By Diane Urbani de la Paz
For Peninsula Woman
Here is a woman confronting a major obstacle — and not allowing it to stand in the way of joy.
Rebecca Wanagel is a math, reading and guitar teacher who is almost completely deaf. She wears a hearing aid in her left ear and a cochlear implant in her right, but those provide her with only the faintest amounts of sound.
In interviews, Wanagel answers questions about deafness cheerfully — and what comes across most clearly is that she’s an educator who listens to her students with both her mind and her heart, and then strives to impart what each one needs.
Wanagel grew up in Ithaca, N.Y., the eldest sister in a family of 11 children. As a young girl, she suffered from a hearing impairment that her mother suspects was due to a low-grade measles infection during her pregnancy.
“There was an outbreak of rubella in 1965, the year I was born, so that theory is quite plausible,” Wanagel says.
Her hearing grew worse over the years, but Wanagel’s parents didn’t treat her like a child with a disability.
For this and for other reasons, she expresses gratitude: “I have actually always felt quite fortunate, rather than feeling sorry for myself,” she says. “Rubella can do severe damage to a fetus far beyond what I experienced.”
Wanagel went on to earn a master’s in special education at Syracuse University and taught in public schools for about a decade. She moved to the Olympic Peninsula in 1999, where her then-husband, a pilot, wanted to build a small airplane hangar and a home near Sequim.
By this time, her hearing loss had grown quite severe; working with a classroom full of kids went from difficult to impossible. She began offering her services as a tutor and found the form intense — and ideal.
“I really love the fast progress and personal relationship that develop when you work with people one on one,” Wanagel says. “Also, it frees me up to work with students of any age or level, from the very young needing to learn basic problem-solving skills, to adults who are struggling with algebra to meet a college requirement.”
Over the years, Wanagel has developed her own set of coping strategies, such as paying keen attention to body and facial language in addition to her lip-reading. So she never sees a disability as a reason to not do well.
“That comes across to my students in the message that you can get it; you can do it. Therefore, I set my expectations high, and students always strive to reach that bar,” she says.
Her impairment, Wanagel adds, teaches learners better communication in any situation.
“It is not an option with me to mumble,” she says. “Students learn to speak face-to-face and enunciate clearly, which is a great skill to take into the world.”
Lest Wanagel seem like too tough a taskmaster, she turns to another of her loves: music, played on the guitar. She can’t understand lyrics, can’t enjoy listening to an orchestra — but Celtic and other folk music, especially Joni Mitchell’s, send her.
“Playing the guitar just brings me sheer joy. . . . I can’t fully explain why. There is something about having the ability to create intricate and beautiful music with heart-catching melodies,” she says.
Wanagel recently has returned to teaching guitar, after a hiatus.
“I used to give lessons here in Port Angeles; all kinds of people with all levels of natural ability came to me, some with obstacles they had to overcome to play guitar. But no matter what someone has to overcome, I can always say — from the heart — ‘You can do it. I do.’
“And they believe me. It gives them hope. They know that I have one of the worst obstacles you can have for playing a musical instrument, yet I persevere and love it just the same.”
This applies to tutoring as well, Wanagel adds.
“Say, for example, someone has a learning disability. That shouldn’t stop her from doing what she wants to do, like my hearing doesn’t stop me from being a musician,” she says.
At the same time, this teacher loves math — though she realizes not all of her students share the feeling. So Wanagel focuses on confidence-building.
“It brings me great joy to watch students learn to independently use the virtual ‘tool belt’ of strategies that I help them develop. I teach a variety,” she says, so like a carpenter building a house, the learner will know how to choose the right tool for the given situation.
“With adult students,” she adds, “I love watching their lifelong fear of math dissipate.”
Wanagel also tutors in reading and writing, and along with those who are looking to catch up, she has students who come for enrichment and challenge. She teaches home-schooled kids, too.
Diane Kithcart began driving with her son, Joey, 12, from Marrowstone Island to Wanagel’s Port Angeles office last June. Joey’s biggest challenge was math, and “they connected immediately,” Kithcart says. “She figures out how her students learn, and then teaches them in a way that they really understand.”
Wanagel’s positive attitude is unflagging, Kithcart adds. “Joey used to beat himself up because he didn’t understand and was lost in class. Rebecca encouraged him and never made him feel bad for not understanding. She is patient and keeps at it until he finally has that ‘aha’ moment.”
Coral Miller of Port Angeles takes her daughter Brianna to Wanagel, also for math coaching.
“I don’t want to sound like I am gushing, but Rebecca is beyond wonderful,” Miller says.
Brianna, 14, went from the lowest math scores in her class to the highest after working with Wanagel; these days Miller listens to her explaining algebra equations to friends. Brianna looks forward to seeing her coach, adds her mother, and though she still has to work hard on math, she’s developed the confidence to keep at it.
“With the deepest respect,” Miller says, “I call Rebecca a teacher, an educator who not only teaches, but inspires her students.”
Wanagel, for her part, adds: “Hands down, the most joy I get is in being such an integral part of a student’s progress and being an important part of their ‘team,’: parents, teachers, other adults in their lives.”
Wanagel recently had a breakthrough of her own, in her life as a musician. It’s a struggle at times to play the guitar, she says. She wishes she could play better with other people, since she has many musician friends including Kelly Thomas, who with Victor Reventlow co-hosts the open-mic night at The Buzz in Sequim each Wednesday.
Her cochlear implant and hearing aid help some, but not enough for her to hear instruments as separate entities. And as much as she loves playing guitar and singing, Wanagel senses that she’s off key, and has hesitated to sing in public.
Staying in tune
Then, one day she tried turning off her “ears,” as she calls the digital hearing aid and cochlear implant. She sang that way, and listeners told her that the difference was significant.
“I was staying in tune with my voice much better,” she recalls.
“So then I got really, really brave and decided to perform like that at an open mic: ears turned off and singing and playing in front of a crowd. Well, I was informed by many of my friends that the improvement was drastic, and they all wanted to know how I could do it. Truly, I had no answer until I thought about it for a while. I realized that as soon as the ears were off, I was ‘tuning in,’ no pun intended, to the feel of the guitar and to where my voice is in my body. Somehow they seem to connect.”
Wanagel has now sung and played, to good response, at both the Wednesday gathering at The Buzz and the Thursday night open mic at the Cracked Bean coffeehouse on DelGuzzi Drive off U.S. Highway 101 in Port Angeles.
Yet she is no Pollyanna about deafness. She wonders constantly about what she’s missing.
“I love the outdoors; love the mountains; love the trees; love rivers,” she says. “But I cannot hear nature sounds at all. There are no beautiful sounds in nature as far as I can hear, even though I know full well the truth is the exact opposite.”
The lack of aural pleasure does not stop her, though, from enjoying a run or a mountain-bike ride through the woods — and feeling gratitude for the experience.
Wanagel says the North Olympic Peninsula, “beyond a shadow of a doubt,” is home. And to do her part to help others enjoy its natural wonders, she’s a member of the Thursday Trail Crew, a volunteer team working on the Olympic Discovery Trail’s Adventure Route west of Port Angeles. It’s another job she values, in addition to the one she does for a living.
“Having access to our local forests and [Olympic] National Park and National Forest through trails for running, biking and/or hiking,” she says, “is something for which I never stop feeling grateful.”
