May 22 will be a pretty special day for me. I’ll be attending a graduation. Graduations are the norm this time of year and moms and dads, brothers and sisters, grandparents and close family friends gather for these wonderful events. I’ll be attending as a teacher, or more accurately, a tutor.

My friend is going to receive his GED next Thursday night and I’m proud to be there. He wasn’t my friend before I became his tutor; in fact, we had never met. The Five Town Adult Education department hooked us up and the rest is history.

I posted something about him on Facebook and it got over a hundred likes and lots of nice comments about my efforts and I genuinely appreciate them all. But here’s the thing: All I did was tailor the education to the student. That’s it. I don’t have a degree, but I understand people. All sorts of people.

Let’s go back a bit.

When I was at MBNA, I learned that a couple of brothers couldn’t read. It turns out that growing up back in the day, they were labeled as not being able to learn and were sent to Pineland.

If you’ve been in Maine for a while, you know about Pineland. You can Google it. In the eighth grade, they figured out that the brothers needed glasses, but by then the system had written them off, so they never got the help they needed. When I asked if they would like to be able to read, they replied that they thought that would be good.

I took the Literacy Volunteer education and we were off. Like any educational system, there were guidelines, but Literacy Volunteers allows a good deal of flexibility. I asked the brothers what their favorite thing was in the whole world and they replied, Scooby Doo. We started reading Scooby Doo comic books. We went on to other things, but Scooby Doo was a part of every session because it was what they liked.

Literacy Volunteers then hooked me up with a person who needed to pass a proficiency test to be licensed in his job. This guy knew all the aspects of a pretty complex job and did that job well, but needed to show his qualifications on a written test.

I asked him what he liked to do the best and he replied hunting and fishing. We started reading hunting and fishing magazines together. After he started showing interest in reading we worked on the technical terms and what he needed to pass his test. But while he needed to pass the test for his job, he really wanted to learn to read so that he could read with his grandchildren. We then moved on to children’s books.

Back to this coming Thursday night. My student wants to be a part of the United States. He embraces that. He met his wife and fell in love in another part of the world, but now he’s one of us. He understands that it takes work and he has been a dedicated student. He never once missed a call nor an appointment and he came to every session properly prepared.

We had some fun times. English is difficult to understand for people who don’t speak English as their first language. It is also a difficult language to teach to people who don’t have English as their first language. All of our rules are rules we break.

What I’ve learned about teaching literacy is that you have to find something that the student is interested in and build on that. Droning on and on about facts and figures, charts and studies never teaches anyone anything if they are not engaged.

I’m looking forward to Thursday. It will be fun. Maybe there will be pictures. I’ll leave that up to him.

One last thing. We both understood the minimum needed to pass the various phases of the GED tests. We never went for the minimum. I didn’t want him to just pass. Once you have a GED, you have it, but I wanted him to believe he could do better than the minimum.

It was important to me that he felt that in everything he did going forward. Life is full of rewards and I’m going to receive a great one this week.