‘I was a teacher for 17 years, but I couldn’t read or write’ | SENTENCE MINING 07

1. I lived in fear that he would call on me, every week I was terrified, but I had a backup plan.
2. If he had called on me I was going to get out of my chair and take two steps, grab my chest, drop to the floor and hope they called 911. 
3. Whatever it took not to get caught, and I never got caught.
4. I didn't belong in the classroom, I was trespassing. I wasn't supposed to be there and sometimes what I was doing made me physically sick, but I was trapped, I couldn't tell anybody.
5. I got married while I was a teacher. Getting married is a sacrament, it's a commitment to be truthful with another person and this was the first time I thought, "OK, I'm going to trust this person, I'm going to tell her."
6. So we got married and we had a child and years later it really came home to her.
7. I was reading to our three-year-old daughter. We read to her routinely, but I wasn't really reading, I was making the stories up - stories that I knew, like Goldilocks and The Three Bears, I just added drama to them.
8. My wife heard me trying to read from a child's book and that was the first time that it dawned on her. I had been asking her to do all this writing for me, helping me write things for school, and then she finally realised, how deep and severe this was.
9. But nothing was said, there was no confrontation, she just carried on helping me get by.
10. It didn't relieve anything because in my gut I felt dumb and I felt like a fake.