When Jane Kennedy sits down with Johnny Williamson for their weekly tutoring sessions, each has already had a full day of work. He drives a construction truck; she is a library media center teacher at MacArthur School in Hoffman Estates.
Tired as they might be, the sessions are important to both of them. Williamson, once functionally illiterate, wants to continue improving his reading and spelling. Kennedy, a volunteer with the Literacy Connection, wants to help him. They meet, as they have for three years, in one of the study rooms at the Gail Borden Library in Elgin.
Kennedy has a lesson plan for each session. Typically, that includes spelling, vocabulary and writing exercises and oral readings from material that she selects. She has modified the literacy program by changing reading topics to fit his interests. Also, “I’ve tried different types of teaching aids that I have pulled right out of my library” at MacArthur School, such as workbooks and games, she says. “You don’t want to get too babyish with them, after all, because they are adults, and so that’s been a constant struggle.’ ‘ She tries to find books that are highly interesting but can be understood by someone with a limited vocabulary.
“It’s a great program, and I know it helped me a lot and it’s helped a lot of other people,” Williamson says. “I didn’t learn to read, write and spell when I was a kid.”
The Literacy Connection is an affiliate of Literacy Volunteers of America and serves 15 communities in the far west and northwest suburbs. The group’s 200 tutors work with more than 300 students.
Kennedy signed on with the group early in 1995, spurred by a call for volunteers on her local cable TV station. After six weeks of training, she was ready to begin. She chose to work with an American student rather than one studying English as a second language.
“As soon as I finished the course, they said they had a gentleman who wanted to start right away,” Kennedy recalls. “So I picked up with Johnny and I stayed with him.”
Kennedy and Williamson’s long-term tutor-student relationship is typical, says field trainer Jeanne Rowe, who notes that quite a few pairs have been meeting for three, four or five years, and sometimes even longer.
“Some people take to it quickly,” she says. “But for many of our students, the alphabet is arbitrary and students have to work hard to get to where that abstract relationship becomes second nature to them.”
At their first meeting, Kennedy, following the prescribed format, asked Williamson to explain why he sought help and what he wanted to learn. She took dictation while he was talking to her, and these notes became an autobiographical sketch, which she helped him read at their second session as part of the lesson plan.
Williamson’s main reason for coming into the literacy program was to learn to spell. His job required that he write up reports. He had been using a list of words his wife made up for him, and he could read them, but he was feeling uncomfortable about the situation.
“I felt rather lucky because he wasn’t totally illiterate,” Kennedy says. He had been to school, but he moved to Chicago from the South as a child and was pushed through the school system, as some students are. “And I was very pleased, after working with children, to find out that an adult really attunes and is interested,” Kennedy says. “That was encouraging.”
At first she had him work on words and sentences that had to do with his job as a trucker and the specific problems he had to put in a report.
“I would start the session asking him had he any trouble at work that he needed to report, and we would work on those actual sentences,” she says. She notes that she learned a little bit about trucks because he would have to explain that material to her.
“We got beyond that over the years,” Kennedy says. “Now we’re going through different spelling lists and hypothetical situations.”
Williamson made so much progress the first year that Kennedy recommended him for a certificate of achievement.
Because Kennedy has had more than 35 years of teaching experience, she finds the tutoring easy and pleasurable. She often uses her lunch hour to scour the media center at school for materials to help her prepare lesson plans. Williamson’s interests are so wide that it is easy for her to find material for him to read, Kennedy says.
“Most of our tutors have a love of reading,” Rowe says. Aside from helping students meet their literacy goals, the tutors hope to develop that love in their students.
Kennedy was born in Phoenix and spent her early years in Arizona, Oklahoma and California as her father, a doctor, treated residents of Indian reservations. When he decided to open his own practice, the family moved to Detroit, then Chicago. Kennedy enrolled as a 5th grader at Shakespeare School on the South Side. She graduated from Hyde Park High School and entered Elmira College in Elmira, N.Y., graduating with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She spent a year working as assistant manager of a bookstore at the University of Rochester in New York.
In 1957, she married and moved to California, where the first of her three children was born. Two years later the family was transferred back to Chicago.
Kennedy began taking night classes at junior colleges in the city to get the education credits that would allow her to teach in Chicago schools. In 1961, she was hired as a provisional 7th-grade teacher at Beidler Elementary School on the West Side. The next year, Kennedy and her family moved to Hoffman Estates, and Kennedy was hired by Schaumburg Township Elementary School District 54 to teach 2nd grade at Hoffman School and, later, Hillcrest School.
When Kennedy and her husband divorced in 1972, she began work on a master’s degree in education and technology, which she received in 1977 from Northern Illinois University, De Kalb. In 1981, her 20th year of teaching, she came to MacArthur School in Hoffman Estates to be the resource center teacher. She has lived in Elgin since 1975.
In her spare time, Kennedy sings in the choir at the Universalist Church of Elgin, and she enjoys square dancing. Because she likes to keep up with technological developments, she takes continuing education classes regularly. She also spends time reshelving books at the Gail Borden Library “as long as I’m there for Johnny,” she says.
Williamson invited her to his granddaughter’s birthday party, and Kennedy stopped by with a present: a book. Sometimes, when Williamson has to baby-sit, he brings the child to the tutoring sessions. Kennedy also knows how proud he is of his son, who has completed medical school and is an intern at the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center, and she knows about his passion for golf.
When Williamson first entered the program, he was reading at a 2nd-grade level. He now reads at a 5th-grade level. Though he doesn’t feel that he has accomplished enough, Kennedy says that “both of us know there will be an end to this because he is considering moving to Georgia and I am considering retiring and moving East.”
She notes that Williamson can continue to improve on his own if he wants to, using the workbooks and magazines they have been reading together. Recently, the two shared a non-working evening when they attended the Literacy Connection’s annual meeting and potluck dinner.
“She has been real dedicated, and she puts in a lot of effort, and she’s always there,” Williamson says.
“It’s been a really wonderful relationship,” Kennedy says.
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For more information on The Literacy Connection, call Jeanne Rowe, coordinator, or Emily Menendez, ESL coordinator, at 847-742-6565.
