It’s no mystery why I chose Deaf Education as a course of study in college.
Perhaps it was more that this curriculum chose me. The reason? At a young age it was discovered that I had severe hearing loss in both ears. No wonder the world was such a confusing place! Wearing a hearing aid with one earpiece, I could hear conversation, but it only made sense if you faced me so lipreading could aid my understanding. To this day, I must see faces at close range or else the clarity of speech drifts away into the nether lands. In short, I can hear, but often not make sense of what I hear. It sounds like white noise coming through my microphones. What a pain.
I always wanted to be a teacher. Granted I was naïve, but I wasn’t dumb. Even
as a kid I realized that no public school was going to hire me for regular classroom teaching. My speech was different, and my loss too severe. The options: schools for the deaf or public schools with classrooms for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. No matter the setting I AM GOING TO BE A TEACHER.
But what subject? Mrs. Doan, my history teacher from grades 4-6 inspired both my love of history and to teach the subject. The way Mrs. Doan talked about people and events ignited my imagination. She was my role model.
Later, as a teacher at Iowa School for the Deaf I approached history as stories, not dry facts and dates. I also created fun learning centers with games for independent and/or group study. Remember Classic Comic books, before superheroes took over the market? Surprisingly, the kids liked the medieval history stories, which I saved for the week before going home on vacation. My bulletin board displays, a source for deaf kids to gather news, kickstarted discussions on current events. These techniques were a lot more work, but fewer behavior problems occurred. I believe that learning about history with current events thrown in the mix helped deaf students think more critically about what is happening in the world. As for this teacher, I learned about deaf culture and its history. And that is another story…
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