While I have seen a lot of interesting things in this business and one of the all-time coolest things I have ever seen here is the time a guy decided to learn how to read.
Seriously.
This goes back about twenty years ago and I look back on this and smile when I think about it which is fairly often because it makes me feel pretty good even though I didn't see it firsthand. I had met the main character a couple of times, though. He was quite an interesting person. I am going to change a few names here to protect people's privacy. Some of the guys are still out here and decency requires this.
The man had a 1600 ton license and knew his job and knew it well, but he could not read.
What? He couldn't read?
Nope, he couldn't read. He could sign his name, but the written word made no sense to him. He was, however, highly skilled. He knew men and he knew boats and could nestle a 500 foot long barge up against a pier in 30 not winds and a foul tide so gently that you could put an egg between the dock and barge and he wouldn't crack it.
The guys covered for him over the years by taking care of the paperwork for him and he managed to take his Coast Guard tests orally as there used to be a provision for that. There may still be a provision for this but I'm not sure, but still, he was licensed.
Before I ge a whole lot further you have to stop and think a minute about a guy that can not read and write, yet had a nice home, a good, responsible job, and a wife and kids. The man must be awfully intelligent to be able to pull such an act off.
He also must have had quite a sense of frustration, too because it finally got to him and he decided to do something about it. One day when they changed crews somewhere he was headed off with the deckhand and the chief engineer and stopped at a liquor store and bought a couple bottle of some pretty good hooch and handed a bottle to each of the two guys.
"Next trip you guys are going to teach me to read," he announced.
Now we are talking about a pair of tugboat guys here with no teaching credentials and probably a couple of basic issue high school diplomas on a tugboat that was generally out in BFE most of the time. There were no video teaching aids or whatever they use these days to teach kids to read, just a couple of guys with whatever they had to work with and an eager student.
The three of them went at it and the guys taught their skipper his ABCs and how the different letters represented different sounds. It didn't take long. By the end of the three week tour he had enough background so that he could look at written words and figure a lot of them out.
The chief had also heard of a new program that was out called 'Hooked on Phonics' and managed to bring the program back to the boat for the next tour and things really took off. It wasn't long before the skipper was running around with a headset on and whatever apparatus that he needed and was buried himself completely into the program.
In a few months the skipper was reading on a college level and from then on you could find him during his off watch time with his nose stuffed into a book somewhere.
This was before the boats had computers installed so I would imagine they were using cassette tapes but I might be wrong. Like I said, I was not there to witness this self-made miracle.
It didn't take long and pretty soon the skipper emerged from the darkness of illiteracy and into the world of the literate. He eventually got his GED and the last I heard is that he was taking courses at his local community college. I guess he worked something out with them to permit him to take the classes around his schedule and make up what he missed. I don't know how it worked, but apparently he managed something.
Dragging a man out of illiteracy didn't take the services of a college educated teacher, nor did it require all sorts of high tech costly equipment and a huge building and a multi-million dollar budget, it just took a couple of guys with high school diplomas and a willing student. The tools they worked with were what they had kicking around the boat.
My guess is that his primer was not something designed by some hifalutin' educator. It was most likely an old dog eared Louis L'Amour western someone found under a bunk somewhere.
While I am not against education in any way, when you see something like this happen your mind thinks of quite a number of different things. You question the schools that keep justifying huge expenditures that cost us millions yet do not seem to make things a whole lot better for our kids.
You question the requirements laid out for teaching credentials and start to think about the degrees and huge salaries we pay for. In my case I look back at some of the best teachers I ever had, army NCOs. some of which probably had pretty dubious formal educations.
But the biggest thing I seem to think about is the joke about how the Dalai Lama changes a light bulb.
He doesn't. All change comes from within. The light bulb has to want to change itself.
+++++++++
Aftermath.
Some years later I was in a supermarket and some hippie chick saw me looking at a tabloid. I was looking at an ad for 'hooked on phonics' and smiling as I recalled hearing of that skipper learning to read. The hippie looked at me and interrupted my warm thoughts by telling me in an incredulous tone that Rush Limbaugh shilled for the program. Her tone of voice made it clear that she couldn't fathom why Rush would shill for such a program.
I looked at her and told her that Rush was a believer in self help and keeping the government out of as much as possible and that the Hooked on Phonics program was about as much self-help as you could get. Then I briefly told her about the guy I knew that used it to teach himself to read.
When I told her about the way the Dalai Lama changed a light bulb she blushed.
While I don't think she went straight home and unbraided her armpits, shaved her legs and traded here sandals for a pair of stilettos I do think she stopped and thought a minute. That in itself says at least something.
my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/
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