[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 116 (Thursday, August 1, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9445-S9447]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        MAKING UP FOR LOST TIME

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, a former staff member of mine, Alice 
Johnson, now with the National Institute for Literacy sent me a copy of 
an article by Richard Wolkomir that appeared in the Smithsonian 
magazine.
  It tells the story of Richard Wolkomir and another person teaching 
Ken Adams how to read at the age of 64.
  In some ways it is a sad story, looking at his background and looking 
at all the years that could have been enriched.
  But it is a story that ought to inspire all of us to do better.
  We ought to have a national effort on literacy.
  Mr. President, I ask that this article from the Smithsonian be 
printed in the Record.
  The article follows:

                  [From the Smithsonian, August, 1996]

        Making Up for Lost Time: The Rewards of Reading at Last

                         (By Richard Wolkomir)

       I decide simply to blurt out, ``Ken?'' I ask. ``Why didn't 
     you learn to read?''Through the Marshfield community center's 
     window, I see snowy fields and the Vermont village's 
     clapboard houses. Beyond, mountains bulge. ``I was a slow 
     learner,'' Ken says. ``In school they just passed me along, 
     and my folks told me I wasn't worth anything and wouldn't 
     amount to anything.
       Ken Adams is 64, his hair white. He speaks Vermontese, 
     turning ``I'' into ``Oy,'' and ``ice'' into ``oyce.'' His 
     green Buckeye Feeds cap is blackened with engine grease from 
     fixing his truck's transmission, and pitch from chain-sawing 
     pine logs. It is 2 degrees below zero outside on this 
     December afternoon; he wears a green flannel shirt over a 
     purple flannel shirt. He is unshaven, weather reddened. He is 
     not a tall man, but a lifetime of hoisting hay bales has 
     thickened his shoulders.
       Through bifocals, Ken frowns at a children's picture book, 
     Pole Dog. He is studying a drawing: an old dog waits 
     patiently by a telephone pole, where its owners abandoned it. 
     He glares at the next pictures. Cars whizzing by. Cruel 
     people tormenting the dog. ``Looks like they're shootin' at 
     him, to me!'' he announces. ``Nobody wants an old dog,'' he 
     says.
       Ken turns the page. ``He is still by the pole,'' he says. 
     ``But there's that red car that went by with those kids, 
     ain't it?'' He turns the page again. The red car has stopped 
     to take the old dog in, to take him home. ``Somebody wants an 
     old dog!'' Ken says. ``Look at that!''
       This is my first meeting with Ken. It is also my first 
     meeting with an adult who cannot read.
       I decided to volunteer as a tutor after a librarian told me 
     that every day, on the sidewalks of our prim little Vermont 
     town. I walk by illiterate men and women. We are unaware of 
     them because they can be clever at hiding their inability to 
     read. At a post office counter, for instance, when given 
     forms to fill out, they say, ``Could you help me with this? I 
     left my glasses home.''
       Ken Adams is not alone in his plight. A 1993 U.S. 
     Department of Education report on illiteracy said 21-23 
     percent of U.S. adults--about 40 million--read minimally, 
     enough to decipher an uncomplicated meeting announcement. 
     Another 25-28 percent read and write only slightly better. 
     For instance, they can fill out a simple form. That means 
     about half of all U.S. adults read haltingly. Millions, like 
     Ken Adams, hardly read at all.
       I wanted to meet nonreaders because I could not imagine 
     being unable to decipher a street sign, or words printed on 
     supermarket jars, or stories in a book. In fact, my own 
     earliest memory is about reading. In this memory, in our 
     little Hudson River town, my father is home for the evening 
     from the wartime lifeboat factory where he is a foreman. And 
     he has opened a book.
       ``Do you want to hear from Peter Churchmouse?'' my father 
     asks. Of course! It is my favorite, from the little library 
     down the street. My father reads me stories about children 
     lost in forests. Cabbage-stealing hares. A fisherman who 
     catches a talking perch. Buy my favorite is Peter 
     Churchmouse, a small but plucky cheese addict who 
     befriends the rectory cat. Peter is also a poet, given to 
     reciting original verse to his feline friend during their 
     escapades. I cannot hear it enough.
       My father begins to read. I settle back. I am taking a 
     first step toward becoming literate--I am being read to. And 
     although I am only 2, I know that words can be woven into 
     tales.
       Now, helping Ken Adams learn to read, I am re-entering that 
     child's land of chatty dogs and spats-wearing frogs. 
     Children's books--simply worded, the sentences short--are 
     perfect primers, even for 60-year-olds who turn the pages 
     with labor-thickened fingers and who never had such books 
     read to them when they were children.
       ``Do you remember what happened from last time?'' asks 
     Sherry Olson, of Central Vermont Adult Basic Education, who 
     tutors Ken and hour and a half each week.
       I have volunteered as Sherry's aide. My work requires too 
     much travel for me to be a full-fledged tutor. But I am 
     actually relieved, not having sole responsibility for 
     teaching an adult to read. That is because--when I think 
     about it--I don't know how I read myself. I scan a printed 
     page; the letters magically reveal meaning. It is effortless. 
     I don't know how I do it. As for teaching a man to read from 
     scratch, how would I ever begin?
       Sherry, a former third-grade teacher, gives me hints, like 
     helping Ken to learn words by sight so that he doesn't have 
     to sound out each letter. Also, we read stories so Ken can 
     pick out words in context. Ken reads Dr. Seuss rhyming books 
     and tales about young hippopotamuses helping on the family 
     farm. At the moment, we are reading a picture book about 
     Central American farmers who experience disaster when a 
     volcano erupts.
       ``The people had to move out, and put handkerchiefs over 
     their noses!'' Ken says, staring at the pages. He starts to 
     read: ``They . . . prayed? . . . for the . . . fire? . . .'' 
     ``Yes, that's right, fire,'' Sherry says. ``They prayed for 
     the fire to . . . go out?'' ``That word is `stop,''' Sherry 
     says.
       I listen carefully. A few sessions ahead, it will be my 
     turn to try teaching. ``They prayed for the fire to stop,'' 
     Ken says, placing a thick forefinger under each word. ``They 
     watched from the s . . .'' ``Remember we talked about 
     those?'' Sherry says. ``When a word ends in a silent e, what 
     does that silent e do to the vowel?'' ``It makes it say 
     itself,'' Ken says. ``So what's the vowel in s-i-d-e?'' she 
     asks. ``It's i, and it would say its own name, i,'' Ken says, 
     pronouncing it ``oy.'' ``So that would be `side.''' ``Good,'' 
     Sherry says.
       Ken reads the sentence: ``They watched from the side of the 
     hill!'' He sounds quietly triumphant. ``They-un,'' he says, 
     in backcountry Vermontese. ``That's done it.''
       After the session, I stand a few minutes with Ken in the 
     frozen driveway. He has one foot on the running board of his 
     ancient truck, which he somehow keeps going. He tells me he 
     was born in 1931 into a family eking out an existence on a 
     hardscrabble farm. His trouble in school with reading is 
     puzzling, because Ken is intelligent.
       For instance, he says he was late today because he had to 
     fix his truck. And now he launches into a detailed analysis 
     of the transmission mechanisms of various species of trucks. 
     Also, during the tutoring session, we played a game that 
     required strewing

[[Page S9446]]

     word cards upside down on a table and remembering their 
     locations. Ken easily outscored both Sherry and me in this 
     exercise.
       Ken described himself as a ``slow learner,'' but clearly he 
     is not slow. Sherry had told me he probably suffers from a 
     learning disability. People with these perceptual disorders 
     experience difficulties such as seeing letters reversed. 
     Although their intelligence may actually be above average, 
     learning to read is difficult for them. they need individual 
     tutoring.
       ``It was a one-room school, with eight grades, so I didn't 
     get much attention there,'' Ken tells me. ``It was just the 
     same as the folks at home were doing when they kicked me 
     along through the grades, and when you got to be 16, that's 
     when they kicked you out.''
       After he left school, he left home. ``Then you knock 
     around, one farm to another,'' he says. ``I'd get $15 a week, 
     and room and board.'' Besides farming, he worked in bobbins 
     mills and sawmills and granite quarries. ``Then I was at a 
     veneer mill in Bradford,'' he says. `` After that I was 
     caretaker at a farm for six years until I had to give it up 
     because I had heart attacks.''
       Now he subsists on a $400-a month Social Security 
     disability pension plus $90 a month in food stamps. He lives 
     alone in a farmhouse he built himself more than 25 years ago, 
     five miles up a mountain dirt road. He earns money for his 
     medicines by cutting firewood, haying, digging postholes with 
     his tractor, snowplowing an cutting brush. ``I'm doing odds-
     and-ends jobs where you can take your time, because the 
     doctor told me I have to stop whenever I fell I need to 
     rest,'' he says.
       He cannot afford electricity from the power company, but he 
     gets what current he needs, mostly for lights by--
     ingeniously--drawing it from car batteries. To recharge the 
     batteries, he hooks them up in his truck for a day. He also 
     can charge them with a diesel generator. He waits until 
     prices dip to buy fuel for his generator and tractor. ``I've 
     got a few maples around my house,'' he tells me. ``I'll find 
     a rustedout evaporator, fix it up and make syrup--there's 
     always a few things I can do, I guess.''
       I ask how he's managed all these years, not reading. He 
     says his bosses did the reading for him. And now a Marshfield 
     couple, lifelong friends, help him read his mail and bills 
     and notices. But they are entering their 80s. ``Now I've got 
     to learn to read myself, as a backup,'' Ken says.
       To find out more about what illiteracy does to people like 
     Ken, I telephoned the U.S. Department of Education and spoke 
     with the Deputy Secretary, Madeleine Kunin. She told me that 
     only 3-5 percent of adult Americans cannot read at all. ``But 
     literacy is a moving target,'' she said. ``We figure the 40 
     million who do read, but at the lowest proficiency levels, 
     have difficulty handling some of the tasks they need hold 
     a job today.'' Kunin, a former Vermont governor, cited 
     that state's snowplow drivers: ``Now they have computers 
     attached, and they need a high school degree just to drive 
     a snowplow.''
       Ken arrives for his next session in a dark mood. It turns 
     out his tape recorder, used for vocabulary practice, is 
     broken, ``I can't fix it because the money's all gone for 
     this month,'' he says. ``I had to go to the doctor, and 
     that's $30, and it was $80 for the pills, and they keep going 
     up.'' He says one of his prescriptions jumped from $6.99 to 
     $13 in two months. ``I don't know if I'll keep taking them,'' 
     he says. Illiteracy has condemned Ken to a lifetime of 
     minimum-wage poverty.
       He brightens reading a story. It is about a dog, John 
     Brown, who deeply resents his mistress's new cat. Ken 
     stumbles over a word. ``Milk?'' Sherry and I nod. ``Go and 
     give her some milk,'' Ken reads, then pauses to give us a 
     dispatch from the literacy front: ``I was trying to figure 
     that out, and then I see it has an i,'' he says.
       My own first attempt at solo tutoring finally comes, and I 
     am edgy. Sherry has wryly admonished Ken, ``You help Richard 
     out.'' I show him file cards, each imprinted with a word for 
     Ken to learn by sight. He is supposed to decipher each word, 
     then incorporate it in a sentence. I write his sentence on 
     the card to help him when he reviews at home. Ken peers at 
     the first word.``All,'' he says getting it easily. He makes 
     up a sentence: ``We all went away.''
       ``That's right,'' I say. Maybe this won't be so hard after 
     all. I write Ken's sentence on the card for him. Then I flip 
     another card. Ken peers at it, his face working as he 
     struggles with the sounds. ``As,'' he says.
       During our last session, he confused ``as'' and ``at.'' Now 
     he has it right. So he has been doing his homework.
       ``As we went down the road, we saw a moose,'' Ken says, 
     composing a sentence. That reminds him that the state 
     recently allowed moose hunting, game officials arguing that 
     moose have become so plentiful they cause highway accidents. 
     ``Yesterday, I come around a turn and there was ten moose, a 
     big male and female and young ones,'' Ken says. ``They 
     shouldn't be shooting those moose--they ain't hurting anyone, 
     and it ain't the moose's fault if people don't use their 
     brakes.''
       I flip another card. ``At!'' Ken says, triumphing over 
     another of our last session's troublemakers. ``We are at the 
     school.'' But the next word stumps him, It is ``be.'' I put 
     my finger under the first letter. ``What's that sound?'' I 
     ask. When he stares in consternation, I make the sound 
     ``buh.'' But Ken is blocked. He can't sound out the next 
     letter, even though he has often done it before. ``Eeeee,'' I 
     say, trying to help. ``Now put the two sounds together.''
       Ken stares helplessly at the word. I am beginning to 
     understand the deep patience needed to tutor a man like Ken, 
     who began these sessions a year before, knowing the alphabet 
     but able to sound out only a few words. ``Buh . . . eeee,'' I 
     say, enunciating as carefully as I can. ``Buh . . . eeee,'' 
     Ken repeats. Abruptly, his forehead unfurrows. ``Oh, that's 
     `be,' '' he says. ``Be--We should be splitting wood!''
       ``Was that what you were doing before the tutoring 
     session?'' I ask, to give us both a break. ``Nope, plowing 
     snow with my tractor for my friend who broke off his ankle,'' 
     Ken says.
       That is arresting information. When I ask what happened, 
     Ken says his octogenarian friend was chain-sawing cherry 
     trees when a bent-back branch lashed out, smashing his lower 
     leg. Ken, haying a field, saw his friend ease his tractor 
     down from the mountainside woodlot, grimacing in agony, 
     working the tractor's pedals with his one good foot.
       Ken himself once lost his grip on a hay bale he was 
     hoisting. A twig poking from the bale blinded his right eye. 
     Now learning to read is doubly difficult because his 
     remaining eye often tires and blurs. These grim country 
     stories of Ken's make my worries--delayed flights, missed 
     appointments--seem trivial. I flip another card: ``But.'' 
     ``Bat,'' Ken says, cautiously. ``Buh . . . uh . . . tuh,'' I 
     prompt. ``But,'' he finally says. ``I would do it, but I have 
     to go somewhere else.''
       I write Ken's sentence on the card and he reads it back. 
     But he stumbles over his own words, unable to sound out 
     ``would.'' I push down rising impatience by remembering the 
     old man in the woods, crawling toward his tractor, dragging 
     that smashed leg.
       Finally, I put away the cards, glad to be done with them. 
     Tutoring can be frustrating. Why are even easy words 
     sometimes so hard to get? Now we look at a puzzle. On one 
     side it has pictures of various automobile parts. On the 
     other side are printed the parts' names. The idea is to match 
     the pictures and the names. Before I can start asking Ken to 
     try sounding out big terms like ``connecting rod,'' he points 
     to one of the drawings. It looks to me like deer antlers. 
     ``Carburetor?'' I guess. ``Exhaust manifold,'' Ken says.
       ``What's this one?'' I inquire. For all I know, it might be 
     something Han Solo is piloting through hyperspace. 
     ``Starter,'' Ken says. It seems to me he is gloating a 
     little. He points again. ``Camshaft?'' I ask. Ken corrects 
     me. ``Crankshaft,'' he says, dryly.
       It is a standoff. I know the printed words. Ken knows the 
     actual objects to which the words refer. ``When I was a 
     kid,'' he tells me, ``I bought an old '35 truck. Sometimes it 
     had brakes and sometimes it didn't. I was probably 17. It 
     made lots of smoke, so mosquitos never bothered me. But one 
     day I got sick of it. I put it under a pine tree and I 
     hoisted the engine up into the tree to look at it. The 
     pressure plate weren't no good. And the fellow showed me how 
     to fix it.
       That reminds Ken of a later episode. ``One time we had to 
     get the hay in, but the baler was jammed. We had the guys 
     from the tractor place, but they could not fix it. Finally I 
     asked the old guy for some wrenches and I adjusted it, and I 
     kept on adjusting, and after that it worked perfectly. I just 
     kept adjusting it a hair until I had it. And then we were 
     baling hay!'' No wonder Ken's bosses were happy to do his 
     reading for him. Even so, in our late 20th-century wordscape, 
     illiteracy stymies people like him. And working with Ken has 
     me puzzled: Why do so many people fail to learn to read?
       I telephoned an expert, Bob Caswell, head of Laubach 
     Literacy International, a nonprofit organization that trains 
     tutors worldwide. He told me many nonreaders, like Ken Adams, 
     suffer from perceptual reading disorders. But there are other 
     reasons for illiteracy, and it is by no means confined to any 
     one part of the population.
       ``People think adult nonreaders are mainly poor, urban 
     minorities, but 41 percent are English-speaking whites,'' 
     Caswell said, adding that 22 percent are English-speaking 
     blacks, 22 percent are Spanish-speaking, and 15 percent are 
     other non-English speakers. More than half of nonreading 
     adults live in small towns and suburbs. Caswell cited U.S. 
     Department of Labor figures that put illiteracy's annual 
     national cost at $225 billion in workplace accidents, lost 
     productivity, unrealized tax revenues, welfare and crime. One 
     big reason for this whopping problem is parents who read 
     poorly.
       Well over a third of all kids now entering public schools 
     have parents who read inadequately, he said. ``Everywhere we 
     find parents who want to read to their kids, but can't,'' he 
     added. ``And a child with functionally illiterate parents is 
     twice as likely to grow up to be functionally illiterate.''
       But as I met some of Ken Adams' fellow students, I 
     discovered all sorts of causes for being unable to decipher 
     an English sentence. For instance, I met a woman who had 
     escaped from Laos to Connecticut knowing only Laotian. She 
     learned enough English watching Sesame Street (``Big Bird and 
     all that,'' she told me), and later from being tutored, to 
     become a citizen.
       I also met a man in his 30s who worked on a newspaper's 
     printing press. He could not spell the simplest words. He 
     said it was because, at age 10, he had begun bringing alcohol 
     to school in peanut-butter jars. After his son was born, he 
     turned to Alcoholics Anonymous and mustered the courage to 
     seek tutoring.

[[Page S9447]]

       I met another man who had dropped out of school in 
     frustration. Not until he tried to enlist in the military did 
     he discover he was nearly deaf. The operator of a creamery's 
     cheese-cutting machine told me he never learned to read 
     because his family had been in a perpetual uproar, his mother 
     leaving his father seven times in one year. And I met a farm 
     wife, 59, who rarely left her mountaintop. But now, with 
     tutoring, she was finally learning to read, devouring 
     novels--``enjoyment books,'' she called them.
       In central Vermont, these struggling readers receive free 
     tutoring from nonprofit Adult Basic Education offices, each 
     employing a few professionals, like Sherry Olson, but relying 
     heavily on armies of volunteers, like me. Other states have 
     their own systems. Usually, the funding is a combination of 
     federal and state money, sometimes augmented with donations. 
     Mostly, budgets are bare bones.
       Many states also rely on nonprofit national organizations, 
     like Laubach Literacy Action (Laubach International's U.S. 
     division) and Literacy Volunteers of America, both 
     headquartered in Syracuse, New York, to train volunteers. 
     Laubach's Bob Caswell told me that, nationwide, literacy 
     services reach only 10 percent of adult nonreaders. ``Any 
     effort is a help,'' he said.
       Help has come late for Ken Adams. Reviewing his portfolio, 
     I found the goals he set for himself when he began: ``To read 
     and write better. And to get out and meet people and develop 
     more trust.'' Asked by Sherry to cite things that he does 
     well, he had mentioned ``fixing equipment, going to school 
     and learning to read, trying new things, telling stories, 
     farming.'' He remembered being in a Christmas play in second 
     grade and feeling good about that. And he remembered playing 
     football in school: ``They would pass it to me and I'd run 
     across the goal to make a score.'' He mentioned no fond 
     family memories. But he had some good moments. ``I remember 
     the first time I learned to drive a tractor,'' he had said. 
     ``We were working in the cornfields. I was proud of that.'' 
     And a later notation, after he had several months of 
     tutoring, made me think of Ken living alone in his hand-built 
     farmhouse on ten acres atop the mountain. ``I like to use 
     recipes,'' he said. ``I use them more as I learn to read and 
     write better. I made Jell-O with fruit, and I make bean 
     salad. I feel good I can do that.''
       In our tutoring sessions, between bouts with the vocabulary 
     cards, Ken tells me he was the oldest of four children. When 
     he was small, his father forced him to come along to roadside 
     bars, and then made Ken sit alone in the car for hours. Ken 
     remembers shivering on subzero nights. ``He always said I'd 
     never amount to nothing,'' Ken says.
       I ask Ken, one day, if his inability to read has made life 
     difficult. He tells me, ``My father said I'd never get a 
     driver's license, and he said nobody would ever help me.'' 
     Ken had to walk five miles down his mountain and then miles 
     along highways to get to work. ``And,'' he recalls, ``I was 
     five years in the quarries in Graniteville--that was a long 
     way.'' Sometimes he paid neighbors to drive him down the 
     mountain. ``They said the same as my father, that I'd never 
     get a license,'' he says. ``They wanted the money.''
       It was not until he was 40 years old that he applied for a 
     license. He had memorized sign shapes and driving rules, and 
     he passed easily. ``After I got my license I'd give people a 
     ride down myself,'' he says. ``And they'd ask, `How much?' 
     And I'd always say, `Nothing, not a danged thing!' ''
       To review the words he has learned, Ken maintains a 
     notebook. On each page, in large block letters, he writes the 
     new word, along with a sentence using the word. He also tapes 
     to each page a picture illustrating the sentence, as a memory 
     aid. To keep him supplied with pictures to snip, I bring him 
     my old magazines. He is partial to animals. He points to one 
     photograph, a black bear cub standing upright and looking 
     back winsomely over its shoulder. ``That one there's my 
     favorite,'' Ken says. And then he tells me, glowering, that 
     he has seen drivers swerve to intentionally hit animals 
     crossing the road. ``That rabbit or raccoon ain't hurting 
     anyone,'' he says.
       We start a new book, The Strawberry Dog. Ken picks out the 
     word ``dog'' in the title. ``That dog must eat 
     strawberries,'' he says. ``I used to have a dog like that. I 
     was picking blackberries. Hey, where were those berries 
     going? Into my dog!''
       We read these books to help Ken learn words by sight and 
     context. But it seems odd, a white-haired man mesmerized by 
     stories about talkative beavers and foppish toads. Yet, I 
     find myself mesmerized, too. The sessions are reteaching me 
     the exhilaration I found in narrative as a child, listening 
     to my father read about Peter Churchmouse. Our classes glide 
     by, a succession of vocabulary words--``house,'' ``would,'' 
     ``see''--interwoven with stories about agrarian 
     hippopotamuses and lost dogs befriended.
       One afternoon it is my last session with Ken. We have 
     wrestled with words through a Christmas and a March sugaring, 
     a midsummer haying, an October when Ken's flannel shirts were 
     specked with sawdust from chain-sawing stove logs. Now the 
     fields outside are snowy; it is Christmas again.
       My wife and I give Ken a present that she picked out. It is 
     bottles of jam and honey and watermelon pickles, nicely 
     wrapped. Ken quickly slides the package into his canvas tote 
     bag with his homework. ``Aren't you going to open it?'' 
     Sherry asks. ``I'll open it Christmas day,'' Ken says. ``It's 
     the only present I'll get.'' ``No it isn't,'' she says, and 
     she hands him a present she has brought.
       And so we begin our last session with Ken looking pleased. 
     I start with a vocabulary review. ``Ignition coil,'' Ken 
     says, getting the first card right off. He gets ``oil 
     filter,'' too. He peers at the next card. ``Have,'' he says. 
     And he reads the review sentence: ``Have you gone away?''
       He is cruising today. When I flip the next card, he says, 
     ``There's that `for.' '' It is a word that used to stump him. 
     I turn another card. He gets it instantly. ``But.'' He gets 
     ``at,'' then another old nemesis, ``are.'' I ask him to read 
     the card's review sentence. ``Are we going down . . . 
     street?'' he says. He catches himself. ``Nope. That's 
     downtown!''
       I am amazed at Ken's proficiency. A while ago, I had 
     complained to my wife that Ken's progress seemed slow. She 
     did some math: one and a half hours of tutoring a week, with 
     time off for vacations and snowstorms and truck breakdowns, 
     comes to about 70 hours a year. ``That's like sending a first 
     grader to school for only 12 days a year,'' she said. And so 
     I am doubly amazed at how well Ken is reading today. Besides, 
     Sherry Olson has told me that he now sounds out--or just 
     knows--words that he never could have deciphered when he 
     began. And this reticent man has recently read his own poems 
     to a group of fellow tutees--his new friends--and their 
     neighbors at a library get-together.
       But now we try something new, a real-world test: reading 
     the supermarket advertising inserts from a local newspaper. 
     Each insert is a hodge-podge of food pictures, product names 
     and prices. I point to a word and Ken ponders. ``C'' he says 
     finally. ``And it's got those two e`s--so that would be 
     `coffee'!'' I point again. He gets ``Pepsi.'' Silently, he 
     sounds out the letters on a can's label. ``So that's `corn,' 
     '' he announces. He picks out ``brownies.'' This is great. 
     And then, even better he successfully sounds out the 
     modifier: ``Fudge,'' he says. ``They-uh!''
       We're on a roll. But not I point to the page's most 
     tortuous word. Ken starts in the middle again. ``ta?'' I 
     point my finger at the first letters. ``Po,'' he says, 
     unsure. As always when he reads, Ken seems like a beginning 
     swimmer. He goes a few strokes. Flounders.
       ``Po-ta . . .,'' Ken says. He's swum another stroke. 
     ``To,'' he says, sounding out the last syllable. ``Po-ta-to, 
     po-ta-to--Hey, that's potato!'' He's crossed the pond. 
     ``Ken!'' I say. ``Terrific!'' He sticks out his chin. He 
     almost smiles. ``Well, I done better this time,'' he says. 
     ``Yup, I did good.''

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