Getting the Whole Story

by Cynthia Sullivan, RPR

I am currently providing CART services to a hearing-impaired college student named Michael, at Iona College in New Rochelle, New York. He is in his junior year. This is the first time Michael has had a CART provider; his previous two years of school were with a medium called C-print. C-print is a method of note taking that summarizes the class lecture. With CART, the student sees a nearly verbatim version of what is transpiring in class.

After our first class, Michael told me he never realized how much the professors actually talk. With C-print he would get about four pages of notes for a one-hour class; with CART he gets about 25 pages for every hour of class time. One of the advantages of CART is when he sees that a professor stays on one topic for seven or eight pages, he realizes it is one of the more important points. He also gets the benefit of actually seeing the professor repeat the exact same thing several times; an additional clue that that information is very important. With C-print whatever was mentioned was only ever mentioned once with very little or no distinction between what was of the utmost importance compared with a professor's passing thought.

We have a three-hour business law class with a very interesting and entertaining teacher who uses stories and joke-telling to drive home his points. He is really almost like a comedian. Michael has the benefit, because of CART, of enjoying this class in a way that previously only the hearing students could enjoy. Michael told me that with C-print when the other students laughed during class, he never knew why because the C-print operator didn't write down anything unless it related to the course material. Michael is able to pick up nuances of speech and even voice inflections (because a CART provider can include parenthetical notes indicating such things) that he otherwise would miss. Michael is extremely happy with CART and says it has changed his whole idea of what college is and how to be a successful student.

Please allow us to spread the opportunity to as many deaf and hearing-impaired students as possible.