Talk to Wooster
Spring 2004
Empowering Learners
They teach note-taking. They laugh. They recommend sleep. The tutors at the Learning Center know how to help students navigate the hazards of academia.
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Mary Cotton ’04, left, works on I.S. with tutor Donna Walls. |
Support, not coddling
Any early resistance to the center seemed to relax once faculty members saw how the tutoring was integrated into the academic program. Whether identified with a disability or not, struggling students learned strategies to help them grasp course material. But the tutors never let them off the hook.
"What I appreciate about Pam (the center’s director since 1987) is that she doesn’t let a disability be an excuse. She tells students, ‘You have to learn to adapt and survive in the world,’" says John Ramsey (mathematics).
Denise Bostdorff (communication) agrees: "The Learning Center staff are very encouraging. But they don’t let anybody be coddled. They say, ‘You’ve got to show up to class, do the reading, do the work.’"
For students with ADD or ADHD, the independence of college can spell trouble. Suddenly they face large blocks of unscheduled time, abundant distractions, and irregular sleeping habits. Even a lecture hall filled with other students can be distracting.
"When I took exams in a classroom with everyone fidgeting around me, I couldn’t concentrate very well," remembers Matt Pilachowski ’98, who was diagnosed with ADD in third grade (see "When Reading Almost Ruined Me," next page). "Especially when people started getting up to turn in their exams. I couldn’t remember anything then, because I’d be focusing on, ‘Oh my God, they’re already done.’"
Pilachowski opted, as many ADD students do, to take all his exams at the Learning Center. Other students choose the space for studying.
"I liked going there," says Dan Rosenbaum ’92, a studio art major and sociology minor. "I liked Pam, I liked the atmosphere. I spent a lot of time working on papers there. I knew I wasn’t alone, I had an advocate on my side.
"Pam helped me organize my thoughts," Rosenbaum says. "We’d sit down and she’d say, ‘OK, what do you want to write this paper about?’ And then she’d help me write an outline. She’d say, ‘By Wednesday, you should get these things done.’"
Loic Pritchett ’00, a political science major, remembers the endless hours that Rose spent working with him on vocabulary and grammar. She stressed repetition – "that’s how I learn everything," says Pritchett, whose ADHD was diagnosed in early elementary school. For him, the center was "this little utopia."
Mary Cotton feels that same understanding at the center. "I have a great group of friends, but this is a different kind of support. Donna asks me the exact right question to get out what I’m thinking."
Laughs and kicks in the pants
It’s no mystery why Rose, Walls, and Marion (and former colleague Royana Schultz, who died unexpectedly in 2001) build such a following of fans. The women exude the energy of people who love their jobs. They interrupt each other in their zeal to explain their work or tell a good story. They are successful, they say, because they truly get to know their students over the years and enjoy them, quirks and all.
"I have students who have to pace up and down in my office to think clearly," says Walls, "and one who would have to lie down on the floor with her eyes closed."
"We get these students in college, in a learning environment that isn’t as pedantic as high school was," says Marion. "The thinking process is valued more here. So we meet these students at an exciting time in their lives. And we get to watch over four years as they shed these notions of themselves as screw-ups."
"Sometimes that growth is almost physical," adds Rose.
The tutors stress self-advocacy, yet they will go out of their way to help students succeed. Matt Pilachowski admits that he was very good at leaving things until the last minute. "A few times I dropped a paper off at Donna’s house the night before it was due, and she would bring it in, ready to talk about it the next morning."
The tutors know when they can joke with their students and when to kick them in the pants. Humor usually helps. When things get a little tense, say around I.S. Monday, Rose brings out the Chief. She rescued the two-foot tall painted sculpture of a seated Indian chief from someone’s curbside trash. Come late March, the solemn Chief sits on the receptionist’s desk. His headdress sports yellow stickies with the names of Learning Center students who have turned in their I.S. projects.
Professors recognize the center’s staff as a resource.
"Their experience working with students who have all kinds of challenges to learning is a gold mine," says Susan Figge (German). She has sought the tutors’ expertise many times, because learning a foreign language can be especially difficult for students with dyslexia and ADD.
Fourteen years ago, a Brown University dean argued that learning disabled students benefit a school in part because they help faculty members improve their instructional methods. "Of necessity, dyslexic students exemplify the characteristics of self-awareness and careful deliberation that are hallmarks of a liberal arts education," Robert Shaw wrote in a 1990 Chronicle of Higher Education editorial. Methods that help dyslexic students – a clear structure of materials and assignments, presenting material in more than one mode, say visual and aural, and a chance for students to clarify points – would help all students, Shaw writes.
Ramsey, in mathematics, agrees. His sixteen years of teaching, together with parenting three children, have helped him recognize that all students learn mathematics differently. Students with learning disabilities "tend to be more methodical, slower in how they approach the work. They dot every i, show every step. Often they’re the students who are willing to work the hardest," he says.
