Secret Lives of Americans<\/em><\/a>, which follows people as they reveal a secret they\u2019ve been keeping from friends and family. Like many who struggle to read, Cleo (who did not want to share her last name) learned to compensate for her shortcomings to protect herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\u201cI learned how to maneuver other ways to live life. But your life, if you don\u2019t know how to read, kind of comes caving in on you,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cleo should know. Although she loves driving trucks and has owned multiple trucking companies, she lost all of them because she couldn\u2019t read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat happened to me three times,\u201d she says. \u201cI loved that [work] the most, but I lost it every time because I didn\u2019t know how to read and I couldn\u2019t keep up the business part of it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Like many functionally illiterate people, Cleo found ingenious ways to cope with her lack of literacy skills. As a child, she relied on her cousin to help her at school until he died when she was 11. At restaurants, she\u2019d ask the server for recommendations. She\u2019d pay her utility bills in person so she could speak with someone instead of having to read her statement. She\u2019d enlist her children to help her fill out paperwork, and when it came to earning a living, Cleo\u2014whose list of skills includes fixing plumbing, laying masonry blocks, and driving trucks\u2014could do just about anything with her hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Still, it wasn\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cLife started getting scarier and scarier,\u201d she says, explaining that while she was able to handle manual jobs that played to her strengths, whenever she tried to advance in her role, the new position would require reading skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While Cleo earned a high school diploma and made it through decades with her secret, her compromised reading ability became a source of pain and shame, one she hid from her family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOnce I started having kids, I got really afraid,\u201d she recalls. Simple things such as filling out forms at the doctor\u2019s office or at her children\u2019s school were impossible tasks. She encouraged her oldest son to take on these duties, and in turn, he taught his younger brother and sister. \u201cHe thought I was training him to be a young man,\u201d she says. Really, he was helping Cleo cover up a gap in her education that haunted her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After hiding the secret for more than four decades, Cleo wanted a better life\u2014and she wanted to learn to read. The first step was to tell her family about her illiteracy. Although she worried for years about coming clean, things turned out better than expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe show helped me tell my kids, and it made me listen to their response,\u201d she says. \u201cTheir response made me feel really good because I was ashamed of it before the show.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These days, Cleo, who was recently diagnosed with dyslexia, takes adult literacy classes and spends hours each day working on her skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been a long journey, but it\u2019s getting better because I\u2019m learning to read,\u201d she says. \u201cI put in a lot of time every week.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While she\u2019s improving her skills, Cleo is also helping other adults who never mastered reading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019m trying to do something to help the next person because the program was helping me,\u201d she says. \u201cMy way of giving back was to try to help anybody that I could help to get into a better situation than I had to go through life with.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Link to Youtube video:<\/strong> https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=4X8lYW3r3JE&feature=emb_logo<\/p>\n\n\n\nSource:<\/strong> http:\/\/www.takepart.com\/article\/2016\/06\/03\/secret-lives-of-americans-cleo-illiteracy<\/p>\n\n\n\nComments:<\/strong> This is an account of someone who is illiterate telling their story. This is interesting to literacy at large because only people who can’t read know what it is like to struggle with this and Cleo gives us many insights on how she was able to do things without reading, but also talks about the challenges it brings. The main challenge seemed to be not being able to keep jobs or advance in a workplace because although good at working with her hands, the jobs started to require reading. It also brings up barriers of feeling ashamed and afraid to disclose that she was illiterate. Cleo’s story brings up that even with 12 years in school someone may graduate unable to read. Her story also reveals that in order to learn to read, Cleo has to put in a lot of effort and time to be able to accomplish her goal of reading. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By: Britni Danielle Published on TakePart Promoted by Secret Lives of Americans on Pivot Jun. 3, 2016 Cleo spent more than 40 years slipping through the school system and employing clever tactics to avoid discovery. America is one of the most advanced nations in the world, but its education system has a startling flaw: Many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":6435,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[276],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6432","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health-wellness"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6432"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6441,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6432\/revisions\/6441"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}