David Clemons

Click to hear what David Clemons' reading lesson felt like.

The year was 1997, and David Clemons was down and out. Injuries from a car accident left him unable to earn a living installing carpet like he'd done for 28 years. He had split up with his wife and moved in with his uncle in Washington, D.C. It was an arrangement both men wanted to end as soon as possible.

David, 47, felt desperate to find a job but couldn't fill out an application. Although he had stayed in school until he was 16, David left without learning to read or write. Of his seven family members, he could only read the names of two because they contained double consonants he could recognize.

So David found himself telling "literacy lies" to prospective employers. He would ask if he could take the job application home, saying he had forgotten his reading glasses or someone was waiting for him outside. However, most employers saw through this ruse, and wouldn't permit him to fill out applications off site. The job search was not going well.

Then one day his workers' compensation counselor suggested he take an adult literacy course. David, however, thought there was no point. "I'm retarded, that's what I thought," he recalls. While he excelled at sports, and had been a quick learner on the job when working with his hands, David had always had difficulty connecting letters to the sounds they represent. He had been raised by a mother who couldn't read, and only one member of his family finished high school.

Still, he gave the course a try and was pleasantly surprised. His tutor at the Washington Literacy Council (WLC) in Washington, D.C., used a phonics-based method of sounding out words, instead of the rote memorization required when he was in grade school.

One day, after his tutor had taught him the sounds associated with all the letters of the alphabet, as well as letter combinations like ing and ough, it was time to start putting sounds together. He still remembers the first time his tutor asked him to sound out words in a sentence. After one hour he felt exhausted because he'd been using his brain in an entirely new way.

"I walked out of there dead tired, knowing that I could learn to read and write," he recalls. "That was the first time in my life I felt that I could."

Today, David is reading at a much higher level. He moved out of his uncle's house six years ago and no longer regrets giving up the carpet installation business. Eager to give back to those who have helped him, he's tutoring other students, and he's earning money working full time as a student support specialist at WLC. But that's not all. David has grown so skilled at telling his story that he has been invited to speak at the University of Georgia, the D.C. City Council, and the Library of Congress. He was also elected to serve on the Student Advisory Council of ProLiteracy Worldwide. In the future, David would like pass the GED test so he can continue to work at his present job. He feels right at home in the field of adult literacy, so he's ignoring opportunities in other fields, even if they offer more money.

Learning to read and write "has given me a new life," David says. "It didn't change the old one; it gave me a new one."