disability pension plus $90 a month in food stamps. He lives
alone in a farmhouse he built himself more than 25 years ago,
five miles up a mountain dirt road. He earns money for his
medicines by cutting firewood, haying, digging postholes with
his tractor, snowplowing an cutting brush. ``I'm doing odds-
and-ends jobs where you can take your time, because the
doctor told me I have to stop whenever I fell I need to
rest,'' he says.
He cannot afford electricity from the power company, but he
gets what current he needs, mostly for lights by--
ingeniously--drawing it from car batteries. To recharge the
batteries, he hooks them up in his truck for a day. He also
can charge them with a diesel generator. He waits until
prices dip to buy fuel for his generator and tractor. ``I've
got a few maples around my house,'' he tells me. ``I'll find
a rustedout evaporator, fix it up and make syrup--there's
always a few things I can do, I guess.''
I ask how he's managed all these years, not reading. He
says his bosses did the reading for him. And now a Marshfield
couple, lifelong friends, help him read his mail and bills
and notices. But they are entering their 80s. ``Now I've got
to learn to read myself, as a backup,'' Ken says.
To find out more about what illiteracy does to people like
Ken, I telephoned the U.S. Department of Education and spoke
with the Deputy Secretary, Madeleine Kunin. She told me that
only 3-5 percent of adult Americans cannot read at all. ``But
literacy is a moving target,'' she said. ``We figure the 40
million who do read, but at the lowest proficiency levels,
have difficulty handling some of the tasks they need hold
a job today.'' Kunin, a former Vermont governor, cited
that state's snowplow drivers: ``Now they have computers
attached, and they need a high school degree just to drive
a snowplow.''
Ken arrives for his next session in a dark mood. It turns
out his tape recorder, used for vocabulary practice, is
broken, ``I can't fix it because the money's all gone for
this month,'' he says. ``I had to go to the doctor, and
that's $30, and it was $80 for the pills, and they keep going
up.'' He says one of his prescriptions jumped from $6.99 to
$13 in two months. ``I don't know if I'll keep taking them,''
he says. Illiteracy has condemned Ken to a lifetime of
minimum-wage poverty.
He brightens reading a story. It is about a dog, John
Brown, who deeply resents his mistress's new cat. Ken
stumbles over a word. ``Milk?'' Sherry and I nod. ``Go and
give her some milk,'' Ken reads, then pauses to give us a
dispatch from the literacy front: ``I was trying to figure
that out, and then I see it has an i,'' he says.
My own first attempt at solo tutoring finally comes, and I
am edgy. Sherry has wryly admonished Ken, ``You help Richard
out.'' I show him file cards, each imprinted with a word for
Ken to learn by sight. He is supposed to decipher each word,
then incorporate it in a sentence. I write his sentence on
the card to help him when he reviews at home. Ken peers at
the first word.``All,'' he says getting it easily. He makes
up a sentence: ``We all went away.''
``That's right,'' I say. Maybe this won't be so hard after
all. I write Ken's sentence on the card for him. Then I flip
another card. Ken peers at it, his face working as he
struggles with the sounds. ``As,'' he says.
During our last session, he confused ``as'' and ``at.'' Now
he has it right. So he has been doing his homework.
``As we went down the road, we saw a moose,'' Ken says,
composing a sentence. That reminds him that the state
recently allowed moose hunting, game officials arguing that
moose have become so plentiful they cause highway accidents.
``Yesterday, I come around a turn and there was ten moose, a
big male and female and young ones,'' Ken says. ``They
shouldn't be shooting those moose--they ain't hurting anyone,
and it ain't the moose's fault if people don't use their
brakes.''
I flip another card. ``At!'' Ken says, triumphing over
another of our last session's troublemakers. ``We are at the
school.'' But the next word stumps him, It is ``be.'' I put
my finger under the first letter. ``What's that sound?'' I
ask. When he stares in consternation, I make the sound
``buh.'' But Ken is blocked. He can't sound out the next
letter, even though he has often done it before. ``Eeeee,'' I
say, trying to help. ``Now put the two sounds together.''
Ken stares helplessly at the word. I am beginning to
understand the deep patience needed to tutor a man like Ken,
who began these sessions a year before, knowing the alphabet
but able to sound out only a few words. ``Buh . . . eeee,'' I
say, enunciating as carefully as I can. ``Buh . . . eeee,''
Ken repeats. Abruptly, his forehead unfurrows. ``Oh, that's
`be,' '' he says. ``Be--We should be splitting wood!''
``Was that what you were doing before the tutoring
session?'' I ask, to give us both a break. ``Nope, plowing
snow with my tractor for my friend who broke off his ankle,''
Ken says.
That is arresting information. When I ask what happened,
Ken says his octogenarian friend was chain-sawing cherry
trees when a bent-back branch lashed out, smashing his lower
leg. Ken, haying a field, saw his friend ease his tractor
down from the mountainside woodlot, grimacing in agony,
working the tractor's pedals with his one good foot.
Ken himself once lost his grip on a hay bale he was
hoisting. A twig poking from the bale blinded his right eye.
Now learning to read is doubly difficult because his
remaining eye often tires and blurs. These grim country
stories of Ken's make my worries--delayed flights, missed
appointments--seem trivial. I flip another card: ``But.''
``Bat,'' Ken says, cautiously. ``Buh . . . uh . . . tuh,'' I
prompt. ``But,'' he finally says. ``I would do it, but I have
to go somewhere else.''
I write Ken's sentence on the card and he reads it back.
But he stumbles over his own words, unable to sound out
``would.'' I push down rising impatience by remembering the
old man in the woods, crawling toward his tractor, dragging
that smashed leg.
Finally, I put away the cards, glad to be done with them.
Tutoring can be frustrating. Why are even easy words
sometimes so hard to get? Now we look at a puzzle. On one
side it has pictures of various automobile parts. On the
other side are printed the parts' names. The idea is to match
the pictures and the names. Before I can start asking Ken to
try sounding out big terms like ``connecting rod,'' he points
to one of the drawings. It looks to me like deer antlers.
``Carburetor?'' I guess. ``Exhaust manifold,'' Ken says.
``What's this one?'' I inquire. For all I know, it might be
something Han Solo is piloting through hyperspace.
``Starter,'' Ken says. It seems to me he is gloating a
little. He points again. ``Camshaft?'' I ask. Ken corrects
me. ``Crankshaft,'' he says, dryly.
It is a standoff. I know the printed words. Ken knows the
actual objects to which the words refer. ``When I was a
kid,'' he tells me, ``I bought an old '35 truck. Sometimes it
had brakes and sometimes it didn't. I was probably 17. It
made lots of smoke, so mosquitos never bothered me. But one
day I got sick of it. I put it under a pine tree and I
hoisted the engine up into the tree to look at it. The
pressure plate weren't no good. And the fellow showed me how
to fix it.
That reminds Ken of a later episode. ``One time we had to
get the hay in, but the baler was jammed. We had the guys
from the tractor place, but they could not fix it. Finally I
asked the old guy for some wrenches and I adjusted it, and I
kept on adjusting, and after that it worked perfectly. I just
kept adjusting it a hair until I had it. And then we were
baling hay!'' No wonder Ken's bosses were happy to do his
reading for him. Even so, in our late 20th-century wordscape,
illiteracy stymies people like him. And working with Ken has
me puzzled: Why do so many people fail to learn to read?
I telephoned an expert, Bob Caswell, head of Laubach
Literacy International, a nonprofit organization that trains
tutors worldwide. He told me many nonreaders, like Ken Adams,
suffer from perceptual reading disorders. But there are other
reasons for illiteracy, and it is by no means confined to any
one part of the population.
``People think adult nonreaders are mainly poor, urban
minorities, but 41 percent are English-speaking whites,''
Caswell said, adding that 22 percent are English-speaking
blacks, 22 percent are Spanish-speaking, and 15 percent are
other non-English speakers. More than half of nonreading
adults live in small towns and suburbs. Caswell cited U.S.
Department of Labor figures that put illiteracy's annual
national cost at $225 billion in workplace accidents, lost
productivity, unrealized tax revenues, welfare and crime. One
big reason for this whopping problem is parents who read
poorly.
Well over a third of all kids now entering public schools
have parents who read inadequately, he said. ``Everywhere we
find parents who want to read to their kids, but can't,'' he
added. ``And a child with functionally illiterate parents is
twice as likely to grow up to be functionally illiterate.''
But as I met some of Ken Adams' fellow students, I
discovered all sorts of causes for being unable to decipher
an English sentence. For instance, I met a woman who had
escaped from Laos to Connecticut knowing only Laotian. She
learned enough English watching Sesame Street (``Big Bird and
all that,'' she told me), and later from being tutored, to
become a citizen.
I also met a man in his 30s who worked on a newspaper's
printing press. He could not spell the simplest words. He
said it was because, at age 10, he had begun bringing alcohol
to school in peanut-butter jars. After his son was born, he
turned to Alcoholics Anonymous and mustered the courage to
seek tutoring.

[[Page S9447]]

I met another man who had dropped out of school in
frustration. Not until he tried to enlist in the military did
he discover he was nearly deaf. The operator of a creamery's
cheese-cutting machine told me he never learned to read
because his family had been in a perpetual uproar, his mother
leaving his father seven times in one year. And I met a farm
wife, 59, who rarely left her mountaintop. But now, with
tutoring, she was finally learning to read, devouring
novels--``enjoyment books,'' she called them.
In central Vermont, these struggling readers receive free
tutoring from nonprofit Adult Basic Education offices, each
employing a few professionals, like Sherry Olson, but relying
heavily on armies of volunteers, like me. Other states have
their own systems. Usually, the funding is a combination of
federal and state money, sometimes augmented with donations.
Mostly, budgets are bare bones.
Many states also rely on nonprofit national organizations,
like Laubach Literacy Action (Laubach International's U.S.
division) and Literacy Volunteers of America, both
headquartered in Syracuse, New York, to train volunteers.
Laubach's Bob Caswell told me that, nationwide, literacy
services reach only 10 percent of adult nonreaders. ``Any
effort is a help,'' he said.
Help has come late for Ken Adams. Reviewing his portfolio,
I found the goals he set for himself when he began: ``To read
and write better. And to get out and meet people and develop
more trust.'' Asked by Sherry to cite things that he does
well, he had mentioned ``fixing equipment, going to school
and learning to read, trying new things, telling stories,
farming.'' He remembered being in a Christmas play in second
grade and feeling good about that. And he remembered playing
football in school: ``They would pass it to me and I'd run
across the goal to make a score.'' He mentioned no fond
family memories. But he had some good moments. ``I remember
the first time I learned to drive a tractor,'' he had said.
``We were working in the cornfields. I was proud of that.''
And a later notation, after he had several months of
tutoring, made me think of Ken living alone in his hand-built
farmhouse on ten acres atop the mountain. ``I like to use
recipes,'' he said. ``I use them more as I learn to read and
write better. I made Jell-O with fruit, and I make bean
salad. I feel good I can do that.''
In our tutoring sessions, between bouts with the vocabulary
cards, Ken tells me he was the oldest of four children. When
he was small, his father forced him to come along to roadside
bars, and then made Ken sit alone in the car for hours. Ken
remembers shivering on subzero nights. ``He always said I'd
never amount to nothing,'' Ken says.
I ask Ken, one day, if his inability to read has made life
difficult. He tells me, ``My father said I'd never get a
driver's license, and he said nobody would ever help me.''
Ken had to walk five miles down his mountain and then miles
along highways to get to work. ``And,'' he recalls, ``I was
five years in the quarries in Graniteville--that was a long
way.'' Sometimes he paid neighbors to drive him down the
mountain. ``They said the same as my father, that I'd never
get a license,'' he says. ``They wanted the money.''
It was not until he was 40 years old that he applied for a
license. He had memorized sign shapes and driving rules, and
he passed easily. ``After I got my license I'd give people a
ride down myself,'' he says. ``And they'd ask, `How much?'
And I'd always say, `Nothing, not a danged thing!' ''
To review the words he has learned, Ken maintains a
notebook. On each page, in large block letters, he writes the
new word, along with a sentence using the word. He also tapes
to each page a picture illustrating the sentence, as a memory
aid. To keep him supplied with pictures to snip, I bring him
my old magazines. He is partial to animals. He points to one
photograph, a black bear cub standing upright and looking
back winsomely over its shoulder. ``That one there's my
favorite,'' Ken says. And then he tells me, glowering, that
he has seen drivers swerve to intentionally hit animals
crossing the road. ``That rabbit or raccoon ain't hurting
anyone,'' he says.
We start a new book, The Strawberry Dog. Ken picks out the
word ``dog'' in the title. ``That dog must eat
strawberries,'' he says. ``I used to have a dog like that. I
was picking blackberries. Hey, where were those berries
going? Into my dog!''
We read these books to help Ken learn words by sight and
context. But it seems odd, a white-haired man mesmerized by
stories about talkative beavers and foppish toads. Yet, I
find myself mesmerized, too. The sessions are reteaching me
the exhilaration I found in narrative as a child, listening
to my father read about Peter Churchmouse. Our classes glide
by, a succession of vocabulary words--``house,'' ``would,''
``see''--interwoven with stories about agrarian
hippopotamuses and lost dogs befriended.
One afternoon it is my last session with Ken. We have
wrestled with words through a Christmas and a March sugaring,
a midsummer haying, an October when Ken's flannel shirts were
specked with sawdust from chain-sawing stove logs. Now the
fields outside are snowy; it is Christmas again.
My wife and I give Ken a present that she picked out. It is
bottles of jam and honey and watermelon pickles, nicely
wrapped. Ken quickly slides the package into his canvas tote
bag with his homework. ``Aren't you going to open it?''
Sherry asks. ``I'll open it Christmas day,'' Ken says. ``It's
the only present I'll get.'' ``No it isn't,'' she says, and
she hands him a present she has brought.
And so we begin our last session with Ken looking pleased.
I start with a vocabulary review. ``Ignition coil,'' Ken
says, getting the first card right off. He gets ``oil
filter,'' too. He peers at the next card. ``Have,'' he says.
And he reads the review sentence: ``Have you gone away?''
He is cruising today. When I flip the next card, he says,
``There's that `for.' '' It is a word that used to stump him.
I turn another card. He gets it instantly. ``But.'' He gets
``at,'' then another old nemesis, ``are.'' I ask him to read
the card's review sentence. ``Are we going down . . .
street?'' he says. He catches himself. ``Nope. That's
downtown!''
I am amazed at Ken's proficiency. A while ago, I had
complained to my wife that Ken's progress seemed slow. She
did some math: one and a half hours of tutoring a week, with
time off for vacations and snowstorms and truck breakdowns,
comes to about 70 hours a year. ``That's like sending a first
grader to school for only 12 days a year,'' she said. And so
I am doubly amazed at how well Ken is reading today. Besides,
Sherry Olson has told me that he now sounds out--or just
knows--words that he never could have deciphered when he
began. And this reticent man has recently read his own poems
to a group of fellow tutees--his new friends--and their
neighbors at a library get-together.
But now we try something new, a real-world test: reading
the supermarket advertising inserts from a local newspaper.
Each insert is a hodge-podge of food pictures, product names
and prices. I point to a word and Ken ponders. ``C'' he says
finally. ``And it's got those two e`s--so that would be
`coffee'!'' I point again. He gets ``Pepsi.'' Silently, he
sounds out the letters on a can's label. ``So that's `corn,'
'' he announces. He picks out ``brownies.'' This is great.
And then, even better he successfully sounds out the
modifier: ``Fudge,'' he says. ``They-uh!''
We're on a roll. But not I point to the page's most
tortuous word. Ken starts in the middle again. ``ta?'' I
point my finger at the first letters. ``Po,'' he says,
unsure. As always when he reads, Ken seems like a beginning
swimmer. He goes a few strokes. Flounders.
``Po-ta . . .,'' Ken says. He's swum another stroke.
``To,'' he says, sounding out the last syllable. ``Po-ta-to,
po-ta-to--Hey, that's potato!'' He's crossed the pond.
``Ken!'' I say. ``Terrific!'' He sticks out his chin. He
almost smiles. ``Well, I done better this time,'' he says.
``Yup, I did good.''<bullet>

____________________