Literacy Ain't Just for the Young!

When I tell people I teach reading to adults, I often get a lot of...interesting looks.  Some pity me, assuming I get the absolute "worst" of society: drug addicts, high school dropouts, felons, criminals, homeless people, jobless people, etc.  Others assume my students are only there as someone forced them there, demanded they stop being the drain on society they so obviously are.  Even a few assume I spend my days desperately trying to force adults to learn things they have NO interest in learning.  Heck, I've even had a few tell me I just repackage lessons and get my summers off...while I was packing up to go teach a class in July that I had spent an entire weekend designing.

...yeah...about that...

I don't get mad at these people.  (...well, okay, I got mad at the last one for being condescending, but that angers me in people who verbally attack people who aren't me.)  Instead, I just view them as someone who has no idea of what I do everyday, and that's okay.  I just see it as another opportunity to educate people.

It's not uncommon for people in adult education to joke that we're a forgotten field.  Much of the literacy funding that's available in the USA goes to children's literacy.  Honestly, that doesn't surprise me: it seems a huge chunk of the educational movements in our country are focused on "our future," with "the future" soundly considered to be those who are under 21 or, in many cases, 18 years of age.

But is that the right approach?

Yesterday, I stumbled upon a TEDx Talk about the growing need for adult literacy instruction in our nation and beyond.  The speaker (Daphne Greenburg) spoke about being an adult literacy tutor and the many people she encountered in her line of work.  Even as a professional in that field, it spoke to me.

Many of those students sit at the tables in my classroom.

You can ask an adult education professional (instructor, program director, tutor, etc) for what kind of people make up their classrooms, and I'd almost bet that most people would counter with "Just start naming the types of people you know.  We've got them all."  And they'd be right.

• I have high school graduates, and I have high school dropouts.
• I have college graduates, and I have college drop-outs.
• I have currently employed people and demoted workers, and I have jobless people seeking work in a rural, impoverished area.
• I have people holding down steady jobs--people who want to move on to new fields of work.
• I have people with steady jobs who got hurt on said job and now cannot perform their duties and are forced to make a career change.

In short, just like in any other population, you cannot make sweeping generalizations of adult learners.  That term alone can also refer to adults going back to college, and how often do we truly refer to those learners as lazy, inconsiderate, criminal drains upon society's lacking resources?  This is a vast injustice as these people, though not the "future," are a huge growing concern for our society.  They deserve as many educational opportunities as the young.

Who knows: how many of them, like Greenburg says, will be going home to some of the very same learners childhood literacy movements are trying to reach?  Does it not benefit children to surround them with adults who understand the value of education?

Hey, I Had a Blog!

Well, I went to read a blog today in Blogger and, low and behold, I apparently STILL have the blog I started as a scholarship entry for grad school back in, oh, 2010.

...It is 2014...for 24 whole days now!

Needless to say, today I deleted the one-and-only post as it was TERRIBLE.  It reeked of "college senior English major burned out on school, writing, scholarship entries, and life."  (It also reeked of "I THINK I want a Masters in Library Science but all the doors are closing and I have no idea which one will open so I will ramble here until you throw money at me KTHNXBAI.")  That's not what I want to be my blogging legacy (if such things even exist) in this world.  So, it's gone.

Instead of ending the blog, however, I decided to re-purpose it.  Rename it, redesign it, and play around to see if I really want to get into this whole "blogging" thing.  I have many blogs I read that I love, and they always inspire my creative side to write more, to get my voice out and share it with others.  It will take some time, though, to figure out what that is.

I'm up for the journey.

So, for starters, my name is Cherish: hence the "pun-y" title to this blog.  I'm a newlywed as of December 28, 2013; my husband is a PR guy for a local university.  In my free time, I knit, crochet, write, draw, and play clarinet when I can.  That free time is sorely limited, however: I'm also a 25-year-old teacher at a non-profit in Western New York.

What makes me unique as a teacher is that I'm what's called an "adult classroom instructor."  My non-profit in concerned with family literacy, and I work in their adult program.  My role in the non-profit is to teach adults to read as well as to sharpen their reading skills so they can better themselves (through HSEs [High School Equivalency diplomas, for all you non-New Yorkers], obtaining jobs, or improving their work outlook), their families (through the empowerment of knowing they can help their students learn as they can read better as well as through the economic boost of such knowledge), and the community.

Yes, you read that right: I teach adults to read.  And write, on occasion, but that mostly happens at the jail.

...oh, that too: I teach two mornings a week at our local jail until July.  Many teachers equate their classrooms to jails at times: my classroom really is one a few times a week.

Despite the challenges you can imagine crop up in my job, I love it.  I love the creativity it takes to create lessons that engage, encourage, and strengthen my students.  I love the environment of adult education and the HUGE changes I see happen with my students.  I adore knowing that I work with students many, many other people, educational systems, and communities have written off as "lost causes" and "worthless drains on society."  I never see them that way: I see the potential that lies there, even when they fail to see it themselves.  And I adore knowing that my attempts to teach them often go beyond the classroom, helping them better others.

So, welcome to this teacher's personal blog.  Let's see where it goes.