 |
| Mom and truly yours, age 4, strolling to John Tracy Clinic in Los Angeles, summer of 1969 |
When we were living in Tulsa, Oklahoma, my deafness became world
knowledge just before I turned three.
So, my beleaguered mother did what thousands of other mothers, who
suddenly discovered themselves not-so-proud guardians of little deaf
kids, usually did in the 1960's.
She sent away for a free John Tracy Clinic correspondence course.
[Author's note: John Tracy Clinic was a well-known oralist school in Los Angeles with many services, such as providing lessons in mail to parents who want to teach their small children to lipread. The school was named after the founder's son who was deaf. When the founder, wife of the late actor Spenser Tracy, discovered her son's deafness, she devised ways to teach him to lipread and speak, and then started the school to teach her methods to others.]
Armed with booklets from distinguished John Tracy Clinic, my mother set out on a crusade to turn me into a full-fledged "flapping mouth." She bought tons and tons of toys to use in games to aid with my lipreading. She also bought boxes and boxes of Lucky Charms cereal to use for rewarding. Everytime I got a right answer (usually, a lucky guess), I would be treated to a few bits from the ever-present bowl of Lucky Charms. Mom has told me about how everday she had to drag me to that little white table in my room to work with me. I don't remember those games very well, but I do know that I am deeply in debt to John Tracy Clinic for my present hatred of cereal, and the fact that I was the kid with the biggest collection of toys in the neighborhood.
I remember my mother dragging me to speech therapists at the University of Tulsa all the time. Despite all their efforts, I never learned to lipread, let alone talk. One of the requirements of learning to lipread was to get the kid to look at the speaker's face as much as possible. Though Mom did try plenty to get me to look at her face, it was often in vain since I was always busy looking at everything and everywhere -- everywhere but Mom's face. Gawking at my mother's mouth opening and closing all day long, day after day, can be quite a bit dreadfully dull. And, everyone knows a three-year-old's attention span has all the longevity of an ice cream cone sitting out in 101-degree weather. Many was the time when Mom's crusade was not to enlighten me in the wonderful ways of lipreading, but just to get me to look at her face.
"But, haven't you ever wondered about why hearing people move their mouths a lot?" many people have asked me. Well, to tell you the truth, it somehow never occured to me that the poeple's moving their mouths was a way of communication. I just took it for granted, like walking or smoking a cigarette, and I thought that people were just exercising their lips. In addition, I never made the connection between my speech therapy and people's moving mouths, because people in general don't pull other people's hands to their mouths, make noises like a dishwasher, puff and huff like the big, bad wolf, and make the other people repeat the same feat. Also, hearing aids weren't really a helpful factor for me. I don't remember what my hearing loss in decibels was, but it was so profound that I didn't have very much speech discrimination -- the sounds were mostly "white noise." It was akin to slapping a pair of prescription glasses onto a blind person who can see only lights and shadows.
Just before my fourth birthday, I proved to be such a pitiful student that John Tracy Clinic finally accepted me as one of the few honored deaf kids to participate in a seminar at the clinic in Los Angeles. So, for two weeks in the summer of 1969, my mother and I lived at a dormitory in a nearby college, along with dozens of other mothers and kids from all over the country. (One mother and her daughter came all the way from India.) For me, it was a very delightful experience, because being an only kid, I had about a dozen kids (all wearing those box things with cords and ear plugs just like myself!) to play with all day, in the dorms and in the clinic. We would keep getting into mischief, such as climbing trees (and getting stuck and having to be rescued by exasperated teachers.) But, for Mom who had to wash colored clay and fingerpaint out of my hair and chase me all over the dorms to get me to go to bed every night, it certainly wasn't one of the best summers in her life. And for all the trouble, my lipreading skills didn't improve even a bit. It seemed that every kid at the clinic, even ones younger than me, were outperforming me at lipreading and speech. (Note: many kids who could speak -- or doing something that came close to speaking -- were usually parrots, repeating whatever a teacher said but not actually understanding what they were saying. I guess I just wasn't a very good parrot.)
Back in Tulsa, I started my first year of school, in a preschool class for the deaf (oral, of course), located at a regular public school, Kendall Elementary School. Due to the Rubella epidemic that occured in early to mid-1960's, there were so many preschool-age deaf children that the school had to have four classes, two in the morning and two in the afternoon, to accomodate all the kids. (And this was in Tulsa, a town of about 400,000, not exactly a big city, which goes to show you how big the impact of the Rubella epidemic was). I was in one of the afternoon classes, where I had a teacher who did not provide any speech therapy or auditory training. It was as if I was in a hearing class with all deaf kids. Not surprisingly, I flunked the class and had to repeat the year (albeit with a different teacher). The reason? I couldn't lipread, of course. What a great start for my education.
To make it worse, the teacher from the first class had hinted to Mom that I might be a slow learner. So, my panic-stricken mother rushed me to a hospital in Kansas City to have my IQ tested and my brain analyzed. Confirmed that I wasn't mentally retarded (in fact, my intelligence turned to be above normal), Mom finally decided that the oral method wasn't working for me. After all, one can only go so far in life with a verbal vocabulary consisting entirely of two words: "off" and "shoe". So, my mother sneaked off to sign language class (she would have caught flak if someone from the school district saw her) to learn sign. Soon, I was taught sign language by the new chairman of the speech/hearing department at the University of Tulsa, who supported total communication.
Thus, my career of being an oral failure ended at the tender age of four. To this day, I have never mastered the fine art of lipreading.
[Author's note: even though I still can't read lips, I certainly can assure you that my vocabulary isn't limited to two words these days.]
No comments:
Post a Comment