Learning to Love Ireland

by Althea Farren

  It took ages to get through the town. Out on the N11 the cars were travelling in third gear much of the time. I slavishly followed the dark tracks all the way home to Gorey, shuddering at the thought of the terrifying 360° spin one of the ‘Breakfast Show’ presenters had experienced on black ice.

  Home at last, I was instantly warm and safe again. There was enough oil in the tank outside to heat the house for several weeks.

  Snowflakes swirled about the statue of Our Lady on the front lawn, reminding me of the glass domes we’d played with as children. You shook them to make the ‘snow’ boil into a white cloud for a few seconds. You watched it settle on the tableau within the glass and then you shook it again...and again...

  For weeks Helen had to leave her car at the bottom of the hill below their house as the road was impassable. Every evening, when she returned from work in Derry, she had to trudge up the hill on foot in the dark through deep snow. Every morning she had to make her way back down the treacherous hill to her car and then she had to clear the snow off it.

  Glyn’s friends, Alli and Nick, both slipped and fell on icy pavements in London. Nick broke his arm and Alli was badly bruised.

  Larry and I developed cold sores. Mine was a disgusting red blotch under my nose and Larry’s an unsightly swelling on his lower lip. We’d been coughing and spluttering all week in a repellent duet of sniffs and honks.

  Sean and Audra’s excited voices sounded far away. They were phoning from Glendalough where the Glen of the Two Lakes had become a fairy-tale landscape of perfect white waterfalls, streams and woods set against a mountain backdrop. It was magical, they said. Who needed the Swiss Alps?

  Frankly, I was sick of snow.

  I felt sad that I’d lost my sense of wonder and adventure and had betrayed my childhood self.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  To my surprise and delight, a letter arrived in September offering me a place on an initial tutor training course for the County Wexford Vocational Education Committee’s Adult Literacy programme to be held in New Ross. I’d written months before to the Adult Literacy Organiser asking her to include me when the VEC held its next tutor training course.

  Since my hours of work had just been reduced, this was my opportunity to discover what Adult Literacy teaching entailed, even if it meant spending every Tuesday evening for the next few weeks in a strange town.

  Among the many jobs I’d applied for the previous year was a part-time position as an adult literacy teacher at a prison. The County Wicklow VEC had advertised a possible vacancy. Filling in the application form had been a lengthy process. My last full-time teaching post in 1984 seemed a long time ago...

  One section of the application required me to outline my ‘approach’ to teaching:

  Each person’s needs would have to be carefully assessed. I would utilise available records (educational, not criminal) and information relating to each student as a starting point. It is likely that a tutor in a prison situation would encounter a wide range of abilities. I would want to be thoroughly prepared and, to this end, would be guided by such reports as the International Adult Literacy Survey of 1997 and the Prison Adult Literacy Survey of 2003. I was interested to note that, according to the latter report, 52.8% of prisoners scored at Literacy Level 1 or below. (About 25% of the general population score at the lowest level.) Both reports highlight the fact that poor literacy skills restrict a person’s life-choices. Emphasis would therefore be placed on providing opportunities for personal growth through literacy. I would treat each student as I would any other in a school or college setting. Each person would be encouraged to read as widely as possible and written work would be done and marked regularly.

  Not bad, I thought. I’d read that teachers had no ‘custodial role’ and therefore worked with students ‘in an atmosphere of co-operation and mutual respect’.

  Family backgrounds of prisoners were often dysfunctional: 50% of prisoners, according to the survey carried out in 1997, had left school before the age of fifteen. Prison imposed literacy demands on prisoners that they had not faced before. Work-training and education were the two main activities in prison in Ireland, and programmes and curricula were designed to help prisoners cope with their sentences and prepare them for release.

  In Zimbabwean prisons the two main activities are remaining sane and staying alive. Political activists or human rights activists in Zimbabwe are frequently detained or arrested.

  A number of our friends and business associates, accused of ‘subversive behaviour’, had spent time in jail cells in various parts of the country. Chillingly, they were the lucky ones, even if they were beaten or tortured, as they would be high profile cases. Their lawyers would be working hard to secure their release. The media would monitor their treatment, and their friends and relatives would bring them food and agitate for medical attention.

  They told us sadly that the jails were full of forgotten prisoners who couldn’t afford lawyers. Journalists were unaware of their existence, there was no one to bring them food and, naturally, there was no question of the state supplying legal aid.

  The only holding cell for women at Bulawayo Central police station is approximately three metres by six metres in area. It’s intended to house six persons, seven at a push. My friend, Joan, who had participated in a march organised by a women’s civic movement one St Valentine’s Day, was detained and locked up along with twenty-one other women ‘protesters’. The stench, she said, was unbearable. The squat pan, inadequately partitioned off from the rest of the cell by a metre-high wall, had overflowed. Dried faeces plastered the walls. Throughout the night she could feel a thousand creatures exploring her body: creeping and crawling, biting and nipping.

  Zimbabwe does not offer its prisoners the opportunity to study. Its ruling party is not concerned about how well they cope with their sentences. Literacy levels are of no relevance. Neither is providing adequate food. And dead bodies have been known to remain in overcrowded cells for days before they are eventually removed. (It’s ironic that Robert Mugabe earned six degrees through distance learning while he was a political prisoner in Rhodesia. Two of them were law degrees.)

  My interview in Wicklow was scheduled for 9 a.m., which meant that we had to leave Gorey at 6.45 a.m. It was quite a long walk from the railway station into Wicklow Town. Larry always came with me to my interviews in unfamiliar towns. I wouldn’t have wanted to be alone at that hour of the morning, wandering past restaurants that hadn’t yet opened, craving warmth and coffee. Outside the newsagents were piles of newspapers. On the doorsteps of other shops were mounds of fresh fruit and vegetables. If this had been Zimbabwe or anywhere else in Africa, neither the produce nor the newspapers would have lasted more than a few seconds. They would have been appropriated by ‘informal traders’ and offered for sale at their own roadside stalls.

  From an icy metal bench near the VEC building, we watched the sun rise and the drab plants in the baskets above the doorways become glowing petunias and radiant purple and yellow pansies.

  The panel of five asked me the obligatory questions about Africa and Mugabe to ‘put me at ease’. I hoped they weren’t aware that I was fidgeting, since my hands were out of sight under the table. I was trying to keep my feet still, too, as I’d been warned on a sales course once that one’s feet are a dead give-away. I did my introductory bit about how I was delighted to be in a First World country and how I was looking forward to teaching again. I said that I was following Irish politics with great interest, and although I missed Super 14 rugby, I was supporting Leinster. (There were a couple of men on the panel.)

  Then it was time for specific questions.

  What would I do if.....?

  How did I see...?

  How would I view...?

  I’d taught O-Level and Matriculation Level English to mature students, I told them. The Ministry of Education in Zimbabwe operated under the auspices of Cambridge and the Associated Examining Board – both highly respected examining bodies in the
UK. I knew the system was different here, I added hastily. (Perhaps they weren’t wild about the Brits.)

  What were they looking for exactly?

  I knew that I hadn’t connected, although I’d researched both the prison itself and the findings of the two relevant surveys. At one point, I went completely blank, something that had never happened to me before in an interview.

  ‘How did it go?’ Larry asked, putting down the Irish Times. He’d been waiting for me in reception.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I gasped, desperate to escape.

  It was the worst hot flush I’d had in ages.

  I remembered a really bad one when Geraldine (our branch manager) and I were visiting a company in Harare to discuss Alfa’s annual printing requirements. The meeting was going well. The managing director was interested in doing business with us and his terms and prices were reasonable. Suddenly I felt that familiar, unstoppable burning sensation spreading from the top of my head, on through the rest of me and right down to my toes. My energy drained away like those last few inches of bath water being sucked down the plug hole. I repressed the usual urge to rip off all surplus clothing and rush outside. Sweat began to pour down my face. Geraldine would need to take over. I turned to her for support, but she was bright red too. With her steamed-up glasses in one hand, she was rummaging in her bag for a tissue...

  ‘Can you imagine,’ said the lecturer, ‘not being able to fill in a form at the doctor’s surgery? You’d probably tell them you’d left your glasses at home. Not being able to read the instructions on your sick child’s medicine bottle? Not knowing what was written on that road sign you’ve just passed? Not being able to use a recipe? It would be like this...’

  She handed out a piece of paper. What was written on it appeared to be nonsense until you realised it was mirror writing. I turned it round and held it up to the light – which you weren’t supposed to do. She wanted us to try to decipher it so that we might begin to appreciate the sensations of inadequacy, irritation and frustration that adults who couldn’t read or write experienced every day of their lives.

  An adult learner, she explained, needed to learn at his own pace, and his programme had to be tailored specifically to meet his needs. The content of what was to be studied had to be meaningful and relevant, reflecting his interests. The individual himself would be an active contributor to his own programme, with a say in what he wanted to learn and how he wished to go about it.

  A keen Liverpool supporter might want to read the sports section of the newspaper. Someone else might want to write a letter to relatives in America. The tutor, with the assistance of the literacy team, would devise learning programmes that would help them achieve these aspirations.

  So, while you might have to go back to the very beginning again, it wasn’t the same as teaching a child. Material had to have an adult flavour. The tutor might, for example, summarise and simplify an article on a recent win by Liverpool and then devise a series of exercises based on it that addressed the learner’s specific difficulties.

  This approach focused on the development of the whole person – the very vulnerable person – for whom failure had been a way of life and who, consequently, was likely to have low self-esteem. People who knew how to read and write took so much for granted, we realised: books, street signs, instructions on packaging, advertisements, helping children with their homework, texting, emailing, planning a holiday.

  Many adult learners would have hated school and resented their teachers. They all had to contend with the social stigma of illiteracy, which very often led to a sense of limitation. It was in the tutor’s power to change all this by treating her adult students with respect, by giving them encouragement and positive reinforcement and by helping them attain their goals.

  Now I knew why I’d been unable to convince the VEC panel in Wicklow that I was the right person for the prison job.

  It was very simple. I hadn’t been the right person. Not then, anyway.

  Although the course was intensive and therefore very hard work, it was fascinating. There was no messing around, either. It was extremely well-organised and every minute was accounted for. We would be expected to commit to a minimum of 20 hours of voluntary teaching after the course. We could progress to becoming group tutors and receive further training, if we were interested, and, eventually, we might be offered some paid group tuition hours.

  We were each given a little book of short stories written by some of the students. A sense of achievement and pride was evident in even the most simple of these. I found particularly moving a contribution by a young man who had been consistently ridiculed by his teacher and made to feel useless and insignificant. He’d lived with a poor self-image for years. Then he heard about the Adult Literacy Programme, and before long, he was making encouraging progress and gaining confidence.

  One evening, on his way home from work, he saw his old teacher out walking his dog. He jumped out of his car, and asked the man whether he remembered his former pupil. He didn’t.

  ‘Well,’ said the young author, ‘I’m that boy you used to make fun of. I’m the one who had to stand in front of the class week after week while you told them how stupid I was because I’d got all my spellings wrong. I’m the one who couldn’t read. Do you remember me now?’ He didn’t.

  The young man wondered how many others had suffered in the same way.

  ‘I’d like you to know that I can read, write and spell now,’ he said. ‘I have a family, a house and a job. I’d like you to know that I am not stupid.’

  The young man returned to his car and drove off. With dignity and courage, he had confronted the person responsible for his miserable schooldays.

  After several more months of waiting, I contacted John to ask what progress had been made with regard to my South African qualifications. Nothing had happened. They’d never received an application for reassessment from me, they said. Once again, I filled in the required forms and sent them off.

  There was another long silence. Then a letter arrived advising me that, as I’d hoped, my diploma would be regarded as a Level 8 qualification.

  The whole saga had lasted eighteen months.

  My adult student and I met one evening in a small ‘one-to-one’ room equipped with a computer, a whiteboard, a table and two chairs. The impressive Adult Education Centre had just been completed in Gorey and everything was brand new.

  He was a pleasant-looking man with a nice smile. He didn’t seem nervous or particularly reserved. It was easy to draw him out with a few questions about himself and his family. This wasn’t his first encounter with a VEC tutor. He’d attended lessons several years previously – both one-to-one sessions and group meetings. When he and his wife moved to Gorey, he’d let a few years slip by before approaching his local centre.

  He loved watching animal documentaries on TV. He was fascinated by those programmes where daring eccentrics thrust their heads into crocodiles’ mouths or insist that boa constrictors can be affectionate. He wanted to be able to help his grandchildren with their homework and read them bedtime stories.

  Sport didn’t interest him at all. Neither did movies. And he dismissed politics with a shrug.

  Where does one begin when a whole lifetime of reading and writing is missing?

  He’d worked as a driver delivering farm produce. When he felt more comfortable with me, I was able to ask some of the questions I’d been dying to ask for ages.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a grand memory, thanks be to God. We mostly had regular customers. J Doyle and Son were number 15 on our delivery list. Seamus O’Flannery was number 62. I can still remember everyone’s numbers. I also got used to seeing their names on their buildings and on their vans.’

  ‘Did anyone know you had a problem?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Fergal. ‘We had a grand bunch of lads working there.’

  We’d started off with a short passage about sharks. There’s always a robust reaction to sharks.


  In some form, sharks have been around for about 400 million years.

  Even before dinosaurs roamed the earth, sharks hunted through the oceans. These ancient predators are both fascinating and terrifying.

  Sharks have the most powerful jaws on the planet. Unlike most animals‘ jaws, both the shark’s upper and lower jaws move.

  A shark bites with its lower jaw first and then with its upper. It tosses its head back and forth to tear loose a piece of meat which it swallows whole.

  A shark may grow and use over 20,000 teeth in its lifetime.

  I’d adapted the passage from ‘Interesting Facts on Sharks’, an article I’d found on the Discovery.com website. It needed to sound adult in tone and language. I couldn’t give him a Janet and John version of ‘Interesting Facts on Sharks’ to read. That would be demeaning.

  He found words like ‘both’, ‘even’ and ‘with’ more difficult than ‘predators’ or ‘dinosaurs’. He struggled with ‘a’ and ‘an’. He had problems with suffixes like ‘-ing’. And it became obvious almost immediately that he needed reading glasses. He promised to have his eyes tested before our next lesson.

  The glasses made a huge difference to his confidence. Although he still took wild guesses, he could now actually see what he was reading. But it was obvious to both of us that a long, long road stretched ahead. He couldn’t distinguish between ‘of’ and ‘for’ and he didn’t know that certain letters, when combined, had a sound of their own like the ch- in ‘church’ and in ‘chocolate’ or the sh- in ‘shoe’ and ‘shirt’. When he was writing out answers or filling in an exercise sheet, I had to keep reminding him to steady the paper with his free hand.

  We were supposed to meet once a week for a lesson. He would call to cancel when he was in Cork visiting his son and daughter. This happened frequently. He never did the homework I suggested he might want to do. (We couldn’t insist that adult learners did homework.) He mislaid the books he borrowed from the VEC library. I don’t think he ever read aloud to his wife, although he always said that he wanted to show her how he was getting on. He lost the exercises I gave him, or said that they’d been thrown away by mistake.