Challenges interrupted her first attempts
Wendy Baber tried three times to finish a two-year degree in nursing. Three times she dropped out, sometimes in happiness at the birth of a child and sometimes as a result of heartbreak. Then an advisor with UNCG's Professions in Deafness told her, “You’re not supposed to be a nurse, you’re a teacher.” Soon afterwards in January, 2006, she enrolled in the Auditory-Oral/ Birth-Kindergarten Teacher Licensure program; she completed her degree in December 2008.
Wendy had taken her first college courses while still in high school, prerequisites for entering Gaston College’s nursing program. Over the course of the next five years, she would drop out and return to school three different times, as she married, started a family, and moved to Winston-Salem for her husband to take a job at Wake Forest University and enter the evening MBA program there.
Her young family had welcomed their third child and was meeting the customary challenges of work, school, family life, and Wendy’s class schedule at Forsyth Tech, when unimaginable tragedies struck: the new baby, Nicholas, was puzzlingly sick and five-year-old Noelle was diagnosed with a brain tumor. “We went from managing school, sports, and dance schedules, to scheduling surgeries, going to radiation treatments five days each week, and providing nursing care, as we tried to keep our children alive,” Wendy recalls.
She stopped school and put her nursing training to use to help her own children. The family commuted to hospitals in Chapel Hill and Cincinnati, Ohio, where Wendy and Noelle stayed at the Ronald McDonald house hoping for a liver transplant for Nicholas, who had been diagnosed with liver disease. Her husband, Van, and oldest child, Nathan, commuted back and forth each weekend. But within the next year, Wendy and her family faced the devastating sadness of losing first Nicholas and then Noelle within four months of one another.
Developed an interest in hearing loss
In the grief and heartache that followed, Wendy concluded that a career in Nursing would now be too difficult for her emotionally, but she still sustained the dream of finishing her schooling. She had developed an interest in hearing loss, suffered by both of her sick children, and began looking for programs in this field. She decided she wanted to work with young children with hearing loss who were acquiring spoken language.
When Wendy talked with an advisor about the Oral-Auditory/ Birth-Kindergarten Licensure curriculum, she knew she had found her program. “I want the doors to close immediately if this is not going to work,” she thought. But the doors stayed open. She qualified for Financial Aid, and everything fell into place for her to begin, even with the demands of a commute from Winston-Salem and a new toddler at home, one-year old, Gabrielle.
The Auditory-Oral/Birth-Kindergarten curriculum is actually a double major: Wendy is licensed to teach both typically-developing and disabled children from birth-Kindergarten and hearing-impaired children from Kindergarten-12th grade. Her courses included a rigorous 53-hour sequence in Specialized Education Services, where she learned about auditory and language development in young children and how those who are deaf or hard of hearing can master spoken Standard English. She took a dozen additional courses in related areas: Audiology, Human Development and Family Studies, Speech Pathology, and Social Work. “It’s not fair; you’re teasing us!” Wendy recalls telling her advisor, as she became fascinated with each of these fields in turn.
Scheduling was a challenge
“Your education is what you make of it,” Wendy affirms, “While in school, I pursued every avenue I could.” One of her most powerful springboards to learning was her willingness to say, “I don’t understand.” “I don’t understand how cochlear implants work,” she told one professor, who then arranged for her to scrub in at a local hospital in order to watch a surgery where the devices were implanted. When she acknowledged, “I don’t understand the Envoy,” she was given the e-mail address for the first person in the country to receive this new hearing device so she could learn about it firsthand through a face-to-face interview.
The complexity of her subject area was just one of many challenges for Wendy and her family. In addition to her commute and a heavy class load (she took from 12 to 15 hours each semester, sometimes including summer school), Wendy’s program required several practicum experiences leading up to a semester of student teaching. For one of these, she drove an extra hour and a half to work with the best people she could find in her field. “That semester, I would drive to Chapel Hill to start my practicum at 7:30 a.m., get back to campus for a class from 4 to 8, and perhaps go to the grocery store on my way home to Winston-Salem,” she recalls.
Finding time for group work also meant challenges for an already tight schedule: “I volunteered to do all the power points if my group members would agree to work by e-mail,” she remembers. “I looked for other adult students or very flexible traditional students if there was a choice in selecting group members.”
The whole family pitched in to make the demanding schedule work. “My husband was as ‘on board’ as I was,” Wendy recalls. “His favorite saying was ‘It’s short-term.’” Some nights “dinner on the table” meant carryout from McDonald’s. “When things were stressful, we had to prioritize and decide what was most important for this week, or even break it down to what was most important for this day,” Wendy remembers. “It’s not just my degree; it’s our degree,” she concludes. “We all sacrificed.”
Adult students are “more brave, more forthcoming” when working with professors, Wendy observes. “You shouldn’t compete with anyone else in your class; you push yourself hard because you’re competing within yourself.” Wendy was especially gratified when information she worked on became available to others; such as a blog about cochlear implants she developed early in her studies. In another class, a paper she wrote became part of her professor’s presentation at a national conference. “I felt my education was for me to mold,” Wendy says, “I took it as putty and shaped it.”
Found a home in the classroom
After three years, Wendy graduated with a 4.0 GPA. She actually has more A+’s than A’s on her transcript. At graduation she had three job offers awaiting her, two in a nearby county, where she had completed one of her student teaching assignments, and one in Winston-Salem. “My principal in Winston-Salem held a job open for me during my last semester, and that’s the one I took.” “I love it,” she says with satisfaction, “the school could not be more welcoming, and the leadership has been outstanding.”
Wendy works in the mornings in a high-poverty elementary school, teaching a class of young children as a group and also working with them in individual therapy sessions. “We teach our children to use their amplification to listen so they can learn to speak,” she says. “Just as other body parts atrophy if not used regularly, so does the auditory nerve. The children have to remind themselves to listen in order to process information. They then learn to put sounds together so they can speak. It requires full commitment from all professionals involved, the child, and the family in order for this to work properly.”
In addition to assessing and assisting each child in her classroom, Wendy also teaches parents how to help their child acquire spoken language. Sometimes this means starting her day at 7 a.m. to meet a parent before work. In the afternoons, she travels between schools and meets individually with older students. She hopes to foster self-advocacy so that these students will get the support they need to manage their hearing impairments not only in the school setting, but also in their lives beyond school.
Wendy stays in touch with her professors and has found them available to answer her questions as she begins her new professional career. “In school, the apron strings were still attached. Now I’ve had to cut the apron strings. UNCG did as much to prepare me for the workforce as it possibly could,” she affirms.
Wendy’s professors have encouraged her to think about graduate school, and she is considering a variety of programs at UNCG including Special Ed, Birth-Kindergarten, and Speech Pathology. For now, though, the responsibilities of a demanding new job and a full family life will keep her busy as she takes some time to get her feet on the ground before committing to additional schooling.
“I could not have been more delighted with my program,” Wendy says. “I was totally immersed in all it offered. For me, my education was truly a gift.” That gift now enables her to give, in turn, to her students and their families.
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Page updated: 06-May-2009
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