John Corcoran taught high school social studies, bookkeeping and P.E. for 17 years despite being illiterate, the former teacher says.
As a student, Corcoran acted up to hide his problems.
“My parents came to school and it no longer was a problem for me reading because this boy Johnnie the — native alien I call him — he didn’t have a reading problem as far as the teachers were concerned. He had an emotional problem. He had a psychological problem. He had a behavioral problem,” said Corcoran.
He cheated his way through high school and college, earning a degree in education and business. (One strategy: Date the valedictorian.)
For 17 years Corcoran taught high school for the Oceanside (California) School District. Relying on teacher’s assistants for help and oral lesson plans, he said he did a great job at teaching his students.
“What I did was I created an oral and visual environment. There wasn’t the written word in there. I always had two or three teacher’s assistants in each class to do board work or read the bulletin,” said Corcoran.
Corcoran left teaching to work successfully as a real estate developer. At the age of 48, he worked with a tutor to raise his reading level from second grade to sixth grade; later he worked intensively to reach 12th-grade reading and writing skills. He’s written a book called The Teacher Who Couldn’t Read and started the John Corcoran Foundation, which funds tutoring programs and advocates for teaching phonemic awareness to beginning readers.
I once volunteered as a judge in a writing contest for women who were learning to read while in prison. A number of the women — all of whom struggled with writing skills — had graduated from high school; one had a college degree. They did a lot of oral reports, they said. These days, the illiterates are making posters and getting credit for group projects.
Amazing. I can’t figure out how they pass written tests.
I had a fifth grade teacher who was close to illiterate and couln’t do math..
She HADN’T passed the written test–she’d failed it for 5 years straight, but she was still teaching on a probationary license.
And this was in Montgomery Co., MD, supposedly one of the best systems in the country.
(But it was at a predominently poor, mostly minority school. So we all got shafted….)
I am guessing he wasn’t the Language Arts teacher?
)
I am all for people finding their “knack” in life. Of course, someone who is gifted in teaching doesn’t necessarily need to be a good writer or reader. But are we all okay with the cheating part?
I wonder what the students he taught over seventeen years though of him as a teacher as well as in comparison to their other teachers?
This is really a management failure. How could this guy’s principal not notice that he never read or wrote? Were there no written evaluations to respond to? What process hired someone who couldn’t fill out the application – or the W2 form? In 17 years, this guy never had to attend any kind of continuing education program that involved a written form or test?
Shameful is the first word that comes to mind.
Rob’s questions are directly on target. Similarly, the guy had to either sign his paychecks or fill out direct-deposit papaerwork. Someone did that for him?
Oh, and lemme see, he taught social studies and bookkeeping? In college, he passed the test out the window for some friend to answer — and he did this in every class?
I smell the odor of bullshit here. OTOH, he is flogging a book, so…
The book was published six years ago.
> I smell the odor of bullshit here.
Then you haven’t knowingly spent much time with adult illiterates.
The really sad fact is that the degree of cleverness and the amount of work necessary to obscure their illiteracy would allow them to easily become literate.
It looks like he was in HS and college in the 50’s, so maybe it was easier for a motivated person to cheat. (And, given that he was on an athletic scholarship at a small college in TX in the 50’s, maybe his cheating was sort of overlooked.
The teaching part is still pretty unbelievable, though.
I don’t know how common this is, but my two sons had an elementary teacher (teaching a combined 4th-5th grade class) who was almost complete innumerate.
She made almost no attempt to teach arithmetic, and it became an almost weekly chore to make the trek to school with mis-graded tests.
The principals de jour (they didn’t seem to stay long) were clearly aware of the problem, but one told me her hands were tied by the district. I can’t say that the rest of her lessons were much better. She was really big on ‘projects’ and ‘group work’ to fill class time and avoid any hint of real instruction.
Another of the reasons why meaningful reform isn’t happening.
So maybe he was a superb visual or kinaesthetic learner and his whole teaching career was dedicated to students like himself. My principal would probably like this guy because of the projects he could unleash on his students. He could do wonderfully wordless PowerPoints all day and all year and post his kids’ visual projects around the classroom. The CTA could showcase his room in its magazine. He could do a lot of neat stuff with the “technology” our district has invested in, and this would be great for the kids that come to class without paper, pens or pencils in spite of the fact that our school shelled out $20,000 to buy every kid a notebook, paper, dividers, pens, pencils and other schoolkid paraphenalia because “they don’t know how to organize themselves for school.” See, he would be “impacting” the kids on their level without doing the gut-wrenching work of trying to lift them to a higher level.
Anyhow, I’ve found that most of our Spanish teachers are semi-literate in English, being native Spanish speakers that never quite learned how to write or think. I say that because writing, more than anything else, reveals the quality of one’s thinking, and based on our Spanish teachers’ emails…well, let me just say that their emails are long on aimless rambling and short on spelling, punctuation, sentence structure and grammar. But, hey, they teach Spanish, not English.
“These days, the illiterates are making posters and getting credit for group projects.”
What a sound observation and mommies wonder why I don’t have posters and projects in HS. No one learns anything.
Gee, BadaBing, are you saying that I got thru high school, worked like a sonofabitch to pay my own way thru a state college, and have had a couple of successful careers because I (or my parents) had to buy my own supplies in the Des Moines school system in the late 40s and early 50s before we moved to California and I was exposed to a frankly substandard elementary/secondary school system?
If that’s true, you’re right, but it had nothing to do with the then-and-now-execrable California school system.
Bill
so, if he couldn’t read, how did he KNOW any social studies? What he’d heard others tell him? Saw in movies? i know, I know, social studies isn’t history, so he didn’t need to know any history, and whatever social studies is, didn’t require reading…
BadaBing:
You are probably right in everything you say.
But, if I were you, I’d seriously consider a change in employment (either a different school, district, or career).
Your views as expressed seem to represent someone who is seriously burnt out. I think you are doing yourself and your environment (students, colleagues, etc.) a disservice with your current attitude.
Find another way to excel, impact, soar.
You (apparently) think you have superior skills that are not being utilized — and you are probably right (in my experience, that is most often the case). Now you owe it to yourself to find an outlet for your talents; you obviously have a lot to offer and could positively impact many students/colleagues. Expend your energy to build up yourself and those around you.
how good can his book be if he’s only on a 12th grade reading level? that is, if he really wrote it…
The general disrespectful tone of the above postings make it clear to me why most adult illiterates take great pains to hide their disability. I think the posters would be more understanding of a teacher who admitted drinking on the job.
I don’t believe it’s BS. I think it’s something we’d like to think is BS. Remember, “Carlsbad City Library literacy coordinator Carrie Scott said people of all walks of life go through the reading program, including teachers.”
How many teachers, especially in the early grades, are functionally illiterate? How can they teach reading, when they can’t read themselves? And, a further thought, is the influx of technology in the classroom making it easier for teachers to hide illiteracy?
JuliaK, while I can only speak for myself, I think you miss the point.
The object of anger and outrage is not the idea, per se, of an illiterate adult. It is the fact that he essentially committed a fraud in holding a post and taking money for something he was arguably not capable of doing: classroom teaching.
Moreover, if his story is true, then those who really belong in the pillory are the “educators” who hired him, allowed him to continue in the system with no review whatsoever, gave him tenure, and further, allowed him to continue in the face of what must have been annual parents’ complaints. (And there must have been complaints. Alternatively, we must believe that no one ever caught on, and no one ever asked serious questions about this man or his performance during the 17 years or so that he took money under false pretenses.)
There are serious questions to be asked of his story, of course; you can read some of them in this thread. I find the entire story dubious. If it’s true, then there is indeed cause for outrage.
“The really sad fact is that the degree of cleverness and the amount of work necessary to obscure their illiteracy would allow them to easily become literate.”
An illiterate adult that is intelligent enough to work as a teacher and real estate developer by definition has a reading disability. While they can be remediated, it certainly isn’t easy for most of them.
I understood your point. I’m more outraged about the fact that our school system produces illiterate adults. How many children who act up in classrooms are making the choice to present themselves as ill behaved, rather than stupid? How many have not been taught to read? Whole language is entrenched in our school systems. Note that his parents tried to help, but their visit to school led to the school passing him along from grade to grade, ““My parents came to school and it no longer was a problem for me reading because this boy Johnnie the — native alien I call him — he didn’t have a reading problem as far as the teachers were concerned. He had an emotional problem. He had a psychological problem. He had a behavioral problem.”
Being unable to read doesn’t mean that he couldn’t teach. Some of the best lectures I’ve attended in my life were performed by professors without notes, and without visual aids. The Socratic method doesn’t stop for students to write down their responses. It seems he’s an intelligent person who couldn’t read, not someone who was unable to learn to read. After 17 years of teaching, he did seek out tutors, and did learn to read.
As for the questions raised about his story, illiterate adults find ways to cope. It’s probably harder to pick out illiterate adults in professions such as teaching because you’re not looking for it. He probably didn’t have sterling grades, but he had a college degree during a teacher shortage. Employment forms can be filled out at home. I remember a time when many forms had to be typewritten, so of course an applicant could pick up forms at the office, and bring them back filled out.
As for the book, I think the nonfiction, celebrity life story, and personal self-help genres are to a great degree written by ghostwriters.
Bill Leonard said, I smell the odor of bullshit here. OTOH, he is flogging a book, so…
Bill is exactly right. There is NO evidence that the individual was indeed illiterate. What we know is that he SAYS he was illiterate. It’s the newest trick that works so well in our media-obssesed, victimological culture: I know one because I am one. Come on, folks. What he did was write a book in which he presented NO objective evidence that he was illiterate. He then publicized the book. What does he gain? Money. Not a dumb man.
JuliaK, you’re outraged that the ed system produces illiterate adults, yet not very bothered by an illiterate teacher. Perhaps the two are connected? He probably gave passing grades to illiterate students, no doubt out of sympathy and guilt. I have about as much sympathy for him as for a drunk who’s driving a school bus. He didn’t have to choose a profession where he’d inflict his problem on future generations.