Fred Maloy has had to cut back on many of his activities, like driving, due to his Parkinson’s disease. But as far as reading goes, he devotes several hours a day to improving his reading.
Fred will be 80 this summer. Before he retired, he could not read. Even when he was a foreman on the job, no one knew he could not read. In his early 70s he decided to come to Dover Adult Learning Center, where he got special one-on-one tutoring for reading. Now, slowly but surely, he reads stories in the workbooks that his tutor provides for him. He is always amazed when he can easily read long words like apartment and newspaper, but struggles to decode short, common words like what and where. He knows that he has dyslexia, a word processing disability, but he knows that he is now actually reading. That’s rewarding enough to someone who once was illiterate.