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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Helping students through "an exciting time in their lives": Pam Rose, left, Learning Center director, with tutor Linda Marion. |
Embracing success
One alumna and her parents remain forever grateful for the Learning Center’s presence on campus.
Mary Hunt Prekop ’89 arrived at Wooster with a nagging fear that she really didn’t belong in college. The third daughter of two proud Wooster alumni, she was articulate and charming. She could boast of a 4.0 grade point average, but that was at an inner-city high school in Chicago where she sat elbow-to-elbow with students who could not read.
Midway through her first semester, Prekop’s fear mutated to panic. Despite three years of Spanish in high school and tutoring with an upperclass student, she was failing Spanish 101.
"My professor finally asked me
how many years I had taken Spanish. ‘Something’s not right, this isn’t normal,’ he told me."
The professor sent Prekop to the Learning Center. Staff members arranged for her to be tested for aptitude, then for performance. The results showed a classic disconnect between the two. Despite her intelligence, Prekop’s brain doesn’t process auditory information very well, for one thing. She has trouble retaining what she reads in black-and-white print. Her spelling "is permanently stuck at the fourth-grade level." The diagnosis: dyslexia.
Prekop still struggles to express the impact of that diagnosis.
"It was enlightening. Mind blowing. All your life you have felt stupid, as if you were playing a charade," she remembers. "And then you have someone tell you, ‘It’s your brain, there are just certain things that are hard for you.’"
At the center, Prekop learned pains-taking strategies such as taping all of the lectures in her classes, then listening to them slowly while taking notes with a multicolored pen, "so it wouldn’t all sound like ‘blah blah blahbety-blah blah.’
"What sticks in my mind about the Learning Center is a sense of calm, a sense of serenity. The staff was fabulous, committed to getting us through school. They planted the seeds for helping me cope, teaching me that there are tools I can use."
An urban studies major, Prekop used her I.S. and an internship experience to land a position as executive director of a Main Street development program right out of Wooster. Now married and the mother of two, she has moved from nonprofits to furniture making to property management, her self-confidence growing stronger all the while.
"It’s OK to say I’m dyslexic, but I’m also very smart," she says. "Don’t underestimate me."
Similar success stories fill the backs of postcards and wedding photos pinned to the center’s bulletin boards. The tutors are proud of Whit Schofield ’03, a biology major who has accepted a full doctoral fellowship from Yale University to study molecular cell biology.
Most Learning Center students see completing I.S. as one of their greatest accomplishments. A year after he graduated, Pilachowski hiked the entire Appalachian Trail in five months, but he ranks that achievement second to his I.S. He works as a mortgage banker, where his flexible schedule suits him. His newest goal is to wean himself from medication for ADD after almost twenty years (see "It’s All in Your Head," page 25).
By all accounts, the Learning Center staff keep their focus on each student’s abilities, not disabilities. Students and faculty members have never heard a student say that he or she felt stigmatized by using the center’s services. Once out of Wooster, however, things don’t always feel the same. A fear of being labeled or questioned because they process information differently than others – what so many of these students experienced in their elementary and secondary education – may creep into their workplaces. One alumna earned a Ph.D. and teaches at a large university, but she won’t talk about her learning disability until she earns tenure.
Others put their experiences at the Learning Center into practice. Jesse Buell ’98 and Lisa Beam ’01 translate the skills they gained at the Learning Center to classroom work.
"On the first day of school, I ask how many kids think that when I write ‘study for a test’ on the board it means they have no homework," laughs Buell, who teaches sixth grade in Massachusetts. "Three-quarters of them raise their hands. So I teach them how to study."
Beam is studying for a master’s in teaching at John Carroll University. Fellow grad students admire her color-coded folders and other organizational strategies. Noticing that her lesson plans are ready a week in advance, they ask her for tips.
Mary Cotton, by the way, passed her orals in mid-April and loved the I.S. process. She hopes to work on getting her study published. She plans to work with autistic students in the younger grades. She has caught up on her sleep and is "forever indebted" to Donna Walls and the Learning Center.
"So many times we look at these students and try to tell them, these might be your last four years of academic work," Walls says. "Then you’re going to go out there and live! And they’re so successful."
