If you’ve been to any of the neighborhood fairs in recent months, you have probably seen the Project Read outreach table. One new face assisting outreach worker Leon Veal is Hoover Chan. Hoover has been active with Project Read both as a learner and a volunteer outreach assistant. We had an opportunity to talk to Hoover about his education goals, and how Project Read has helped him.
     Hoover was referred to Project Read by City College. He was “very interested in having a tutor-based one-on-one.” Hoover feels more comfortable with an individual tutor because “I can speak up more...so one-on-one is very interesting to me.”
     Hoover went on to discuss his sessions with his tutor Heather Knight. They work together weekly for several hours and incorporate the computer lab into their sessions. Hoover enjoys working with Heather, and also comes into the lab on his own to work with the different software programs. Hoover has also gotten an email account and surfs the Web frequently. He finds that finding information on the Web is really fun—even more fun than reading magazines.
     One software program he practices with is Ultimate Phonics, a program that assists teaching individual letter sounds. When asked about positive results that have occurred as a result of the tutoring sessions, Hoover replied, “I got the help that I needed now. Before, I ended up throwing the towel. I’d give up instead of just trying to push myself to continue to either write or read. Now, it’s given me little bit more confidence in myself to… to keep going instead of, you know, give up.” Hoover would read a few letters, feel stuck, and give up. “Now, even though I get stuck…I just try to keep going as much as I can until I get frustrated. I more or less stick to it. Before that I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t be able to sit there for five or ten minutes to try to read it.”
     Hoover’s advice to other learners at Project Read: “Stick with it and be very patient. I think, patience is the number one key to learn how to read or to want to read better or to write better or anything. Patience is the name of the game. That’s where I’m putting effort right now. At first I didn’t have the patience. I thought I could learn overnight, but unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. It is a time-process thing. Stick with it much as you can and, like I say, patience is the key ingredient in the whole learning process.”
     Hoover also had a few words of wisdom for tutors: “Be patient with the learner, too. Also, let the learner sound it out as much as they can before letting them know what the word is. A lot of times with me—even though I’m not very patient—I try to sound it out but sometimes it’s on the tip of my tongue. So I would say my advice to the tutor is to give the learner a little bit more time to sound out the word. I think most of the learners want to read. More than anything else they want to read —read a book or read an article or something.”
Well said, Hoover! Keep up the great work!