My father is illerate. He has a learning disiblity and dropped out of school in grade 10. He is a great mechanic and can re build any engine with his eyes closed. He is truly amazing. He has tried to learn by reading childrens books but he is very embarassed. I saw him cry once and he regrets not being able to read me bed time stories. I was able to introduce him to the internet and e-mail and we keep in touch that way. It has helped him alot. He has come a long way since he got his first computer two years ago.
I’d say close to half of my students’ parents are functionally illiterate and a majority of those are truly illiterate. According to their test scores, nearly a tenth to a quarter of our students are illiterate (it changes depending on the test, how you determine illiterate, etc). They do much better when tested in English, but that doesn’t count. A few of our custodians are illiterate I suspect. Not anybody else on staff, though some of the memos that fly around make me wonder.
I live in rural Mississippi, and have met several people who just have no ability to read or write. One lady I knew had to take her ten-year-old daughter to the grocery store so the kid could tell her which products were which. I don’t know if she had a learning disorder, a bad education, or just never learned.
.:Nichol:.
I was illiterate the first few months I lived in Japan. It totally sucked.
Thats so stupid its funny. bi-illiterate… heh
I see alot of Illiterate people post on the DiabloII message boards on Battle.net
The really sad thing is Im not kidding.
Along those lines, I’m only semi-literate in Hebrew, despite having studied it for years. Most Hebrew classes for adults assume that the students learned the alephbet as a kid in Hebrew School, and breeze through through it in a few days. I didn’t go to Hebrew School. So, fun. I know all of the letters and I can read it, but I have to sound out every letter. I can only read it with effort, as opposed to Latin characters, which I read effortlessly and automatically.
This experience has taught me to be grateful to my teachers and parents, who gave me this precious gift. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be truly illiterate, how alienating.
No, I don’t know any illiterate adults. But I think I will volunteer for a literacy program.
I know one man, mid-70s black man in rural Georgia, who finally learned to read and write just a few years ago. He was a big kid, I guess, and in that time and place nobody cared if he could read, so he just never went to school and went to work full-time by age 13 and never learned to read until recently. He is VERY proud of his literacy today, as are we all!
When I worked at a clinic, a man came in for services. He could not fill out the paperwork, so I had to read it to him and write down his answers. Some of the questions were pretty personal, so I stayed as professional as possible.
I’ve seen this man around town since. He’s probably around 55-60, he rides a bike everywhere (which makes sense-- how do you pass the written portion of the road test if you can’t read?), works as a custodian, is married, and seems to be doing all right. It was clear to me that he was of below average intelligence, but I’m sure someone could teach him to read. It made me sad, thinking about how much he’s missing. As an English teacher, I felt terrible about how the educational system failed him.
Yes. I have a nephew…very long story but he is 13 and has been shifted from relative to relative, mostly abused by drug additcts and alcoholics and never attended one school for very long. He can write his first name “Joe” but cannot write his full name “Joseph” it is tragic. When I was married we tried four times to adopt this child but were denied every time. What a waste.
Also when I lived in Italy, some of the older generation, the grandparents who would have been in school during the second world war and shortly after never had the opportunity to finish school. They may read and write but not very well.
A fair percentage of people in China are illiterate, especially in the countryside. Basic literacy has been steadily improving but the countryside definately lags.
I remember being maybe 10 in northern california, and watching a guy sign a check with his “mark” eg a big X
Thanks for the link Dolores Claiborne, I think I’m going to look into this. It would be a good fit for me to volunteer.
I have a 12 year cousin who is functionally illiterate. Unlike mipiace’s nephew, it’s not for the lack of opportunity. He has a stable home life and goes to a private school. Unfortunately his parents are pushovers and can’t get him to do anything that he doesn’t feel like doing. Such as reading.
It’s pretty tragic because he’s a very bright, charming kid, but he’s going to miss out a lot of opportunities because he can’t even read simple sentences.
About 20 years ago I was a clerk in a Fred Meyer store and a man would come in all the time and would have me fill out his checks for him because as he put it " I don’t write to good". It was pretty surreal. He had was about 45 years old, held a job, a truck driver for a local dry cleaner, and seemed to function in society. I remember thinking about it quite a lot. Iwondered what that would be like, All those signs, books, newspapers and to not be able to read them.
Eh, don’t worry about that. I’m very literate and I can’t even remember the months of the year without thinking about it very hard. Whenever I have to date something I write the three-letter abbreviation of the month since I can never remember the number. (Except for January and December. Those are easy.)
I have never known anyone that was illiterate (to my knowledge) but my roommate in boarding school was close. He couldn’t spell, didn’t know the basic homonyms, and didn’t understand any punctuation at all. I helped him with his homework a lot.
He was extremely good at math, though. And he knew the capital of every country and could locate nearly any geographical thing on a map; even small mountains and rivers you’ve never heard of, anywhere in the world.
He couldn’t spell them, though. 
The CIA World Factbook puts American literacy at 97% of those 15 years or older, incidentally.
Australia is put at 100%, but I’ve heard a second hand account of illiteracy.
A friend of mine delivers furniture for a living. He was in the truck with two coworkers, both from the UK. Passing a mapbook, he asked one of them to look up a delivery address. Noticing the guy puzzling over the entries for a couple minutes, he made a mild enquiry.
The bloke replied, “Sorry Chris, I can’t read”, and passed the mapbook to the other man in the truck.
The third man piped up in astonishment, “Hey, neither can I!”
So there you go: there’s at least a few illiterates around.
By way of a footnote, the two guys in the truck who couldn’t read went on to become fast friends, perhaps united by their common bond.
Kid, the Younger, my 14 year old son is quite severely dyslexic. he reads at about the kindergarten level and although he can form letters neatly, I doubt he could put together a coherent sentance without help. His intelligance tests in the normal range.
Despite the dyslexia, he is mechanically gifted. He’s already got a little business going, repairing lawnmowers and chainsaws. He’s very imaginative too, and has had poetry published.
As you can see (I hope!) I’m not dyslexic in the sense of reading and writing, but I can’t do math beyond addition and subtraction. If it’s a simple enough equation, I might be able to multiply, but division is out of my range. I need to figure out prices for different cleaning packages at my AM job, so every time we get new prices, I sit with the calculater and figure out all the more common combinations.
One of B’s friends has a cousin who managed to graduate from high school and is illiterate. I think he is retarded, and I am fairly sure that he is unable to focus both eyes at any one target.
Many of my clients are barely semi-literate, but they always try very hard. I work in a hostel for the homeless and we have some very street-tough people in there, but they’ll give me a letter proudly and it looks like it was written by a six year old. You can see the effort put into writing the letters, and they seldom ask for help, I find it very touching. Multiple crossings-out and misspellings, malapropisms all over the place, sentence structure so confusing it’s difficult to parse effectively. I deal with the appeals and complaints within the hostel, so get several letters from them a day. It’s tough, I have remind myself not to laugh when I read some of the letters, remind myself that most of our residents had so much other crappy stuff going on in their lives they didn’t have time for school. Sometimes it still takes me upwards of half an hour to figure out exactly what they’re complaining about enough to respond.
An example - this week I got a letter addressed to “to who it my consirn”. That this person had tried so hard to be formal and ‘do things properly’ without help, and without need because I certainly don’t expect that, seemed something very nice to me.
We have a weekly literacy class, but it’s undersubscribed.
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- I had a co-worker for a while who apparently couldn’t even read numbers past a few digits. He was a temp hire at the grocery store I work at, only because the pickup truck he was living in ran out of gas on the parking lot. He admitted he couldn’t read well when he “filled out” the application, by scribbling incomprehensibly in a few of the spaces, and then signing his name. You could read his name when he signed it, but it was very shaky. Anything else he couldn’t really write, and he was perfectly willing to take the lousiest, dirtiest job around just to escape having to read or write anything. He said he could read numbers well, but we found he wasn’t much good for that either: part of the job involved sorting boxes by an 8-digit product number, and he really couldn’t do it. He seemed retarded (or dyslexic, now that I think of it) but that could have been a laid-back demeanor; he seemed to have to think a while whenever you tried to explain anything new to him. During conversation he said he had never gone to high school as his parents had thrown him out when he was 16 and he didn’t do well in grade school, and back in his day (he was in his mid-50’s) quitting school to go to work was common so nobody made a big deal of it. People did make jokes privately, but some of us mentioned how bad we felt for the guy, as there really wasn’t anything an illiterate could help with much at that store.
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And concerning the driving test: yes, you can be functionally illiterate and still get a drivers’ license. A current co-worker is, and has one. If you have problems reading the questions, (in IL, at least) you can request that someone from the DMV read the questions to you. He had to take the written test a few times before he passed it. This guy is also retarded, has problems reading&writing [but can read + write simple sentences] and is a high-school dropout. I know how big the crack he fell through was, he went to one of the larger, better schools around (in a suburban middle-class area) so I’d bet they tried to find out what his exact problem was. Then again neither of his parents are real sharp, his dad is a dropout also and his parents let him quite school at 16 because he had behavioral problems and they didn’t see it helping much anyway.
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I cannot imagine what I would be doing if I could not read and write–everything I like doing and most of wht I have planned on int he future has depended upon it.
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- I had a co-worker for a while who apparently couldn’t even read numbers past a few digits. He was a temp hire at the grocery store I work at, only because the pickup truck he was living in ran out of gas on the parking lot. He admitted he couldn’t read well when he “filled out” the application, by scribbling incomprehensibly in a few of the spaces, and then signing his name. You could read his name when he signed it, but it was very shaky. Anything else he couldn’t really write, and he was perfectly willing to take the lousiest, dirtiest job around just to escape having to read or write anything. He said he could read numbers well, but we found he wasn’t much good for that either: part of the job involved sorting boxes by an 8-digit product number, and he really couldn’t do it. He seemed retarded (or dyslexic, now that I think of it) but that could have been a laid-back demeanor; he seemed to have to think a while whenever you tried to explain anything new to him. During conversation he said he had never gone to high school as his parents had thrown him out when he was 16 and he didn’t do well in grade school, and back in his day (he was in his mid-50’s) quitting school to go to work was common so nobody made a big deal of it. People did make jokes privately, but some of us mentioned how bad we felt for the guy, as there really wasn’t anything an illiterate could help with much at that store.
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