The Nation’s Oldest Student :: Mary Walker via Chapter16

The Nation’s Oldest Student

The Oldest Student

Rita Lorraine Hubbard shares the remarkable life of Mary Walker, who learned to read at age 116

Chapter16: 1.07.2020 by Julie Danielson

Born into slavery in Alabama in the mid-19th century, Mary Walker was freed at the age of 15, moved to Chattanooga in 1917, and learned to read at the extraordinary age of 116. “You’re never too old to learn,” she famously remarked. Author Rita Lorraine Hubbard brings Mary’s inspiring story to young readers in her new picture book biography, The Oldest Student: How Mary Walker Learned to Read.

Dubbed “the nation’s oldest student” by the U.S. Department of Education, Mary — who lived through 26 presidents, outlived her entire family, and eventually became a Chattanooga icon — “studied the alphabet until her eyes watered” at well past the age of 100. As a former slave, once forbidden to learn reading and writing, she finally met her lifelong goal and proudly read from the Bible given to her as a teen by a woman who had told her, “Your civil rights are in these pages.”

Hubbard fleshes out Mary’s extraordinary life in this reverent and loving tribute, illustrated in layered, textured collage art by Caldecott Honoree Oge Mora. On the book’s first spread, Hubbard writes that Mary, as an enslaved girl, watched the swallows soar through the sky and wondered: “That must be what it’s like to be free.” Throughout the book, Mora repeatedly pictures these birds in flight, a symbol of Mary’s freedom and her invincible spirit.  READ MORE >>

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Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 13.4

Lexical Density: 70.6%

Total word count 221

Unique word count 156

15 hard words

Sentence count 8

Average sentence length 27.6