Real Help

This blog gets a little repetitive for some people. I spend a lot of time being awfully rah-rah-rah, in my efforts to support non-traditional students who are considering going back to school. The fact is, though, that I needed (and sometimes still need) a lot of support, and I don't want anyone to miss out on learning just because no one is standing right there at the registrar's office yelling, "Sign up! Do it now!"

I realize, though, that some non-trads will never consider going back to school because they think they may have a learning disability, vision problems, attention deficits, or really bad writing habits. That's a shame, because the modern university, as well as most community colleges, offers support for people who have a steeper hill to climb than many of us.

At St. Martin's University, we have the Learning and Writing Center; the equivalent facility is right in the center of things on the University of Washington campus. Besides the usual tutoring in math, philosophy, the sciences, and Japanese, French, German, and English, these centers also offer supportive services for all kinds of learning problems. They also offer peer readers, to help students turn out writing assignments, but for now, let's talk about the support.

Suppose you have dyslexia, and it's pretty severe. Depending on your needs and preferences, at a learning center you can complete testing to make sure that's the issue, rather than an eye problem; get help with taking class notes; learn how to work with your professors to arrange for more time to take tests or turn in papers; train to use software that translates your spoken words into computerized text; learn how to adapt Word and other software to your needs; and work with tutors and peer readers to manage your workload.

From working with a few students last semester, I know that learning disabilities do not mean that a person is stupid -- far from it. A particular student mathematician comes to mind: he's a brilliant logician and understands the whole of the mathematics syllabus without a single problem. However, he cannot spell or write down a coherent sentence on his own. The challenges of academic English leave him anxious and frustrated. I can't say that working with the student peer readers and tutors in the Learning Center has solved all his problems, but the Center has helped, and he'll be back in school this fall, instead of quitting his studies way short of his potential to do good things for the world.

In talking about non-trads with the staff at the Learning Center, I found out that many older students just don't use the services very much, even though the cost of them is included in the tuition. If using a tool from the Learning Center, whether it's time management or a sophisticated software system, is the difference between an A and dropping out again, isn't it wiser to reach out for that tool?

While you're on campus, looking over the layout of the buildings or signing up for this fall's classes, stop by your school's Learning Center. It could unlock a lot of mysteries for you when school starts.

Brains Change

A friend from Seattle stopped by Saturday (hey, Karen!). Our chat made me realize just how much my brain has changed since June, when I quit my job and moved to Olympia to get ready for school. Nothing against working, but I'm beginning to believe that being in not-quite-the-right-job made me a little fuzzy. I wasn't learning new information on a daily or hourly basis in the last several jobs, and much of the intellectual stimulation was in the way of irritation, rather than discovery.

Being back in school after all this time makes me feel a little more awake. New information presented in new language keeps showing up every day, and my brain is running twice as fast as ever before to keep up. So far, this is pretty good.

(English majors, please note: the preceding paragraph is brought to you by "sandwiching," a concept that was breezily brought up in passing in ENG 203 last week.)

Another change is showing up in my spoken vocabulary: I no longer edit what I'm saying to make sure people understand me. If the right word, no matter how long, shows up in my brain during a conversation, I no longer need to mentally dig up synonyms. One of my classmates mentioned how liberating it is for her to be out of high school and in an environment where either everyone knows all the words, or knows how to get definitions out of online or paper dictionaries.

Some things about my brain have not and will not change, of course. I still have dyslexia, and the math gene simply is nowhere in my genome. Nonetheless, I'm finding new ways around these problems, to reinforce the techniques I've used over the years, so these handicaps don't have as much of a chance to hold me back.

Whatever is holding you back from doing what you really want to do, try ignoring it for a while. Imagine doing what you really want to do, step by step. If you're looking at individual steps, your handicaps may not be stumbling blocks after all, and the process of changing may make those handicaps much smaller.

At least, that's what my brain thinks.