A calm man in a quiet room teaches immigrants English

After three degrees, after five universities, after 40,000 pupils, and after 84 years, 10 months and 25 days, John Kuhlman has circumnavigated his way back to the essentials of education: a teacher and a student in a room.

Decades ago, he was a student, the 6-year-old son of a wheat farmer in eastern Washington, going to a school that fit all 12 grades under a single roof. Now, Kuhlman is the teacher, sovereign of a single room in the inconspicuous brick headquarters of an adult English-literacy program here in Asheville, North Carolina. The adult seated just inches from Kuhlman, Raul Funes, had come after working an overnight shift doing maintenance at an inn and then attending a morning class at a local technical college.

No pedagogical technique explains why Kuhlman sat so close to Funes, or why he peered so insistently into his student’s face. Forty years ago, while he was a charismatic professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kuhlman had begun inexplicably to lose his hearing. Disability enabled ability, or at least affinity. For the last four years, Kuhlman has been teaching immigrants to read and write English, to listen and speak. In 90-minute individual lessons, Kuhlman currently tutors 17 students in a week, from Mexico, Thailand, Ecuador, China, El Salvador and Ukraine. Read his story in The New York Times online.