Marcie’s Inspiration: Keep Your Dreams to Yourself

I was having a conversation with my friend who supports me in his own way. He does listen and provides feedback, but I am going to remove him from my list of people who I share my dreams with.

Dream Killer

I was telling him that I am going to provide writing training to corporations. He said, “Well, I haven’t seen many people in corporate America who couldn’t write.” Of course, you wouldn’t. First of all, employee correspondence tend to go through supervisors for approval. If their superiors lack writing skills, they have their superior to review it. Other than a poorly written e-mail every now and then, you may never know who really lack writing skills in the workplace.

Then he said, “I don’t think that’s a good market.” Really???

Note: This is a long post. You can skip the Literacy Facts and go down to Keep Your Dream.

Literacy Facts

Consider these facts from ProLiteracy:

Literacy is the ability to read, write, compute, and use technology at a level that enables an individual to reach his or her full potential as a parent, employee, and community member.

• There are 774 million adults around the world who are illiterate in their native languages.
• Two-thirds of the world’s illiterate adults are women.
• In the U.S., 30 million people over age 16 — 14 percent of the country’s adult population — don’t read well enough to understand a newspaper story written at the eighth grade level or fill out a job application.
• The United States ranks fifth on adult literacy skills when compared to other industrialized nations.
• Adult low literacy can be connected to almost every socio-economic issue in the United States:
  • More than 60 percent of all state and federal corrections inmates can barely read and write.
  • Low health literacy costs between $106 billion and $238 billion each year in the U.S. — 7 to 17 percent of all annual personal health care spending.
  • Low literacy’s effects cost the U.S. $225 billion or more each year in non-productivity in the workforce, crime, and loss of tax revenue due to unemployment.

There are many high educated and degreed people who can’t write a sentence let alone an entire paper. This is not an assumption; it is fact.

I attended a Chicago Public School Board meeting this week, and posted the following information on Shorty: Your Chicago South Side Resource.

• There are 283 schools on probation – 207 elementary schools and 76 high schools. That’s more than half of the high schools in the city.
• 72 schools have been on probation for 5 years in a row and 16 have been on probation for 15 years in a row.
• Over a 20- year period, there has been no improvement in African American and Hispanic reading. There has been an incremental improvement in math.
• There is a widening gap in reading and math scores between white and black and Hispanic students.
• Only 7.9% of Chicago’s 11th graders are college ready.
  

So, you do know that the 7.9% is out of 100% of the students who tend to stay in school???? And only 57.5% of these students graduate.

Keep Your Dream

The moral of this long blog post is this:

1. You have to keep your dreams to yourself. Even your most well-intentioned people will not understand. Find a few people who are where you want to be and ask them to be mentors or sounding boards.
2. If there is something you want to do, research it. Do not give up prior to checking it out. You may find that what you wan to do is not a viable idea for one particular group and is a grand idea for another.
3. If you want to conduct any type of writing training, now is the the time to do it. We are working with low literacy rates along with text messaging and other anti-writing vices. And, there are world-wide opportunities.
4. Remember, you are seeing with spiritual vision, not natural vision. If you can see your dream, then what other people say does not matter.

Sorry for being so winded in this message, but I am certain that someone else could use this message at this time. If this is you, keep your eyes on your prize and keep on moving.

What’s your dream killer story?

Images: jessicavacco, thecubiclechick, wce.wwu