If you were to use the word ‘euphoric’ to describe how Colleen Harper feels about what she is able to learn these days from a book, she would be able to read the word ‘euphoric’ and probably tell you what it means.
Euphoria sums up what the 53-year-old Guelph woman is feeling after spending several months in literacy training at Action Read Community Literacy Centre in the city.
She was able to read prior to getting teamed up with a tutor, but couldn’t understand what she was reading. Everything was scrambled, and reading tired her out and gave her headaches.
Now, she talks excitedly about reading books and being riveted and overjoyed. She can now understand what she is reading, and can follow the story without rereading every paragraph.
“I failed Grade 3, because I had dyslexia,” she said. “In the 60s, they didn’t know what it was. After that, they pushed me up every year, and by Grade 7 they forced me into a remedial class.”
Her parents were told she would have to go into vocational school and take up a trade, because she didn’t have the learning abilities necessary to attend regular high school.
“I could barely read or write,” said Harper, who now dreams of getting a “real” high school diploma, not the symbolic one she received that’s “not worth the paper it was written on.” And she might take her education as far as college.
Her learning troubles, along with the damning “remedial” label, made her a target of a lot of abuse in school.
“We were called retards and rejects,” she said. “Horrible names. I was called a ‘mental case’ and a failure.”
From then on, Colleen believed she was incapable of reading properly. Most of her learning – the learning she needed to work in dry-cleaning, as a baker or a salad maker, or as the person fixing and replacing toilets at a camping resort, she learned by watching others do it.
“If I had to learn something by reading a book, forget it,” she said.
After health problems forced her into retirement, a friend told her about the programs at Action Read. Maybe she could finally get past her reading and learning problems. She spoke with Joanne Morant, the one-on-one program coordinator, and Morant found the perfect tutor.
“I just wanted to be able to read a book and understand it,” Harper said. “I never had the confidence before. I was just always so insecure. I was embarrassed in case I said the wrong thing.”
The tutoring has worked wonders. Lessons in long and short vowels, sentence structure, and simple tools to improve word recognition, have changed how she reads, and how she feels about herself.
“I am loving reading,” she said. “I can’t get enough of it. I’m not getting headaches anymore. I was getting B’s, D’s and P’s mixed up. Not anymore.”
As her confidence grew, so, too, did her reading ability. With that confidence has come a sense of euphoria.
“This is showing me that I’m not a useless waste of space, as someone once told me,” she said. “It has really opened my horizons, to the point where now I think I could take a college course.”
She was told she would never be able to go to college or university. And while she is able to prove the naysayer wrong, that’s not why she is on her path of literacy.
“I’m doing it because I’m excited,” she said. “I’m doing it because I love it so much.”
Joanne Morant said it is normal for those with learning problems to lack confidence, and to have experienced very negative educational experiences.
But those who seek guidance and skills from Action Read already have many great skills, she said.
“We help them realize the skills they have,” Morant said. “They just need some strategies to help them along. Everybody can learn, and has the right to learn.”
With new skills and abilities comes an uplifting sense of accomplishment, she said – a sense that they can achieve anything they put their mind to.
Harper writes songs, sings and plays guitar, and will perform a song she wrote about her literary journey at the upcoming For the Love of Words, the organization’s annual fundraising event. It happens on Friday, April 21, at Guelph Youth Music Centre, 75 Cardigan St.
The event is an evening of poetry, spoken word, storytelling and live music, a night to champion words and the freedom of expression.
Some who have benefited from Action Read programs will tell their stories at the event. Colleen Harper will be among them.
Spoken word artists and poets David James Hudson, John B. Lee, Karen Houle and Brittany Luby will be part of the program, along with Greata Delonghi and Candace de Taeye. Music will be by The Hazy Maidens. There is also a silent auction.
Tickets for the licensed event are $20, available at the Bookshelf, at Action Read’s new location at 8 Cork Street E, online, or at the door. All proceeds go to Action Read literacy programs.
