Another true story today Imagine making it all the way through high school, being handed a diploma, and still not being able to read. I once taught a 29-year-old woman who had graduated from high school in Biloxi, Mississippi, even though her teachers knew she couldn’t read. When Barbara Bush was First Lady, one of the causes she championed was literacy. That inspired me to join Literacy Volunteers of America, where I was trained to teach adults to read. I eventually taught three adults, and it remains one of the most fulfilling things I have ever done. Teaching an adult to read is very different from teaching a child because adults who cannot read have usually spent years learning how to hide it. They learn to recognize pictures, signs, colors and other clues to get through everyday life. One of the excuses we were taught to recognize was someone saying they had forgotten their glasses when asked to read something in a store. Imagine spending your adult life constantly finding ways to keep people from discovering that you can’t read. That 29-year-old woman was one of my students. Another was an older gentleman who had grown up working in the cotton fields of Mississippi. His parents told him he didn’t need to learn to read because he was going to work in the cotton fields anyway. My third student was a woman who had grown up extremely poor in the Black community of the Mississippi Delta, where educational opportunities simply had not been available to her. I think about those three people from time to time because learning to read changed so much more for them than what was written on a page. Suddenly they could read a newspaper, fill out a form, understand a sign or read something in a store without making an excuse. They didn’t have to depend on somebody else or try to hide anymore. There was a freedom in that. I’ve done a lot of things in my life, but knowing that I helped three adults learn to read is something I will always be proud of.