Story
Stephans, Drew

DREW: I guess my literacy story would be about my first grade teacher Miss Paul in Malvern, Arkansas. I started school in 1984 or 1985 and so I went to kindergarten and at that time nowadays kids learn how to read in kindergarten, it's amazing what they learn. But when I was in kindergarten, it was just ok here are your colors, you can count to fifty and play in the sand, that's your past, your good life. I was always kind of different as a child, maybe ADD, I don't know what my problem was but I had a hard time staying on task or doing things structure-wise. But kindergarten was fine because it was all play. When I got into first grade I remember the second or third day of class, I had sat down next to this girl named Brittney, I believe, and the teacher was going so far past anything I knew I could handle and I immediately started looking off her paper and trying to figure out how to do all this stuff. I was just copying what she had because I didn't really understand it. My teacher, Miss Paul at the time, she immediately saw what was going on and she got me and moved me off to the other side of the class where I could just copy off of this girl. [Laughing] From then on forward, I don't know what would have happened if that had continued, but she had a system of learning how to read that was really unique, I think, even for the school system at the time. she had this big board with the letters on it and the sounds that groupings of letters made and she had a large stick and she would stand up in front of the class and she would point to these letters and we all had to stand up, it was like a physical thing where we had to move as we learned these letters and as we learned these words and sentence structure and things like that. It was so foreign to anything I had learned before because I wasn't sitting at a desk and I wasn't saying, "Ok, memorize these things and figure out how to do it." It was an active, kinetic kind of thing. I don't know, maybe if some people learn more when they're moving, but that really helped me learn how to read and it was crazy because I did great and learned an amazing amount about how to read and we were all tested at the end of the year. I started the first year not knowing anything about learning how to read and at the end of first grade they tested us all and I tested in reading at an eighth grade level. It was an amazing transformation for me and I don't think - it really set me on a course that really changed the rest of my life and I think that if I got any other teacher who was there, I probably would have learned how to read but it would have been different and wouldn't have gone as well. Since then I was always terrible in math but reading, writing, learning how to express myself with words, one person set me on a course to completely do something different with my life. I have Miss Paul to thank for that. I don't know what I would have done without her, I don't even know if she's still alive but that's my story.