Getting A Feel For Illiteracy
March 9th, 2008 by admin
Pretend with me for a moment that you cannot read. It’s hard to even imagine that, isn’t it? We take literacy skills for granted, and we read without even thinking about the process.
Try this:
Th!s si hmat !llitarecy zeews liek ot wauy. Teh lattens hcenge anb swithc anonub unitl ti si iwbossidle to becobe anything.
That ugly mess actually says “This is what illiteracy seems like to many. The letters change and switch around until it is impossible to decode anything.” All I did was rearrange a few letters and substitute some commonly-confused letters, like w for m and u for n. It was very uncomfortable, wasn’t it?
If you could not read, that sentence above would seem normal to you. Print would, for the most part, be meaningless. Your opportunities and education would be extremely limited, and you would have trouble accomplishing even the most basic tasks in adult life, like reading recipes or assembling budget furniture. Protecting yourself by reading loan documents or taking care of your own taxes would be out of the question. Employment doors would be slammed in your face as soon as the personnel department realized that you couldn’t read.
Statistics show that in the United States, between ten and fifteen percent of all adults are in this situation. Many more can read somewhat, but are not efficient at the task. HELP IS NEEDED! Please consider donating time, energy, and/or money to your local literacy agency. Share your good fortune with others, and don’t take reading for granted!
If you are a parent or a teacher, take a moment this week to make sure your children or students are reading as well as they should be. It’s simple: just listen to them read aloud from a grade-level text. They should make no more than five errors per page. If you notice a problem, get help! Don’t assume it will go away on its own or be outgrown. It’s very important to seek help early for reading problems.
Check out these helpful articles here at AIA Reading:
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© 2008 Sandra Fleming
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 9th, 2008 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Adult Literacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
