Adult literacy volunteers change lives
RSVP program trains retirees to assist adults who want to improve reading and writing skills
The proposition seems simple enough: Meet an adult at a local library for 1-1½ hours once or twice each week to work on basic reading, writing and vocabulary skills. But in practice, volunteers in RSVP’s Adult Literacy program find themselves challenged and rewarded in surprising ways.
“It’s rarely what people think it will be,” said Janis Glusman, the program’s recently retired founding coordinator. “The student’s probably not going to have a eureka moment. It’s not a fairy tale. But there are those moments, and they’re very satisfying, when you feel that you have reinforced your student’s skills, that they’ve remembered new things, gained new confidence.”
The program works through Montgomery and Delaware County organizations such as the Abington Library Literacy Program, Delaware County Literacy Council, the Literacy Council of Norristown and others. “We are also stationed throughout the counties, at various locations,” said Glusman.
RSVP links volunteers with a literacy provider that often is located near their homes. They are trained and matched with adults seeking help. Some are learning English as a second language. Some are seeking a high school diploma. And others simply want to gain the ability to read and write well enough to hold a job.
“When you help someone learn to read or speak English, you enable that individual to take advantage of a new world of opportunities,” said RSVP Adult Literacy Coordinator Sandie Rollins. “Simply put, literacy changes lives.”
Martha Simelaro “didn’t know what I was getting into” when she volunteered for an adult tutoring opportunity at the Keystone Opportunity Center in Harleysville. A retired business trainer, “I had never done that kind of teaching.”
She was matched early this year with a 36-yearold woman who read at a third-grade level, whom she met twice per week for 90 minutes. “It was a lot of work because of the preparation,” said Simelaro. “You can’t go in there and just sit down and read with an adult. You’ll lose your student, you really will.”
To prepare for her lessons, “each week I found something new — games, computer learning, things like that. We’d always start off learning (using material provided by the literacy center). Then in the middle I would interject some kind of activity. She had homework. I had homework.”
By this summer, when the training ended, the student’s reading “increased to level 4½. She started out very introverted. By the end she read with confidence and was doing some reading on her own,” said Simelaro. “It was a great experience.”
Lesson preparation took less time for Debra Schaeffer, a retired teacher who volunteered to help both elementary and adult literacy students. But she regarded adding to the lesson as crucial to her student’s success. The student, an Algerian who emigrated to the U.S. with her husband, spoke four languages but “needed far better oral and written English skills to gain a job.” But her immediate goal was to gain U.S. citizenship.
“Sometimes I spent 15 minutes, sometimes more than an hour looking for things online for her,” Schaeffer said. “She was very interested in learning about the states. She really liked reading about important historical figures. I got to know what her interests were. That’s important in terms of engaging students.”
On Valentine’s Day this year, Schaeffer joined her student along with a small group of family and supporters at Washington’s Crossing for her naturalization ceremony. She had passed her citizenship test with ease.
“It was quite moving,” said Schaeffer. “She and her husband are now very good friends. They were here for Thanksgiving. I couldn’t have asked for a better situation. We happened to be a perfect match. We have more things in common than not. I consider myself very lucky.”
Richard Dowgun, a retired healthcare provider, volunteered as an Adult Literacy tutor because “it’s something I’ve felt was important. My father was an immigrant to the U.K.” The Literacy Council of Norristown offered him a choice of three students on its waiting list.
His student, a man in his early 30s who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level, was seeking a general education high school degree. Because his student worked nights and provided daycare for a young son while his wife worked, Dowgun met him in the early evening at a nearby library.
“There was progress — not rapid but the tests showed it and his vocabulary and the quality of his conversation improved.” He was learning. And then he dropped out of sight. “It was a little disappointing that he didn’t communicate,” said Dowgun. “His son became ill and his job didn’t come with any health insurance. I think the stresses just squeezed his schedule.”
The next month, Dowgun began tutoring a new client, an immigrant from Nigeria where English is spoken in addition to indigenous languages. “He had about six years of schooling. He’s so motivated and grateful – he expresses it two or three times when we meet,” he said.
Like other tutors, Dowgun often invests as much time in preparing each lesson as the lesson itself takes. “One of the pieces we used last week was a newspaper account about an artist who decorated a bridge for his community. The homework was reading and thinking about the article, coming up with questions. We talked about bridge idioms in English, such as “burn your bridges” or “cross that bridge when you come to it.”
Adult Literacy tutoring “is stimulating because you need to be consistently creative and thinking of new ways to communicate what you need to,” said Dowgun. “It does not become routine.”
According to RSVP, Adult Literacy volunteers should be prompt, dependable, flexible, friendly, patient and optimistic. They should relate well to people and of course have good reading and writing skills.