Malcolm X
I work for the Diabilities Services Office on campus. We provide various accommodations to students with disabilities, and act as advocates for them. I am a Reader; basically I read various books that students need to have for class onto audio tapes, for students with visual impairments or dyslexia. It’s a great office and all of my co-workers are super nice.
The neat thing about my job, besides the fact that I know that it helps people and that it allows me to be a little bit dramatic at times (I love reading poems or stories!), is that I learn something new every day. Some of the books I read are things I would never just pick up and read on my own. So I’m just always learning.
Today I read about Malcolm X. I love this story so I am going to share it with you all. It almost made me cry, it is so beautiful. It blows my mind to think about the power that literacy has in peoples’ lives. Helping little kids learn to read and, better yet, learn to love reading, is something I definitely want to do in my lifetime. I think I’d really like tutoring kids at an inner-city school in reading, or something. Anysways, here’s the story.
Malcolm X was a brilliant communicator, but he never had any formal education past the eighth grade. Once while he was serving a prison sentance, he was a little bit irritated by another prisoner, but he admired him at the same time. This other prisoner was a natural leader amongst his fellow inmates. Malcolm X would get frustrated because he couldn’t argue intelligently with this other man, or communicate as effectively, but he admired him for those skills too. And this other inmate was always reading. Malcolm X decided he would read too and become as well-informed and educated as this other man. But the trouble was that he couldn’t. He didn’t understand any of the big words in books, so he would skip them, and then he didn’t understand half the gist of the ideas being communicated in the books. So he decided he needed a larger vocabulary. Also, he needed better penmanship so that he could write as well as speak. He asked the penitentiary’s library if he could have a dictionary and some tablets and pencils in his cell, and they gave him some. He looked at that dictionary, and my, he didn’t know where to start. He had no idea that there were so many words in the English language! So he just started at A, and he wrote out everything on the first page, words, definitions, right down to the punctuation. It took him almost all day, because his penmanship was so shaky and slow. Why, he couldn’t even write in a straight line. That evening he studied the words on that page. He thought about them and read them, in his own handwriting. And when he woke up in the morning, he was still thinking about them, and he could even remember what many of them meant. And he said later that the dictionary can teach you a lot, even things about history, almost like a mini encyclopaedia. The next day he was so excited and interested, he did the second page. He worked his way through the whole dictionary, A to Z. And pretty soon he found that he knew enough words that he could read those other books, and he loved to read. He read voraciously. He spent all day with his books and his dictionary. Between that dictionary, and those library books, and visits from his family and friends, he said at times he didn’t even remember that he was in prison. And because he could finally learn, he felt that he was truly free for the first time in his life. One time, much later, a reporter was asking him a series of background questions for an interview. One of them was, “What is your Alma Mater?” He replied simply, “Books.”
