He stands more than a head taller than his classmates, but what really makes Alferd Williams stand out as a member of the third grade at Edison Elementary School is his age. He's seventy-one.
The son of a sharecropper, Williams headed to elementary school two years ago when he was sixty-eight. He started back in first grade, the last grade he attended before dropping out as a child in Missouri to help his family make a living.
He promised his mother then that one day he would learn to read. At sixty-eight, he found a teacher in Alesia Hamilton, a first grade teacher at Edison Elementary. Hamilton was uneasy, but she started teaching Alferd during summer school and when the school year began invited him into the classroom in the mornings to help out as a volunteer and read with the kids. She made the rounds with Alferd of talk shows (including Ellen, which helped launch a Website to help Williams build a house) noting he was a model student.
Two years later, he still is. Williams made a presentation to the kids in his school recently, explaining to them, “I don’t have a mother living, and I don’t have a father living, so
it’s up to me how long I go to school and how well I learn.”
I confess I got a little weepy with this one and grateful that I can indulge in a good book to destress at the end of the day. Feel lucky you're reading this right now. Recent statistics released by the U.S. Education Department showed one in seven adults in American lack basic prose literacy skills. There are thirty-two million people like Alferd out there, all shining examples to our kids of how bad it can be - not able to read a newspaper, a blog or the back of a box of cereal.
Maybe we need an Alferd at every school in America. Can he take this show on the road; speak with kids who are pondering dropping out? He's got just the message every kid needs to hear - stay in school or spend your "retirement" back in the third grade.
Image: KC Star
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