SE Community, Classes Are a Study in Fresh Starts

And for now, at least, anything is possible.

Learning How to Learn

Professor Kevin Washington, the one who asked about the goals, told the class to hold on to those answers and not to lose sight of them, because that's what would carry them through. He preached, cajoled and riffed his way through class. The students were rapt, taking notes, repeating phrases, responding to his calls. "Sometimes we can major in . . . ," he said, and the class boomed, "Minors." He was teaching them how to learn: how to set priorities, how to manage time, how to keep focused. How to be students.

In the next class, psychology professor Satira Streeter was teaching about learning, too. She told them about Pavlov's dogs and her dog Leo. She explained the different ways that learning is reinforced, according to one theory.

Variable-ratio schedules are like slot machines, she said -- you never know just when the reward is coming. "That's the most resilient" type of learning, she said.

"Like shoplifting," Wright said, and the class cracked up. "People never know when they're going to get away with it."

Streeter pushed the students to explain things she expected them to know for an upcoming exam: What is the difference between applied and basic research? What are the parts of neurons?

Streeter sent Wright down the hall and told the rest of the students that they would teach her to pick up only certain shapes from a pile. It was an experiment designed to show how learning happens -- but in this case, it didn't, since Wright didn't get the pattern. They got the point, though, and laughed, and Streeter ended with "Call all your friends that aren't here tonight!"

A couple of weeks into class, and they were all old friends already.

Somehow the mix of nurturing -- Wright's math class started with subtraction, she says, and the professor didn't even make them feel stupid -- high expectations and badgering seems to be working. "It's kind of contagious," Wright said. "You start believing, 'Maybe I can do this.' "

Besides, she said, "I feel like if I give up, they're going to come after me."

She knew what she wanted to do: in the long term, have a career as a counselor, working with women who have been abused and teenage moms.

And in the short term, she was going to bust an A.

So as the students were leaving that night, walking back out into the old neighborhood, she said, "Who wants to get together and study for psychology?"

Staff writer Del Quentin Wilber contributed to this report.