A beginner reader is not a beginner thinker
May 18, 2009 at 7:05 pm(This post might make more sense if you read the ones below, first)
And life went on, and real life caught up with me at last, and I had to take on teaching more adult literacy courses, and then several hours a week supporting the Adult Basic Education Co-ordinator, and then a permanent part-time management post, which left little spare time for the writing that wasn’t getting me anywhere, except for the enjoyment and the learning and the honing of my skills. But none of that was helping to support the increasing expenses involved in bringing up children through their pre-teens and teenage years.
That stage of having the writing pushed onto the back boiler probably did my craft a deal of good. Writing can’t take place in a vacuum, and I was lucky enough, in those days, to actually love my work, both the teaching, and the interviewing of new students coming forward in trepidation to ask for help with their reading and writing. Actually, it was a joy to help so many people to put their thoughts and stories onto paper, regardless of the state of their punctuation and spelling – I could tell, within a few minutes of listening to someone at the initial interview, when I had a ‘real writer’ in the room.
Tape recorders were useful tools for those who had lots to say, but whose writing skills were still in the embryo stage. One of the sayings of the original ‘Right to Read’ scheme, from which the ABE service developed, was ‘ A beginner reader is not a beginner thinker.’ To see the look on people’s faces when they realised that they were being listened to – that what they said was valuable and interesting – that they weren’t being looked at as ‘thick’, it used to fill me with a mixture of pleasure at their enjoyment, and inner rage at what our education system had done to them.
The courage and persistence of so many of them was and still is an inspiration for me.
June 4th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
[...] understand why I’m feeling like this if you look back at one of my earlier posts, A Beginner Reader is not a Beginner Thinker [...]
July 1st, 2009 at 10:49 pm
[...] strong link between my teaching and my writing (particularly teaching adult literacy - see the post ‘A Beginner reader is not a Beginner Thinker’) This afternoon I’d been invited by the tutor, Jan Watts, to help launch the little book that [...]
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:34 pm
[...] then I found myself remembering so many of the brave men and women (young and older) who I’ve met during my years as an Adult Literacy tutor, and I experienced the familiar mind switch that happens from time to time as I catch myself [...]