‘I want to be able to read a book before I die’
57-year-old South Sider learning with help of teacher
For all their deprivations and frustrations, these locked-down days and nights have given some people the time and opportunity to fulfill their dreams and desires.
I know a woman who has been using her “spare” time to learn to speak French, another “painting watercolors of beach scenes” and yet another determined to “finish the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle.”
Months ago, when all this began, a 57-year-old man named Andre (who asked that his last name not be used) was laid off fromthe job he had for years toting bags at a downtown hotel. He decided that his would be to “exercise more.” He also decided to tackle something that had been troubling him since hewas a small child.
“Iwanted to learn to read,” he said. “Iwant to be able to read a book before I die.”
Imagine that. Let that sink in.
Something so many of us take for granted was what hewas aiming for and, elaborating, he said, “My whole life, or since I was 7, I knew that I couldn’t read and there was no one to help. I tried but I had one teacher tell me ‘Well, maybe you’ll just never know how to read’ and that hurt me.”
He is learning now, open to talking about it, friendly and quick to smile. Before he told me of his aspiration, he had told awoman named Karen Wadden Mueller.
Andre told her, “Iwant to read a book before I leave this earth.”
“And those words captured my heart ,” says Wadden Mueller.
Thatwas two months ago. Hewas going about the business of calling the people whose names were on the list given him by doctors at the University of Chicago, where he had undergone some testing shortly after being laid off due to the pandemic’s impact on hotels. The list contained names of tutors, specializing in dyslexia. Over his many years, he had been tested and tutored before.
“But none of that worked. Iwas only able to go so far before I gave up or they did,” he says.
He started calling some of the names on the list and found most of the first dozen or so “not very friendly” and all wanting to charge fees far beyond what Andre could afford.
Then he called Wadden Mueller, a learning-disabilities specialist and dyslexia therapist. Raised in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, shewas drawn to her profession due to having family members with dyslexia. She attended Sacred Heart Academy and later earned degrees in learning disabilities and behavioral therapy from Northeastern Illinois University.
She then trained teachers in the Peace Corps in Tunisia, taught in the Chicago public school system for a time and now sees individual clients in private practice and consults for the Park Ridge School District. She and her husband, environmental engineer Tony Mueller, have two kids in college and one high schooler still at home.
Her career had been spent in the company of youngsters between first grade through high school, but thatwas not Andre. He would be her first adult client. Mueller quickly made a diagnosis and “was ready to go the distance with him.”
There are many types of learning disabilities and Andre has what is known as phonological dyslexia, which makes it difficult to segment individual sounds from printed language and to spell those sounds into print. People with dyslexia have no trouble producing and processing the sounds
they need to speak. Learning to do so is one of the first steps children must take learning to read, decoding words by sounding them out one letter or group of letters at a time. Remember?
She explained this to him, telling him that they would “have to go back to the very beginning, the basics. I did this knowing that there is such a sense of shame and embarrassment in this, so many emotions involved.”
She offered towork with Andre for free. But he is a proud man and refused any pro bono arrangement. They settled on a relatively small fee for three hourlong sessions aweek.
They work, of course, remotely, she in her home office on the Far Northwest Side, he froman apartment in Hyde Park. To observe a lesson is to understand how laborious this is, as she employs what she calls “a
multisensory reading technique,” which involves finger tapping each sound to feel where each sound falls in aword in order to “see, hear and feel the words.”
“Sounding thewords out becomes the key,” she says.
It makes for slowgoing but both are enthusiastic and unflappable.
At this point he has mastered a large number of simple words— “cat,” “hop,” “bug,” “nap”— and, when he “gets it,” his eyes brighten, and a smile crosses his lips.
When he “gets it,” Wadden Mueller offers encouragement: “Excellent” or “You amaze me.”
Over the course of their work, she has unobtrusively learned much about Andre and understands that except for certain specifics, his story is not as unusual as one might imagine.
Born and raised on the
Far South Side, hewas the only child of a single mother. “Her namewas Jackie and she worked two jobs to make a life for us,” he says. “Shewas always good tome and helped protect me fromthe gangs and from any real trouble.”
He attended the neighborhood public school where he “felt that something was wrong but didn’t really knowwhat itwas. I was able to grab aword here and there. I learned to write my own name and I knew my address and phone number.”
Teachers mostly paid him little if any attention and he went on his solitary way.
“I sort of kept tomyself,” he said. “Iwas also a little guy. I got bullied a lot. But once you get to a certain age you realize you can’t read and so you do your best to fake it. It’s not all that hard.”
Public high schoolwas no better for him. He dropped out at 17 and, through relatives, found a job with LSG Sky Chefs, theworld’s largest airline and rail catering and hospitality company. Itwas not a demanding job. Working at O’Hare International Airport, he cleaned up empties and replaced the tiny liquor bottles that are ubiquitous on planes.
He stuck with that for four years. Then came other low-level jobs, most of them in the hotel industry; a move to the Far North Side and then back south; and a steady relationship with aman, now nearing 20 happy years in length.
All the while, he coped
as best he could, part of the 32 million or so adults in the United States who can’t read. That is the sorrowful statistic cited by all sorts of organizations, such as the U.S. Department of Education and National Institute of Literacy. (There is an encouraging number of fine literacy organizations in the Chicago area, easily discovered with an internet foray.)
He and Wadden Mueller will virtually meet again three times thisweek. He’s coming along, and quickly.
“I so admire him,” Wadden Mueller says. “He has come to understand what the challenge is and to accept that. We are using a key to open a door and he can be in a place that is comfortable and safe. He has found in me somebody who understands, somebody he can trust. He has learned that his 50 years of struggle had nothing to do with his intelligence of ability to learn.”
He says, “I’m not ashamed anymore.”
She says, “There are only so many times in life where you are called upon to do something, to give back to theworld. Life is a personal journey, just one foot ahead of the other. There is not necessarily a final destination. Andre and I could be at this for the rest of his life and I’ll be there.”
He says, “I just know that I will be reading a book before my time is up.”
She says, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”