I knew a man who was a friend of my father's who, I learned after his death, was functionally illiterate. His son was a classmate, and later on, I worked with his daughter who was a few years older and told me about how her father "had ways" of getting around reading. He knew some words to get by, but anything new (especially technical terms) he couldn't skate by easily.
I had a really hard tie understanding how it would feel to be functionally illiterate until I went with some friends on a trip to England, Scotland and France back in 1999. One friend and I had fading high school French that helped us to read basic signs, but anything beyond that and we were lost without our native French friend or our other friend who was fluent. We got along pretty well for a couple of hicks though.
After a sleep-deprived all-day trip of castles in the Loire valley, then riding home even more exhausted on the Metro and having to try to navigate the signs home was kind of freaking us out. We knew the Metro pretty well by that point, but we were just so tired our French reading skills were shot to hell, and our English wasn't so hot either. We'd been speaking Frenglish with a Texas Twang with our French friend anyway. Drove our friend from Colorado bonkers. ;)
After that experience, it gave me a whole new understanding of how difficult it is to function in a world where not all of the words surrounding us every day make sense, no matter how hard you try. You can manage to do what you need to do to get by, but it's just not the same.
I had a really hard tie understanding how it would feel to be functionally illiterate until I went with some friends on a trip to England, Scotland and France back in 1999. One friend and I had fading high school French that helped us to read basic signs, but anything beyond that and we were lost without our native French friend or our other friend who was fluent. We got along pretty well for a couple of hicks though.
After a sleep-deprived all-day trip of castles in the Loire valley, then riding home even more exhausted on the Metro and having to try to navigate the signs home was kind of freaking us out. We knew the Metro pretty well by that point, but we were just so tired our French reading skills were shot to hell, and our English wasn't so hot either. We'd been speaking Frenglish with a Texas Twang with our French friend anyway. Drove our friend from Colorado bonkers. ;)
After that experience, it gave me a whole new understanding of how difficult it is to function in a world where not all of the words surrounding us every day make sense, no matter how hard you try. You can manage to do what you need to do to get by, but it's just not the same.
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