Noah

August 8th 2012

I was accustomed to feeling frustrated at this point. Frustration seemed to plague me wherever I went.

But this was a whole new experience.

Trying to teach myself to read and write was kind of like trying to play a video game without a controller.

I'd bought a dozen or more online books and manuals that claimed to teach me how to read and write. They used a voice-over tutoring to explain it to me, but apparently the books were aimed at six to seven year olds with trouble developing literacy skills.

According to the most helpful of the seven books, it was almost impossible to learn to read and write past the age of sixteen which, as a seventeen year old, was concerning. I'd spent the best part of three days working my way through the online book but I was still struggling with the four letter words.

I knew the alphabet, which was a starting point. I'd spent three weeks learning the alphabet a few months back, so it was rusty. However, upon seeing the letters drawn out on the laptop screen it started to come back to me.

Yes, I got the gist of the alphabet. What I didn't get the gist of was the long-arse passages it was trying to get me to read. The idea was that I read the passage then gave verbal answers regarding the passage. I clicked onto the next passage, blinked a few times and forced myself to focus.

I'd gone through the earlier phases of easier texts but this one had me stumped. I'd read it and reread it and read it again but I still struggled with a lot of the words, and the sentences were hard to understand. I huffed to myself, reading it once more and still missing gaps here and there.

I forced myself to slow down and spell out words that I didn't understand like I'd been taught. I sounded out the words aloud, making each letter phonetic in an attempt to understand the word.

After a frustrated ten minutes trying to work out what the passage meant, I decided it would be best to just move on to the questions. I scrolled through each question, thoughtfully answering based on my understanding on what I'd just read. When I finally got the results after the twenty questions, it was pretty bad. I got just eight right out of the twenty, and those were the easiest ones.

I sighed heavily, turning the laptop off in an attempt to stop myself from throwing it at a wall.

I had been trying to learn to read and write for a long time now. It wasn't as easy as I had hoped. Everyone I'd known in my life had already been literate, so I figured it couldn't be that hard to learn how to read and write. It turned out that I was very wrong.

I huffed slightly, going into the Craig's room, which I had turned into my study. I picked up one of the comic books off the shelf, opened it up and started reading through it.

This had been my friend's favourite comic, and I had been determined to read it, cover to cover. Now, though, it was getting dusty where I hadn't picked it up in a while. I ran my hand across the smooth page, the words on it seemingly alien to me. The ink that covered the page in scribbles and shapes was incoherent.

I forced myself to take it slowly, matching each letter with a sound to make a whole word. Progress was slow but I was getting there. Whenever I had a full word, I said it aloud to myself to try to drum in the connection with the strange array of symbols on the page. Every time I had a sentence I repeated it again and again, making sure that it made sense and I had all the words correct.

It was nearly twenty minutes before I got through the first page.

I finally put the comic book down, feeling frustrated but at the same time proud of myself for finishing a whole page, which was something I'd never achieved in the past.