Information gathered during initial meeting

• Male, age 29, resides on his own.
• Divorced 4 years ago and has one son age 8 with whom he spends every third weekend.
• Attended high school until he was 16 but left due to poor attendance, lack of interest and failing grades.
• Worked in a beer manufacturing plant for 13 years and recently lost his job due to plant closure - he was making good money and is bitter about the plant closure.
• Over the past 6 months he has tried to get a "good paying job" at the local factories but they won't look at him since he doesn't have his Grade 12 diploma
• Tom often mentioned that it is the "company's" fault that he is in this situation.

Tom came to the learning centre to get high school upgrading. After 3 months he was close to dropping out because he was continually failing his written assignments. However, Tom's English teacher convinced him to give it another chance and referred him to the "literacy program" in the learning centre.

Information gathered through intake process

Academic:

• Tom moved twice during elementary school.
• He remembers not doing well in spelling tests when he wasn't given the opportunity to study the words.
• Tom doesn't recall any special testing, but he remembers a Grade 4 or 5 teacher telling him that he performed at a Grade 2 level in a spelling test - the results were just brushed off.
• Tom's teachers always said he kept messy notes and he often was told that he was rated lower on tests due to his spelling and writing, even though he knew the facts.