GetzScience

Thank you for the five years during which I was able to help students understand the information they needed to learn in various courses. This website is now defunct. The navigation bar will be removed soon. 

The company underwent reorganization and opted to increase expectations from its full-time employees, rather than keeping its part-time teachers.  I was released from my employment. I do not want to mention the name of the company here because I don't want to do or say anything that will get me in trouble. 

I was a part-time teacher because I have Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and, therefore, was not able to work a full-time position. I am paraplegic, which means my legs don't work. I have not been able to stand since 2017.  During my exit interview, human resources confirmed they would not be able to make accommodations for my disability, so even if I wanted a full-time position, it would not be possible.  For lawsuit-happy people, I have no intention of suing them over this quick comment.

If you found this page, it is because you followed a link to something at Getz Science. You should not be able to find this website in a Google search. Since you have this link, you know me in some way. The next parts are written with my disabled students in mind. 

Get documented with a learning disability or a physical disability before you leave the K-12 public school system. I’m unsure if private schools have the same legal requirements as public schools. You need this documentation because it will protect you. It is legal validation that will open doors for you, sometimes quite literally.  

I am sharing part of my history because I want students who struggle with memory or learning to understand that I've experienced similar challenges in processing information. When I was 20 years old, I was in college, and one morning, I woke up and my vision was messed up. It is very difficult to explain, but I would see two of things, then they would mostly come back together. A few years ago, an ophthalmologist told me that I have trouble fusing images in my brain. I see the wrong image out of each eye. I cover one eye, and I see two of whatever is in front of me. I cover the other eye, and I have the same messed-up image. Over the years (I’ve had this for over 35 years), I have taught myself what images mean to other people. For example, if someone holds up a finger, because that is one of the favorite things to do, I know what the image of one finger looks like, so if they hold up one finger, I can say “one finger”. Likewise, I know what the image of two fingers is, etc. To me, it is not one finger. It's nearly impossible to describe, as it resembles overlapping images with unclear edges. Do you remember those magic images from the 90s, where if you relax your eyes, you can see words pop out? It is sort of like that, all the time.   

I have been highly motivated to earn A’s since high school. I never earned a C or lower on a report card. I graduated from high school when you could not get extra points on your GPA for AP classes, so the maximum I could get was 4.0. Even then, I only graduated with a 3.6, yet I was still 6th in my high school class. I did homework ALL of the time. I sometimes preferred staying in on weekends to read books instead of going out with friends. This was in the 80s, so there were not as many distractions out there other than TV or the movies. I was the designated driver when we went out, so I did not drink much. Over time, though, I learned my vision got significantly worse if I did drink. Maybe that is the normal beer goggles effect (although I don't like beer, so I didn't drink any). The split images became more split, and double vision could occur. I’ve had real double vision, and have not had anything alcoholic to drink in at least 15 years, so I can’t tell you if drunk double vision is the same as MS double vision. That is not an experiment I want to try. So that was high school. I did my homework. I was not as obsessed with A’s as I was in college.

After attending college, I went to graduate school, and I had to find ways to absorb information. To do this, I would do one of many things, including:

• Recopy my notes

• Outline the textbook

• Create flashcards with a question on one side and the answer on the other. By the time I graduated, I think I had done this for just about every class I took. I had thousands of flashcards. Digital apps did not exist yet. I found that forcing the words into my brain to get them to my hand was one way to get them into my head.

• I attended all live classes and took detailed notes on everything my professor said. I taught myself to listen by writing things down. I rarely remember things if I don’t write them down. I didn't always need to reread my notes because writing them helped solidify the information in my head. We couldn't buy lecture notes, as some colleges do now, so my notes were valuable to me and my friends. No, I did not sell my notes. I loaned them. I wish I still had all of my notebooks from college and graduate school, but I was convinced by someone else that I would not need them again. That person was wrong. I should not have gotten rid of my flash cards, notes, or anything I used to learn material. That was one foolish thing I’ve done.   

• I made my own copy of many diagrams, in color, on large plain pieces of paper. I bought art paper sketch pads and would fill them with life cycles, processes, or other diagrams.

• Record myself reading my notes aloud and listen to them as I fall asleep. (I don’t think this worked.)

• Made posters of things I had to memorize and put them up in my dorm room so I could study while I brushed my teeth. I drew out the structure of each amino acid and memorized it, along with its name and three-letter abbreviation.

• Think while lying in bed. I used to be able to do calculus in my head. As the MS developed, I lost many spatial and thinking abilities. I have a cloudy brain now. I get infusions of a drug every 6 months that is supposed to help fix problems with multiple sclerosis. The drug does nothing for my mobility issues, but I can now do arithmetic in my head. I can’t map out where to go in a car anymore. I still forget words. Mixing up words that start with the same letter still happens, but I can now think through simple algebra problems, which is amazing. Don’t give me the crap that what is happening to my brain is normal as I age. Nope, you don’t lose the ability to do as much as I used to do as quickly as I lost it.

I did not know that I had some version of dyslexia until I became a teacher and learned what dyslexia involves. If you are a struggling student who still earns A’s and B’s, nobody will believe you have learning issues. I was a master of figuring out how to jump through hoops to get A’s and B’s. That does not mean it was easy or happened quickly. I bring this up here now because one of the things I had to do was write down words on these big sheets of paper in alphabetical order. I made 26 boxes. All of the terms in a chapter that started with A went in the box for A. All of the terms that started with B went in the box for B. If needed, I wrote a definition after the words. What I found more important was seeing words that looked similar next to each other, so I could identify their differences. I don’t read one letter at a time. I see the first and last letter, and based on the length of the word, my mind tells me what the word is. I don’t even know I am doing this. I had to force myself to look at words next to each other so I could learn that there were different words. I do this especially when I learn a language. I was unaware of this technique when I took French in high school, but I applied it when I took Spanish in graduate school. It was not graduate school-level Spanish; that was just my age. I don't recall doing this when I took Latin in college. One summer, I took a college extension class in Chinese, where I learned to write the characters. I don’t think I did the alphabetical list for pinyin.

I tend to read from the middle out. I don’t register headings. People came to this website to use Guide Sheets. I wrote the guide sheets so students could find answers to the questions in the curriculum. I also wrote the guide sheets because it was my way of copying down the information so I would understand it. I needed to pull it apart so I would know what you were being asked to answer. I cannot leave this website up with the guide sheets because I will be sued for copyright infringement. I pay for a license to Articulate, and I may take some of the things I designed to accompany the curriculum and rewrite them in an Articulate format. I did that in a different version of my career and put them at GetzGuides, which can be found in a Google search. I have a feeling GetzGuides is not working at the moment, so don’t go there yet. Articulate used to publish their output as SWF files, which Adobe killed many years ago. I have not been able to use Articulate to republish all of them as HTML5 yet.

In graduate school for my first Master's degree (MS), I originally planned to earn a Ph.D., but I quit. There were many reasons I quit, but the most significant one was that I stopped being able to read. I could not stop the words from moving. I was losing my mind. After earning the Master's Degree in plant pathology, which included over two years of research in a lab, I decided to get a teaching credential. The optometrist at Sac State was the FIRST person to try to fit me with an astigmatic correction. For the first time in several years, I was able to see the edges of leaves. My monocular diplopia (seeing double out of each eye) was not fixed, but I could read again.

I did not have the MS diagnosis yet. My vision problems started when I was 20 years old, and my mom paid for me to see many eye doctors. We even went to the Wilmer Eye Clinic at Johns Hopkins, and they told me I was imagining my vision problems. I went eight years of seeing eye doctors and being told I was not having eyeball problems. My eyes were perfect. I was diagnosed with MS when I was 28, my third year of being a classroom teacher. This would have been about three years of having the astigmatic correction in glasses. I don’t want to use this space to tell my MS story, but since there may be teenagers reading this (as unlikely as that will be), if you know something is not working in your body and you are being told it is in your imagination, tell that person “thank you” and walk away. Keep seeking answers to what may be causing your problem. Getting my diagnosis did not solve my problem, but I finally had a legitimate reason why I could not read or was losing my ability to think. (Glasses with the right prescription, lutein, and sleep are what now let me be able to read. Rituxan (or whatever the formulation is now) is what lets me think.)  

I want to note that I only earned three B- grades in college. Everything else was an A or B. I was on the Dean’s List many times. I graduated Magna Cum Laude and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. I had a 3.682 GPA. I earned a 3.868 GPA in graduate school for the MS in plant pathology. I had completed all of the coursework for the Ph.D. and had two-plus years of lab work in a real research setting. Among other things, I attempted RNA sequencing of the plant virus I was trying to characterize. It did not work. Scientists figured out RNA sequencing 30 years later. The year I did my teaching credential, I earned a 3.965 GPA. I think I ticked off one of my professors, so he gave me an A-. After I left the classroom for the last time (2010), I earned a Master's in Educational Technology (MET) online through Boise State University (2015). I had a 4.0 GPA based on 57 credits. That was not a science lab-type of Master's degree. It was content-based, involving writing papers, creating digital projects, and answering discussion questions.

Take good care of yourselves. You can let me know how you are doing by emailing me at melissagetz@gmail.com.