He Was A Teacher Who Couldn't Read Or Write

John Corcoran went to school in hopes that he would be able to read like his sisters did. As he grew up, however, he found out that learning to read was a really difficult, if not impossible, task. Unfortunately, as a child at a very young age, he didn’t know how to articulate his problem.

I remember praying at night and saying, "Please Lord, let me know how to read tomorrow when I get up" and sometimes I'd even turn on the light and get a book and look at it and see if I got a miracle. But I didn't get that miracle.

As he moved from grade to grade, Corcoran would eventually give up on learning how to read.

I got up every day, got dressed, went to school and I was going to war. I hated the classroom. It was a hostile environment and I had to find a way to survive.

And found some ways he did. Without the need to read, Corcoran would see his way through high school and college, and he eventually found a profession in which he could hide his inability to read — teaching.

Why did I go into teaching? Looking back it was crazy that I would do that. But I'd been through high school and college without getting caught - so being a teacher seemed a good place to hide. Nobody suspects a teacher of not knowing how to read.

Corcoran hid his secret for a long time. But thanks to seeing Barbara Bush talk about adult literacy on TV one night, Corcoran was inspired to ask for help and finally learn to read.

More details about his extraordinary story over at BBC.

(Image Credit: BBC)


Comments (0)

@Will: Incorrect, you are assuming HFCS is primarily fructose, but it's not. It's typically 55% fructose, 42% glucose. It's a little heavier on the fructose, but not by much (and so is honey I might add), and since it's sweeter than sucrose technically you could use less per volume (not that most manufacturers do). The biggest problem by far is purely the volume of it on the market.
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The liver can only process 50 grams of Fructose per day for the average person.

After that, it all goes to jacking up insulin and getting stored as fat.

-Similar to the way that women have significantly less ADH and 1 other Liver enzyme to process alcohol, so the rest goes right into the bloodstream.

HFCS is the crack-cocaine of fructoses.

+It also carries along with it inflammatory Omega 6 particulates from the corn it's based on.

@dev: Wrong. Cane sugar is the disaccharide Sucrose. Di=2, 1 Glucose+1Fructose. You would ingest ~ 1/2 the Fructose viz. HFCS.
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Don't confuse High Fructose diet with High Fructose Corn Syrup. You absorb basically the same amount of fructose digesting cane sugar as HFCS - the problem with HFCS is that it's so cheap (and heavily subsidized) that there is way, way too much of it in our food. The important part is to drop all your sugar intake in your diet - for many reasons.
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