After Tutoring, No Longer at a Loss for Words

After serving eight years in prison for dealing drugs, Reginald Carhee was determined to do something he had never done before: learn to read.

Carhee, now 47, had the literacy skills of a first-grader and had gotten through life by depending on relatives and friends to read important things to him. He cheated his way through school until he dropped out. And drug dealing, he said, didn’t require many books.

But Carhee took some steps to improve his reading while he was serving his sentence in a Texas prison.

“I thought I might as well start now,” he recalled recently. “I started visiting the library in jail. I would look at books with lots of pictures.”

He grew more determined to learn when he was released. His probation officer told him about the Los Angeles Public Library’s Adult Literacy Program and suggested that he visit a branch where it was offered.

“I had never been to a public library before,” Carhee said. “When I first came to the library, I had to work up my nerves and swallow my pride.”

But now, three years later, he reads at a sixth-grade level and has become accustomed to visiting the library for the instruction.

Carhee’s classroom is the Jefferson-Vassie D. Wright Memorial Library, where he comes twice a week to be tutored by Gayle Dennis, a retired social worker.

A recent lesson began with a spelling test. Dennis gave him a word and Carhee spelled it aloud while writing it down. When Carhee misspelled the word “amuse,” Dennis repeated it several times, emphasizing the sounds of the letters “m” and “u.”

Dennis then reviewed Carhee’s homework. He had to write questions about two stories he had read, select antonyms for several words, and write the plural forms of eight words. The last assignment was tricky, because Carhee could not merely add an “s” to create the plural forms of “foot” and “tooth,” for example.

“These are all exceptions to the rule,” Dennis told him.

Dennis and Nevelyn Crouch, literacy coordinator at the Jefferson library, have watched Carhee’s reading gradually improve over the past three years.

“At first, he knew two- and three-letter words. For the most part, he had trouble reading four- and five-letter words,” Crouch said. “Now he reads and write words and paragraphs.”

Before he entered the program, Carhee was like many adults who had devised ways to cover up their illiteracy. At various times in his life, his mother, brothers and two daughters would read to him.

When he attended Jordan High School in Los Angeles, his friends slipped him test answers or took tests for him. Carhee dropped out of high school a few credits short of earning a diploma.

He was able to get a driver’s license by taking an oral exam instead of a written test. He memorized local landmarks so he could drive without having to read directional signs. “For spelling, I would use my own marks to write something down,” he said. “I’d write ‘l’ for left turn, or ‘r’ for right turn.”

He remembers taking a car trip with two friends who also were illiterate. In San Diego, they thought they saw a sign directing them to St. Louis. So they drove in that direction with the intention of going to Missouri. They didn’t know the sign was directing them to Mexico.

“The next thing we knew, we’re crossing the border. It never dawned on us we were going to Mexico,” Carhee said.

Until his arrest, Carhee supported himself by dealing drugs. It was something he could do without reading. “I just needed to count,” he explained.

He did have a “straight” job selling food at the Los Angeles Coliseum for a brief period in the late 1980s. “My cousin filled out the [job] application for me. I only sold three or four things: hot dogs, soda, beer or wine. You know the prices for that, so you don’t need no rocket scientist to help you do it,” he said.

Occasionally, Carhee tried books. “I got disappointed. I just put them down,” he said.

Carhee’s situation is not unusual. The Los Angeles Public Library estimates that more than 750,000 adults in the city cannot read or write English well enough to complete such daily tasks as reading a newspaper, completing a job application or assisting children with homework.

The Adult Literacy Program is available to adults who speak English and read at or below the sixth-grade level. Students must attend tutoring sessions on two nonconsecutive days each week, with each session lasting an hour or 90 minutes.

Dennis has been tutoring since 1997 and now has another student besides Carhee. She had taught home economics for a while and wanted to do some kind of teaching after she retired from social work. “I love to teach. I just don’t like formal classroom situations,” she said.

Tutoring is offered at the Central Library’s Singleton Adult Literacy Center and at literacy centers in 16 branch libraries. A literacy coordinator staffs each center, matching some students with tutors and tutoring other students. Each center contains books, videocassettes and other materials.

About 500 students and 400 tutors currently participate in the program, which is financed through a combination of city funds, grants and donations to the Library Foundation of Los Angeles.

The program also offers a Limited English Proficiency tutoring program to assist adults who need help with English. A third program, Families for Literacy, helps adults in both programs improve their reading skills while learning to read to their children.

Crouch remembered the first time Carhee came to the library: “He had a paper all folded up from the Internet and he said, ‘My parole officer gave me this.’ His head was down and he was shy.”

Carhee’s demeanor has changed as his reading level has improved.

“The metamorphosis is amazing,” said Dennis. “At first, he didn’t talk much and was intimidated. Now when he comes in, it’s ‘Hi! How are you?’ ”

Carhee agreed that he has grown more self-confident. “I’m not worrying about getting lost, not knowing what a street sign says. It’s easier to drive because I can read signs to places. I can read the subtitles to Spanish movies.”

He’s also better able to perform his job. Carhee is a utility clerk at a Food4Less store near the Jefferson library.

His boss schedules work shifts so Carhee can attend a one-hour tutoring session twice a week.

Carhee plans to remain in the program.

“It has helped me a lot, built up my self-esteem a lot,” he said. “It’s not as hard as I thought it was going to be.

“If I had done this [learned to read] a long time ago, I wouldn’t have ended up doing what I did.”