After three attempts, Margaret Wilson is coming close to passing her high school equivalency exam. Under the tutelage of a series of instructors, she has narrowed her margin of failure to a slim six points. “I’m down to my writing skills,” she says, meaning a 200-word essay she has had trouble with. “I’ll pass next time.”
She displays no sense of superiority toward her students. “It’s not because I’m smarter that I’m helping,” Wilson says. “I don’t feel smarter or dumber. Fact is, the men and women I tutor may have gone farther in school than I did. But maybe they forgot some things. Lots of times neither of us can figure out a word, so we’ll go to the dictionary together.”
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So Wilson’s tutoring comes in handy.
A newspaper is a luxury. “I don’t have change to buy one every day,” Wilson reports, “but if I have the money I’ll buy the Defender or the Wall Street Journal. Every once in a blue moon I go out to Oak Park and sit down in the Sizzler or the Arby’s there with the Wall Street Journal. I don’t know nothing about stocks–the markets aren’t half as interesting to me as the stories they got on the front page.”
Despite their best efforts, Ward and his staffers have been hobbled in their mission by the realities of life at Stateway. “We’ve had no incident here,” says Ward, “but I just got a call this morning from one of our students, for instance. She won’t be coming today, she said–one of her grandsons was shot over the weekend.” Many people Wilson knows are afraid to come to the literacy center. “See that field out there?” she says, motioning out the window. “Who wants to cross it if there’s gang action going on?”
It is Ward who now guides Wilson in studying for her GED exam. When she passes, Wilson–who wants to become a teacher or child psychologist–plans to continue tutoring others. “A lot of people come in here because they see kids coming over,” she says. “Or they see people like me. They discover that they can come, too, instead of wasting time watching TV. This is here for them, but they have to decide to come, just like I did.”
