Literacy Volunteer Last summer
I went through a training program and became a literacy volunteer(扫盲志愿者). The
training I received, though excellent, did not tell me how it was to work with a
real student, however. When I began to discover what other people’s lives were
like be cause they could not read, I realized the true importance of
reading. My first student Jane was a 44-year-old single mother
of three. In the first lesson, I found out she walked two miles to the nearest
supermarket twice a week because she didn’t know which bus to take. When I told
her I would get her a bus schedule, she told me it would not help because she
could not read it. She said she also had difficulty once she got to the
supermarket because she couldn’t always remember what she needed. Since she did
not know words, she could not write out a shopping list. Also, she could only
recognize items by their labels. As a result, if the product had a different
label, she would not recognize it as the product she wanted. As
we worked together, learning how to read built Jane’s self-confidence, which
encouraged her to continue in her studies. She began to make rapid progress and
was even able to take the bus to the supermarket. After this successful trip,
she reported how self-confident she felt. At the end of the program, she began
helping her youngest son, Tony, a shy first grader, with his reading. She sat
with him before he went to sleep and together they would read bedtime stories.
When his eyes became wide with excitement as she read pride was written all over
her face, and she began to see how her own hard work in learning to read paid
off. As she described this experience, I was proud of myself, too. I found that
helping Jane to build her self-confidence was more rewarding than anything I had
ever done before. As a literacy volunteer, I learned a great
deal about teaching and helping others. In fact, I may have learned more from
the experience than Jane did. She could write out a shopping list.______