Everybody having fun going
back to school? I am. One thing about being Deaf or Hard of Hearing, is that we
need support at school to access education. That’s the primary reason I have an
IEP, Individualized Education Plan, which is a formal, legal document that
specifies what accommodations the school will provide.
The IEP is a very long document, my last one was 20+ pages long, and has a lot of boilerplate information included. What I have found most useful for my teachers to get a quick and better
understanding of what I need, is to send them the one page “Instructional
Accommodations or Modifications” page, located somewhere in the middle of the IEP. I also send along a few other documents and links, including, but not limited to,
suggested classroom accommodations (which one teacher told me helps everyone in
class, not just D/HH students), a visual audiogram showing pictures of
sounds demonstrating frequencies, loudness, and the speech banana (where common sounds of the English language occur), links
to some YouTube videos and this blog. I think the teachers like the YouTube
videos, because they're engaging tutorials and YouTube recommends other related
videos. I like them because they get the point across.
I used to present all this information to my teachers right before school started, but now I find it more practical to send
this out at the end of the previous year, so that teachers can think about
their classroom structure. For instance, in some classes, there may be a
lot of heated discussions. Multiple people talking (or debating) at once is very difficult for
me to follow. It might be difficult for everyone else to follow, but it is especially difficult for me since I rely on lip reading. One of my teachers worked out a system where she
clipped my FM microphone onto a beanie baby, and only the person with the
beanie baby could speak. It worked pretty well, until some conversations got a
little intense!
- Example of improvements to understanding I
get with the FM Microphone. The last example in this link shows the usage in a
classroom setting.
- Presentation I attended
last fall (see September 2013 blog) that talks about getting access to
communication and advocating.
- Example showing the difference
between normal hearing and mild, moderate, and severe hearing losses. It’s very
cool, because how often do you see a popular cartoon as an educational tool
anyway? House Ear shows the difference between hearing losses. The cool part is
that I don't hear any difference between them without
hearing aids, but a person with regular hearing can hear significant differences between each segment. I should also note that even with my hearing aids in use, I only hear in the moderate range. With hearing aids, I can detect
the volume difference between the segments, but not much more. I also caught myself trying to lip-read the
cartoon characters.
- Article explaining how
exhausting lip reading can be. Rachel
Kolb, who did the presentation referred to above and appeared in Stanford Magazine,
wrote this and I think it a great explanation of what D/HH students have to go
through in all environments with speech.
