WACH Fox News

Excitement! Watch Fox News (Channel 6) did a story on Turning Pages Wednesday night on the 10 pm news. I’m very proud of Thomasina, one of our learners for bravely telling her personal story and, perhaps inspiring others who need help and also encouraging volunteers to tutor. Here’s the link for the Fox News story.

We are currently in need of tutors, so if you are available to take another learner or know someone who might want to volunteer, please complete our Volunteer Interest Form here.

– Chris

Inspiration for Tutors Too

With classes starting again, there are plenty of excited students and teachers.  I came across this article and even though it is directed towards teachers, the message applies to anyone who teaches, tutors, trains or facilitates learning.  I hope it inspires future and current Turning Pages tutors.  Enjoy.

What Students Remember Most About Teachers by pursuitofajoyfullife

Your Life Sentence

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The end of the year and beginning of a new one is a good time to think about Claire Booth Luce’s challenge to write your life sentence. “See if you can summarize your life in one sentence,” she urged her friends.

Mrs. Luce was an accomplished actress, writer and diplomat. Her challenge is one worth addressing. If you summarize the importance of your life in a single sentence, what would you write? How often would you rewrite it? A single sentence forces us to focus on what’s important to us.

What is your life’s purpose?

What have you done with it?

That’s your life sentence.

Here at Turning Pages, with help from fellow Rotarians, volunteer tutors and board members, our purpose is to help adults learn to read or read better, write and acquire other life skills. This serves three vital purposes:

• Their new skills help them win jobs and promotions to raise their incomes to take care of their families.
• It helps people get off government assistance and improve their lives.
• It gives them a sense of value and personal responsibility.

If you would like to help us help more people, please click on “Donate” to the left on this page where you can make a tax-deductible donation before the end of the year. Thank you.

Kindle or Book?

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Kindles: Love ’em or leave ’em?

I think we can all agree that we are book lovers here at Turning Pages. So, the question is, how do you get your fix? Do you prefer the texture of the pages under your fingerprints, the weight of the book in your hands, the smell of the paper in your nostrils as you open that library door? I love it. Do you fill your paper books with post-it notes, underlines, highlights? Do you love finding a grocery receipt or a train ticket stub or a business card in between the pages of a book? As your eyes scan across this artifact from your life, do you pause from reading to remember what you were doing — buying olives and pickles for the appetizer tray at Thanksgiving dinner, taking the train to the city for your cousin’s wedding, the wedding where the DJ said the wrong name as he introduced the bride and groom? You chuckle because it’s only funny after the fact. Those pages remember.

Or, would you rather slide that thin, light electronic device into your handbag, barely feeling its weight even though it contains, like, ten million words? Do you download library eBooks as though they were emails? You have to admit, it is pretty fantastic that library eBooks will literally return themselves when due. (NO MORE OVERDUE FINES!) Are you, like me, fascinated that an electronic device can take on the visual appearance of the printed page with no backlighting? Do you sometimes press the “page turn” button unnecessarily, just for the pleasure of watching those electronic-ink pixels scurry to rearrange themselves, like a marching band, what form will they take on next? I do.

What are you currently reading? Do you have an eReader? Is it on your holiday wish list?

Poems for Book Lovers

Allison sent me this excellent link, titled 12 Beautiful Poems for Book Lovers. It’s just the thing for a  gray, chilly Monday. So, if you are lucky enough to have the luxury, curl up on your couch, make some tea, and sit with these poems for a few minutes. (Just don’t spill the tea on your computer… we can have a discussion about reading on electronic devices later.)

Which one is your favorite? I’m partial to Robert Louis Stevenson myself, although “Book Lover” by Robert William Service rings true.

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Holiday Bazaar to Benefit Local Nonprofits

Friends, I’m happy to announce that we are receiving some support from Trinity Episcopal. They have chosen us as a beneficiary of their Holiday Bazaar. Please come support the Bazaar on Saturday November 9th from 10 to 2 PM at 1100 Sumter Street. There will be family activities and games, delicious food, AND you can get a jump on your shopping lists while supporting several local charities and nonprofits. Hope to see you there

Board Member Interview: Allison

Editor’s note: Today is the first in a series of Q&As to help you get to know our board! We are starting off with Allison Matthews, who has been with us for a little over a year now.

What brought you to Turning Pages?

I come from a family of educators, and in high school, I became especially interested in helping people learn to read. I left Columbia for college, then started a career as an elementary-school teacher. When I moved back to Columbia, I wanted to find a place to volunteer during my summers off. I decided to look for a place that works with adult learners, and, voila! I found Turning Pages.

How long have you been working with your learner?

Ms. G. and I have been working together since June 2012.

What is one of your best “success” moments in working with Ms. G?

When we first started working together, Ms. G would often read through a paragraph quickly, making several errors that affected the meaning of the text, and just move on without understanding what she had read. I brought this to her attention and taught her the strategy of stopping after each paragraph to tell what she learned in her own words. Now, I’ve started noticing that she stops herself to summarize even without me reminding her.

Tell us about a challenge and how you negotiated it.

An ongoing challenge with tutoring is finding the best instructional methods and texts for Ms. G. She has some very distinct strengths as a reader, along with some significant challenges. I’m constantly having to adjust my approach to find what’s most effective.

As a board member, the main challenge is feeling overwhelmed by all the work we’d like to do to improve the services we offer our learners. I think we as a team have gotten a lot better about prioritizing what needs to be done, then dividing the labor so we can knock it all out. It’s an exciting time.

What is your favorite thing about Turning Pages?

It’s definitely the people! Ms. G. and I have built a great friendship. I enjoy working with and learning from my fellow board members, all of whom are passionate about adult literacy. And every volunteer I have gotten to meet is so dedicated and kind. It’s just so encouraging to be a part of this organization.

What do you do when you’re not volunteering with Turning Pages?

Try to make myself useful! I believe it’s very important to be active as a Christian and church member, so that’s a big part of my life. I teach fourth grade Language Arts and Social Studies, so that’s another sizeable chunk, for sure. Other than that– I dabble in music, writing, and the (very) occasional jog!

Are you reading anything good lately?

The book of Isaiah and Time Magazine.

What is your favorite book now? From childhood?

Oh, man. There are so many good ones out there. But my all-time favorite is still Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth. I mean, it’s got adventure, solid character development, humor, important life lessons, and an astounding number of puns. What more could you really ask for in a book?

If you could have lunch with one author, living or dead, who would it be?

If I wanted to enjoy my lunch and learn something, it would be C.S. Lewis. He offers so much wisdom through his writing– and humor, too.

If I wanted to tell someone off while eating lunch, it would be Ernest Hemingway. I would encourage him to be a less terrible human being and to occasionally try writing longer sentences.

If you had to choose between visiting Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, or Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, which would it be?

One of the most important questions in life. Both would be cool, but I would go to Hogwarts. If I went to the factory, I would probably fall into the chocolate lake and get stuck in the pipe just like Augustus Gloop.

Really Listening

Editor’s note: Today’s post comes from tutor and board member, Allison Matthews. Thanks for sharing your perspective, Allison!

When I was working with my learner today, we did a quick exercise to call attention to the letter S at the ends of words. Ms. G. tends to drop off endings like –s, -ed, and –ing when she speaks, and so naturally, she does the same thing when she reads. It’s not always a huge deal, but I’ve told her that sometimes, an ending can make a big difference in the way you understand a word. She performed the exercise beautifully and stretched out all the S’s she found.

“Yeah, I know I never say my endings,” she told me afterward. “When I was a kid, I used to talk and read real fast so no one could understand what I was saying.”

“You didn’t want people to notice you making mistakes?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s it!”

“So, did anyone ever stop you and slow you down, or did you just slide by?”

“They just let me slide right by!”

This exchange with Ms. G. amazed me. First, I was impressed that even as a child, she was developing effective strategies for hiding her reading troubles from her teachers. She may have been labeled with a variety of disorders over the years, but Ms. G. is one smart cookie!

But I was saddened, too, that—as far as I know—no one took the time to slow this little girl down and really listen. To tell her that it was okay to make mistakes. To help her with the words she wasn’t sure about. To teach her that her thoughts are important enough to be heard.

These days, Ms. G. is learning to take her time and communicate her ideas with others through her work at Turning Pages. Let’s look around for other children, teens, and adults who are sliding by and take the time to really listen.

Photo credit: Paul Sableman

Evening in Italy raises money for adult literacy

Sixty-two community leaders came together last week to support a cause — adult literacy.

It is the purpose of Turning Pages to teach illiterate adults reading, writing, math and other life skills.

They invested $100 a couple for a five course gourmet wine dinner at Lexington’s Main Street Cafe.

The cafe’s owner, George Trifos, and Palmetto Wine & Spirts owner Sandi Patel hosted the event, the second in a series of dinners.

The West Metro Rotary Club sponsored the fund-raising event with Lexington Young Professionals, AGGAdvisors, Mirror Associates, Pine Press Printing and the Lexington County Chronicle and Lake Murray Fish Wrapper.

A third dinner in the series is planned soon but no date has been selected. Proceeds from the dinner will go to match a $3,000 Rotary Foundation grant.

Photo via Oabe

Help for 73,000 illiterate adults

Editor’s note:(This editorial first appeared in the Lexington County Chronicle June 13, 2013)

How many illiterate adults do you know? How many who can neither read, write nor even count change? What if you were in the same fix? Imagine what your life might be like — filled with shame that even your children are learning skills that you don’t have. You can’t help them with their homework, or  read the Bible, as many of the learners we work with in the Turning Pages tutoring program are motivated to do. Adults who struggle with reading are among an estimated more than 27,000 Lexington County residents — 10% of the county’s population.

They are not alone. Richland County has 46,000 adults who read below a 6th grade reading level. That’s 12% of Richland’s population. In all, 73,000 functionally illiterate adults live in our two counties and studies indicate that  19% or more of the population are below this threshold, in parts of the Midlands. Functional literacy is the ability to read, write and speak proficiently in English, use technology, solve problems, be a life-long learner and effective in  life.

Illiterate adults are not stupid. Many have learning disabilities that make it difficult for them to read and write. Many have mastered skills the rest of us would find daunting. Some are like the short order cook who holds a dozen orders in memory and prepares them without being able to read written orders from the wait staff. Or the driver with a perfect on-time delivery record who cannot read the addresses on the packages he handles. But he can follow a map and his spatial memory is exceptional.

Last week, 60 public-spirited people came together for our first Reading Between the Wines dinner, hosted by Main Street Cafe owner George Trifos and Palmetto Wines & Spirits owner Sandi Patel. The dinner raised almost $1,500 to help Turning Pages tutors make a difference in the lives of their learners.

At the Chronicle, we were happy to be among the dinner’s sponsors with the West Metro Rotary Club, Lexington Young Professionals, AGG Advisers and Pine Press Printing. We hope to arrange a similar fund-raising dinner soon.