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I was a teacher for 17 years, but couldn't read or write

• timonoko 5y ago
  On Google translate you can test new phonetic spelling. "Wii shäl miit tu dei in Nyy Jork" works best in Polish, Icelandic and Finnish. I suggest we just ignore weird sounds like θ and ð and just use "th" as "thö" sounds reasonably good in those languages.
  • timonoko 5y ago
    Correction: those languages seem to have already "th" == "θ".
    • tuukkah 5y ago
      That's weird as "th" is pronounced "th" in Finnish and there is no "θ" sound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_phonology#Consonants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_phonology#Consonants
      • juki 5y ago
        "th" isn't really used in Finnish (at least in modern kirjakieli). Even loan words just drop the "h" (e.g. "termostaatti"). There probably are some exceptions, but none that I can think of right now.
        • sampo 5y ago
          Finnish has only 3 words, all loanwords that didn't drop the h: thai (+ thai food, thai boxing etc), theeta (name of the Greek letter) and thorax (medical term, common word is rintakehä). https://www.kielitoimistonsanakirja.fi/#/th?searchMode=all https://www.kielitoimistonsanakirja.fi/#/th?searchMode=all
          • tuukkah 5y ago
            That's surprising to me, perhaps because "th" appears in inflected words such as "ovathan", dialectal words such as "vasthaan", compound words such as "oluthana" and names such as "Elisabeth" or "Porthania". Also, I wonder what's the share of the pronounciations "t", "th" and "θ" in the word "theremin". (You can download a list of word forms encountered in some selected written texts here: https://kaino.kotus.fi/sanat/taajuuslista/parole.php https://kaino.kotus.fi/sanat/taajuuslista/parole.php)
            • sampo 5y ago
              I only searched for 'th' in the beginning of the word. We can add these to the previous result: triathlon, smoothie, maybe also apartheid Also the dictionary finds huithapeli, häthätää, rustholli, but I don't think these have 'th' as a phoneme. https://www.kielitoimistonsanakirja.fi/#/*th*?searchMode=only-non-compounds https://www.kielitoimistonsanakirja.fi/#/*th*?searchMode=onl...
              • tuukkah 5y ago
                Nice new findings in the dictionary! What do you mean by having 'th' as a phoneme? If you mean the sound "θ", I don't think any of the words are pronounced with one in Finnish, typically. Rather, they have a "t" sound followed by a "h", or just a "t".
  • nayuki 5y ago
    It would be nice if they used IPA instead of yet another informal nonstandard system.
    • timonoko 5y ago
      If you try "Wii shäl miit tu dei in Nyy Jork" in Google, it works quite well in Inglish too, except thö "Nyy Jork". It would be easy to organize meeting of all Anglos and accept this as an alternate spelling. Polish have some weird sibilants, so that it could be the starting point.
      • krisoft 5y ago
        > It would be easy to organize meeting of all Anglos You must be surelly joking there. :)
    • arp242 5y ago
      I can understand what's intended with "Wii shäl miit tu dei in Nyy Jork" without even knowing what system is being used. In IPA this is "ʃæl miːt təˈdeɪ ɪn njuː jɔːk", and I have no idea what that says at all. I find IPA fairly inaccessible for the casual user. There's a reason other systems exist.
  • nindalf 5y ago
    Is this comment chain supposed to be related to the story about the teacher who couldn’t read? Seems like a software bug.
    • timonoko 5y ago
      Yes. I forgot to explain. I learned to read in one month like any other Finnish child ever. But it took a month longer to understand what I was reading. Like my small brain was using all its capacity in pronunciation and I forgot what I just said. English is like Chinese, you have to learn all pictorials and their meanings. Learning the pronunciation is different process. That is why English takes years and years to learn.
• jmercouris 5y ago
  Incredible, but I still can’t help but feel like he is an idiot. Noticing an obvious deficiency in your life and doing nothing about it is in fact idiotic.
  • xupybd 5y ago
    Sometimes we hide something as a child and it gets so ingrained in us that we don't question the child's logic. We just live life hiding something that a child decided had to be hidden.
  • SamPatt 5y ago
    He did fix the deficiency. It just took longer than most.
  • inglor_cz 5y ago
    "Noticing an obvious deficiency in your life and doing nothing about it is in fact idiotic." So, how many people are overweight and fat these days? Maybe some things aren't easy to solve. If someone told me to learn writing in Chinese, I would be very creative in finding ways how to do without. It is just too hard for me at 43 years of age. People with certain disabilities may find English spelling (a notoriously tricky terrain full of illogical exceptions) similarly overwhelming.
• gnicholas 5y ago
  (2018)
• 1MachineElf 5y ago
  His says his writing level is roughly 6th grade, and the story reads like it too. I believe it. Illiteracy was the standard for humanity not long ago, and yet there were still teachers.
  • mkl 5y ago
    Despite the first person perspective, at the bottom it says "Written by Sarah McDermott". Maybe he dictated it, or parts of it.
  • dorkwood 5y ago
    The story was written by the journalist, Sarah McDermott, and not by John Corcoran himself.
• larusso 5y ago
  First time I read about this (Not from the US). I wonder what‘s with his Highschool/College degree? I mean by his own words he said that he cheated big time.
  • hliyan 5y ago
    Also not from the US, but I think read about him many many years ago in Reader's Digest. It was a long form that had a lot more information. I recognized the story because of this anecdote: "I passed my blue book out the window to him and he answered the questions for me." But the Reader's Digest version mentioned that he was dyslexic (which I don't think the BBC article mentions) and that he taught almost exclusively using audio/visual presentations, activity based learning and guest speakers.
    • denton-scratch 5y ago
      It does sound like he was dyslexic ("for me it was like opening a Chinese newspaper "). But the speed at which he eventually acquired reading and writing doesn't seem consistent with dyslexia; I figure there was some other problem interfering with hiis literacy.
      • nindalf 5y ago
        He says it took him 7 years to feel literate. Does that seem quick to you?
        • philliphaydon 5y ago
          This was after he finished his job. I assume he was spending a lot of time learning during those 7 years. Good on him tho.
      • archibaldJ 5y ago
        Computationally we don't understand what dyslexia is. Neuroplasticity is happening all the time. Perhaps at one point something changes and he has the ability to aquire the writing form of a language agian. Similiar to in mathematics where it's a very different process reasoning with symbols v.s. trying to visualize the mathematical construct through communication. Maybe it's difficult to aquire the writing form of graph theory when you are 19. But when you try to do that again at 25 suddenly you can read all of Paul Erdos' papers less daunthingly.
• cfn 5y ago
  I knew someone more or less like him. My friend went through high school and later even got into university. He was able to read but very slowly and he read everyday. He had this very large (and complicated) romance with him and he would read one page per day pointing at each word painfully slowly. I have no idea if he managed to understand the story or if it was just an exercise. Just like the person in the article, he was very popular with girls and managed to pull a number of similar stunts to go through tests and exams. Eventually he dropped out of university and got a job. This was the 90s and he started playing with computers and something just clicked inside. Sudenly he could read normally and became quite proficient with computers back then. I suppose it was some kind of learning disability that went away with time and persistence on his part. It also shows that schools are not equiped to deal with learning disabilities and push those pupils forward in the hope the problem goes away. BTW, this was in Europe, so it is not a US specific problem.
  • camjohnson26 5y ago
    The author of the article was eventually diagnosed as dyslexic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Corcoran_(author) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Corcoran_(author)
• hogFeast 5y ago
  > If he had called on me I was going to get out of my chair and take two steps, grab my chest, drop to the floor and hope they called 911. Used this tactic many times myself. You pull it once, they call 911. You pull it twice, they usually do it again. You pull it three times...an awkward silence fills the room...after the sixth time, my boss just carried on with the meeting, and I stopped getting invited. I think they call this life hacking. I now do it everywhere...in the line at the DMV clutches heart, wife nagging clutches heart, kid wants new shoes clutches heart. People say you can't outrun your problems...in reality, all you need to do is stay calm, pretend to have a heart attack, and your problems just melt away. I think I am going to write a self-help book.
  • going_ham 5y ago
    Can you elaborate how you fake the heart attack when you are in different situations? Your idea seems really interesting as a life hack. There must be specific ways to clutch your heart?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • amelius 5y ago
      Put a self-inflating armband around your upper arm (like those in blood-pressure meters), let it inflate without anyone noticing, and the pulse in that arm will disappear.
• ghoshbishakh 5y ago
  I still don't get it. How is it possible that he managed to go through the system.
  • IntrepidWorm 5y ago
    Because despite his illiteracy, he is a clever and resourceful person- with enough cleverness and a bit of luck, its possible to do lots of stuff like this. He was able to circumvent the barriers imposed by illiteracy through deception, careful manipulation, or outright swindling. While iliteracy is definitely a huge concern in the world, I hope I'm not the only one out there to admire him for grifting his way through multiple schools and jobs...!
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • IntrepidWorm 5y ago
    Case and point: I wear glasses. In fact, I'm almost blind without them: my effective vision ends at about 3 feet. Though I am able to perceive distinction between large objects and people, everything dissolves into a fuzzy mess. In American public schools (in the northeast US, at least) in the early 90s, schools would test student vision every year during elementary/primary school years. They would use the traditional eye test sheet, with strings of letters in smaller and smaller font vertically stacked, to be read at a distance. It took them 5 years to figure out that I couldn''t see anything other than what was immediately in front of me. I was a smart kid, and never had problems in the classroom as I sat in the front row and listened very carefully to what was going in. I would memorize the eye test sheet while standing in line at the nurses office, waiting to be tested. They never suspected anything was amiss, and routinely reported to my parents that I had perfect vision. I was finally discovered when my father, trying to be clever while we were out shopping, asked me about an ice cream parlor in the distance. Despite the name of the shop being written clearly above the shopfront, I bombed the question and my father realized that I couldn''t see what he was talking about.
    • 5y ago
• alexashka 5y ago
  Rather than learning how to read, it'd do everyone a whole lot more good to admit that some people are not cut out for school and to send them off to work when they're teenagers. This poor guy has felt bad his entire life when he could've been an excellent coal miner instead. Every place I've worked is filled with people like this guy to one extent or another - fearful parents pushing their kids to go to school and pretend to be something they're not. Then people who have an affinity for thinking have to navigate these insecure idiots (sorry, medical term) their entire careers. It makes workplaces hell for everyone involved, both the idiots and the capable. People ought to do what they are capable of doing. People ought to be treated with dignity and respect. If we get that far this century, boy, that'd really be something.
  • ramblerman 5y ago
    > It makes workplaces hell for everyone involved, both the idiots and the capable. I think your attitude is what makes the hell tbh. We should definitely teach everyone to be literate, and not just decide they should be "excellent coal miner"s instead.
    • Ntrails 5y ago
      Slight devils advocate. Is everyone happier with mandatory schooling for longer? It isn't that we shouldn't give everyone the chance to learn, but maybe some people really would be happier dropping out at 14 and just getting a job. Being at school where all you do is fail does not make for a good life experience! I think the answer is probably that we don't want parents pulling kids out of school early just to earn money for the family? So legally requiring they stay at school longer protects. Just a thought
      • moonchild 5y ago
        14-year-olds are likely not equipped to make such a decision. If all you're doing at school is failing, then the school itself should provide better support mechanisms.
• CTDOCodebases 5y ago
  I once worked with a Chef that couldn't read. He made it through culinary school, had his own catering company at one point and owned two residential properties. He was a charismatic guy but very cunning and deceptive. I figured it out after a couple of weeks working with him. I tried to offer him help but he just brushed it off and said that he was dyslexic. Smart phones have many features that make it easy for illiterate people to survive.
• cwdegidio 5y ago
  My grandfather, born in the back hills of West Virginia, was forced to leave school when he was around 6 years old to chop lumber so his family had enough to survive. After he left WV, he worked a press at a forge and was a landscaper at night an on the weekends. He never has learned how to read, and sadly he is in the early stages of dementia so I think that ship has sailed. But... he was always a whiz with finances. He was the kind of guy that can take a dollar on Monday and give you back $100 on Friday. He owns, I believe at this point, 8 properties including his own home. I always regret not staying back home for a bit to try and help him, but I think by the time I would have been in a place to do it he would have told me he had just accepted the fact he would never learn to read. I can't imagine going through life like he did, how much I would hav missed. But it also was always an inspiration to me. Every time I would feel my motivation for something academic or professional start to wane, I remind myself that this man who gave me and my siblings anything to help us succeed didn't get to do 90% of the things I take for granted. It's really sad to see some folks on this thread call this man an idiot. From first hand experience, that's not necessarily the case and often people like him become far more clever than I'll ever be as a means of survival.
  • inglor_cz 5y ago
    One of my grandfathers was illiterate as well. Not a finance whiz, but not stupid either. He was a rural blacksmith and he was rather good with engines and small appliances, repairing them for paying customers. This is also a good moment to meditate on "right of repair". As recently as approx. 1970, most of the machinery in daily use could be repaired by a skillful, even though illiterate, person. The advent of semiconductors did away with that and nowadays even highly qualified people struggle to update a firmware against the vendor's wishes.
    • everyone 5y ago
      You are implying finance people are intelligent???
      • inglor_cz 5y ago
• rubyn00bie 5y ago
  I dream of having the confidence of a white man for only one day. Like, I’ve been writing code for twenty years, and I feel like an imposter still. I can’t even fucking imagine being able to wake up in the morning, living a lie like this, fucking up kids educations because your too much of a pathetic child to admit your own failings?! I find this article to be pretty disgusting to be honest.
  • TheRealNGenius 5y ago
    That's a pretty racist thing to say. Their race has nothing to do with their story. Would your comment have applied if this person was the same race as you? You can't imagine their struggle because you didn't read what they wrote. You just glanced at the picture plastered at the top. Just cause you don't know how to read/write != you have jeopardized a kid's education.
    • rubyn00bie 5y ago
      Lmao. You really think race had nothing to do with their story? You are naive, dear child.
      • TheRealNGenius 5y ago
        It's pretty clear who's "too much of a pathetic child to admit [their] own failings"
        • rubyn00bie 5y ago
          I’m glad you’ve found the errors of your ways so quickly. May you be less ignorant and a better person for all.
      • EvilEy3 5y ago
        Racist crap.
  • inglor 5y ago
    IMO this comment takes a very cynical and US centric view of things. I've found this story was well written and pretty inspiring. Just because people are privileged doesn't mean they don't struggle or that their struggles can't teach us things. It's surprising to see this sort of toxicity in hacker news.
• TheRealNGenius 5y ago
  Totally believable. I've had math teachers say they can't write, and language teachers say they can't math
• Ichthypresbyter 5y ago
  A friend who worked as a doctor in the Fens of East Anglia said that many of the older farmers she treated (in the early 2010s) were essentially illiterate. If she gave them a form or a letter, they would hand it to their wife to read because they considered reading to be women's work.
  • rappatic 5y ago
    This is so similar to the Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson. In the world of the Stormlight Archive, called Roshar, men from the Vorin religion are not expected to be able to read (it is considered even blasphemous). Even many scholars cannot read or write and instead dictate to their wives to write down. This led to many women secretly making corrections to their husbands' work in the margins!
• BrandoElFollito 5y ago
  This also shows how poor the school system was it they did not uncover his illiteracy earlier. In France at least there was such an amount of loud reading at school that it would be hard to hide. I ready the article with a strong dislike for the guy since I knew he was a teacher. I was pissed off for the pupils. But it was not that bad, he was a teacher of PE where beside a limited technical knowledge (at the level he was in) the important part are social skills. So maybe it was for the better after all.
• john579 5y ago
  No one noticed for 17 years because none of his students could read or write either. They probably got a better education as a result.
• novalis78 5y ago
  In 2008 when my kids went to VPK in Florida I was surprised to find out why they memorized words instead of learning how to read. The lady I spoke about this was a veteran teacher of 25 years. She said it was all BS and that a decade or two earlier they had used a book called ‘Learn how to read in 100 lessons’. With that systems, she said, they never had anyone fail. Every child that passed through learnt reading. She said it was like a miracle. But, at some point, the higher ups fell into the trap of having to introduce new regiments and systems because of ever changing fashions. They were forced to introduce silly approaches, changing them every few years, leading to kids suddenly unable to read. Whenever she met parents she would tell them about this book and everyone had success with it and was as shocked as I was how it worked and how it was missing from the school curriculum. I ended up teaching all of my children how to read with it. It’s one of the most precious experiences. They all learnt to read at a very early age. There are many stories like this about writing and early math. Many years later, I read the episode In Feynman’s book ‘Surely you must be joking’ on his encounter with school text books and his disappointment - to say it lightly. One great experiment I can highly recommend is collecting textbooks from the 20th century and compare the decades and (basic) skills taught.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • frogpelt 5y ago
    Is this it? https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/0671631985 https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/0671...
  • fn-mote 5y ago
    > With that systems, she said, they never had anyone fail. Every child that passed through learnt reading. She said it was like a miracle. From someone familiar with the trenches of teaching: claims of 100% success need to be met with skepticism. There could be other classes where the lower performing children go (and fail). There is actually a lot of research on how to teach reading. I'm not saying every school district uses research-supported materials, but I am saying nostalgia for decades-gone-by methods of teaching should be looked at with a (very) critical eye. Who is successful? Who is not? Are there alternative approaches for students for whom the main approach does not work? On this specific claim: VPK = voluntary pre-kindergarten. Presumably this teacher is not claiming that 100% of children are learning to read before kindergarten? To critically evaluate this claim, one would have to know the grade level being taught. If they were teaching introductory reading to 7-8 year olds (instead of typical US kindergarten ~5 years old), then success rates would be higher... And in fact one of the trends in education has been pushing the skills to lower grade levels, where they (of course?) become more difficult to master - which makes these claims plausible but again, you need to know if you are comparing the performance of 2nd graders from decades ago with kindergarteners now.
• daniel-s 5y ago
  Can someone who has read the whole thing spoil it and tell me how someone illiterate wrote a big, long article for the BBC?
  • namenotrequired 5y ago
    He did learn to read and write eventually. But going by the last line, this article was written by a certain Sarah McDermott and not by John Corcoran
  • aymendjellal 5y ago
    He eventually learned how to read later in his life (after his teaching career!) by seeking help at his local library adult literacy initiative.
  • edge17 5y ago
    last line, Written by Sarah McDermott.
• high_byte 5y ago
  waiting for the next article, "I was CTO for 17 years, but couldn't code"
  • siva7 5y ago
    the role of a CTO isn't either about coding ;)
    • high_byte 5y ago
      and a teacher's isn't about reading :D
  • arp242 5y ago
    I know you're joking, but I have actually had coworkers who literally could not program at all. And I'm not talking about high-pressure situations like interviews, non-realistic examples like algorithms, or a one-off fluke: they consistently couldn't program even the most basic of stuff. How these people managed to stay employed as programmers is doing non-programming tasks and such, and copy/paste from Stack Overflow.
    • high_byte 5y ago
      haha that was expected. I'm waiting to hear about imposter managers. and no, not imposter-syndrome managers, and not managers who are not expected to know how to code. I mean actual imposters who are expected to code, can't, and still nailed high profile positions.
  • rytsEa 5y ago
    I don't know about CTO positions but I do know people working as Soft. Engineer barely able to code. Funny enough -as in the article- they are usually attracted to teaching (medium posts, best practice talks, youtube videos...) and mentoring/managing positions. Maybe as a way to escape from coding. Or maybe they want to safe others of struggling with the same problem they have. I don't know.
    • 5y ago
• wyclif 5y ago
  I used to be an ESL teacher for foreign students transitioning to English in the USA before I was in tech. I've also taught high school English, Latin, and History. These days the only English teaching I do is helping adults learn to read. John Corcoran's story is incredibly inspiring and courageous. It's hard to imagine the amount of courage it took for him to go public with his illiteracy. It's never too late to right a wrong in your life. If you know an adult who cannot read, please encourage them to seek help. There are many people who are generous in donating their time to teaching reading skills in a non-judgemental and caring way.
• hmwhy 5y ago
  Maybe I'm joining the large amount of comments at the bottom for once, but this article is not just about someone who ended up being a teacher due to serendipity — he committed crimes to get there. I'm all for supporting people with disability, and there is no doubt that it requires courage to admit to being a fraud after so many years — but being dyslexic shouldn't be an excuse for anyone to commit crimes and get away with it (please read what he actually did if you haven't — it wasn't a simple case of cheating). I have personally seen a lot of academic misconducts that went unpunished that makes cheating in exams seem seem mundane. Fake results that academics don't own up to/just blame their students when proven wrong; made-up results so that a thesis would look better; lying about publications to get scholarships, etc. Nobody ever gets punished and some would eventually go on to hold important positions. Reading the "supportive" comments in this thread is pretty demoralising for me.
  • hliyan 5y ago
    I agree in principle. But I think there has to be a difference in punishment between unrepentant perpetrators who get caught, and perpetrators who come forward on their own volition. If I remember the original Reader's Digest article, this person was already held to account many years ago -- he lost all his credentials, qualifications and not to mention respect and credibility. Even the original story was published much later. If we continue to pounce on people like this many years after the fact, we're only discouraging others with a guilty conscience to come forward.
    • hmwhy 5y ago
      Thank you very much for taking the time to address my comment, it has given me some food for thought.
    • baron816 5y ago
      Yeah, this is kind of a Frank Abagnale type story. He did some incredible yet dishonest and criminal things, but redeemed himself later in life. I’m sure this guy bullied a lot of people to get them to help him cheat. He spent 40 years pretty much as an asshole—he had stolen a life that he hadn’t earned, and had deprived his students of a qualified educator. Maybe the moral of the story is that people can change and become positive contributors to society. Think of all the people who have been locked up for decades for crimes they committed as teenagers. They were just thrown away by society without a chance for redemption. This is part of what Black Lives Matter means to me—there’s a primitive impulse in people’s brains to say they’re criminals and they won’t amount to anything and just cause harm. This guy got a chance that was denied to millions of black youths.
• hackeraccount 5y ago
  There a funny short story I read in H.S. - The Verger by Somerset Maugham - about a guy who's in a position not unlike this. He's illiterate but competent. He doesn't bother to hide it though and is fired from is job as a verger because of that. It's a short read as I remember so I won't ruin the end but the punch line really stuck with me for some reason.
• pfrrp 5y ago
  Great story. He’s an excellent speaker and very charismatic. For those interested he has a non profit focused on teaching reading and writing: https://www.johncorcoranfoundation.org/ https://www.johncorcoranfoundation.org/
• xyzzy21 5y ago
  The extreme of "Those who can't do, teach"???
• mmmuhd 5y ago
  I told my friends about this article,they replied no this could never happen in the US, this could only happen in countries like Nigeria. What a world we live in.
• jasonhansel 5y ago
  Here's a question: what can be done to make tech more accessible for illiterate people? That seems to be a side of accessibility that usually gets overlooked.
  • ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    Put symbols and images on stuff... like we already do on most devices. Play, stop, pause, fastforward and reverse are pracitcally never written out in text. In reality, teaching them to read first, would be best.
• sparrish 5y ago
  The first failure of his illiteracy sits solely with his parents. So many of us parents put the burden of our children's learning on teachers when the responsibility is squarely ours. If my son is in 5th grade and can't read, it's my responsibility to teach him or get him the help he needs to be able to learn.
• marviio 5y ago
  My grandfather was a teacher and in the 50s he started noting that trouble learning to read/write wasn’t linked to lack of intelligence. He started groups for kids (mostly guys) with what we now call dyslexia and tried to help them. He had to invent material and methods. On his eightieth birthday some of his students, now in their 50s, told how they had always felt stupid until he showed them they were not. Now they had businesses and successful careers.