It takes patience to teach basic literacy skills to adults

Before Bob Jansen can teach English to the adult immigrants in his lowest-level class, he has to show about a quarter of them how to hold a pencil. Adult education teachers like Jansen are finding themselves starting from scratch as uneducated immigrants and refugees from conflict regions of Africa and rural areas of Mexico and Central America flock to the United States.

An estimated 400,000 legal and 350,000 illegal immigrants are unable to read or write even in their native language, according to a July 2007 report from the Migration Policy Institute, an independent Washington think tank. “It takes a lot of patience to teach this class,” said Jansen, an instructor at the Don Bosco Community Center in Kansas City, Missouri. Read this article by The Associated Press.