Case Study in Learning to Read, Write
John Corcoran had it all. He won an athletic scholarship to college, dated the valedictorian and became Homecoming King. Later, he married and had two kids.
He became a high school teacher, first of English, then history and business. He earned 60 units of graduate school credit. He started dabbling in investment, and, during the ‘80s building boom, earned millions of dollars in real estate development.
But through it all, he harbored a deep and mortifying secret, a private shame that governed his every interaction with the world. John Corcoran couldn’t read or write.
He had manipulated his way through life: he was disruptive in grade school, only chose college professors who gave multiple-choice tests. Buddies and girlfriends wrote his papers, filled out his applications. When he was a teacher, the bright students in his classes wrote on the board and read important memos aloud.
Nobody knew. Not his parents, his colleagues, nor his children. Only his wife, Kathy, knew, and she covered for him plenty.
“When things got tough for us financially, with the real estate bust, I had to go to work full time for the first time,” said Kathy, a school nurse. “Then, all evening, I’d be doing John’s reading and writing for him. Sometimes, I just wanted to throw the paper and pencil at him.”
Finally, at age 48, the guilt and the pressure became unbearable. One Friday afternoon in 1986, Corcoran strode into the offices of the Carlsbad Library Adult Literacy Program.
“I remember that day so vividly,” said Lynda Jones, director of the program. “During my assessment, I ask each learner to write what they want to get out of the program. John picked up the pencil, and after four words, with a very powerful gesture, he scribbled all over the page in frustration. It was the first time in his life he’d ever written anything with anyone watching.”
Corcoran spent 13 months in the program with tutor Eleanor Condit. She was 65 at the time, and John was her second learner.
“It was astonishing,” she recalled. “I had heard of people who have such enormous learning handicaps and manage to cope in many ways. There, in John, I had the embodiment of all those ways. Not that I got discouraged; he did. But he was so possessed to do this. He got up in the middle of the night, and worked up to 50 hours a week by himself. If every learner would do that, he’d make spectacular progress too.”
Math had always been easy for Corcoran, but he didn’t know the sounds that letters make.
“He was better from the start at reading than writing because of his large vocabulary, having grown up in a literate home,” said Condit. “He could write a few very simple sentences. But he was so afraid of spelling even the simplest word wrong, so terrified at the thought of writing anything anyone would see.”
Corcoran calls Condit “the second-grade teacher I never had. A no-nonsense lady with a sense of humor. She believed she could teach me to read. Her belief was part of my willingness to try. She still helps me, over the phone.”
Condit’s work helped Corcoran to realize that his literacy problems were based on a language learning disability. Last summer, he paid $4,000 for 100 hours of intensive training at a learning center in San Luis Obispo, advancing, he says, from the second to the 12th-grade level.
Jones asked Corcoran to come forward with his story after he had spent a year in her program. The media ate it up. He was “Learner of the Month” on an ad for ABC-TV’s PLUS literacy promotion program. Then he appeared on “20/20,” “Donahue” and other TV shows. He was asked to sit on the Board of the San Diego Council on Literacy.
“At first, I was against his going public,” said his wife. “But now I see the value, the emotional healing. I would have pushed him to do it years before if I’d known. I’ve been healed through this process, too.”
Corcoran became a man with a mission, a literacy activist. He travels all over the country, speaking to prison inmates, dropouts, teachers and administrators. He’s the spokesperson for the National Assn. for Adults with Special Learning Needs. He was recently named by the President to the new National Institute on Literacy. But the struggle continues.
During his FBI check for the federal appointment, an anonymous letter surfaced, suggesting that Corcoran was a fraud, that he knew how to read and write all the time.
“It’s hard for me to deal with that kind of mentality,” Corcoran said. “It’s jealous and mean-spirited. This guy’s the kind of person who would have wanted to expose me as a non-reader years ago. This is an insult to me, my family and the whole literacy movement. As if the whole thing was premeditated.”
His wife notes that “there have been other doubters. I think a lot of them feel personally threatened by John’s story. They think, ‘I couldn’t fake my way through college; how could he?’ ”
His emotional talks have also earned him criticism. People say it all sounds rehearsed, because he always cries at the same point.
“For the last four years, I’ve had my emotions on my sleeves,” Corcoran said. “Part of me wants to scream, ‘How dare you? This is very personal. Sometimes I’m embarrassed by my emotions, but I’m driven by where I’m at right now. How would you like me to question your sincerity and integrity?
“Some of these mean-spirited people are literacy providers. They want to say ‘You’re not like other learners.’ But the other illiterate people identify with what I’m saying. They know it’s their story, too.”
