First of all you may or may not notice something very different about me.
So people have repeatedly asked me in YouTube comments and on other social media
if I would ever talk about how I was as a student in public, mainstream school,
as someone who was deaf for a portion of it.
That is a video that I will make a much longer version of later on down the road,
but I did want to make a quick video, one, because of time,
two, this is, uh, something that was very important to me, I guess,
for lack of a better word.
I will say that there were times that,
uh, people would kinda crack jokes about the fact that I was deaf.
Like if they came up behind me and then said "Gosh what are you deaf or something?!"... When you know, I couldn't hear them - obviously.
But this moment was something that was much more than that.
And something that I really would not have expected to happen from this particular person.
So this is going to be a story time sort of video.
So this happened when I was in 11th grade.
I think in a video that I made about this story I might have accidentally said 8th grade.
Hopefully, I did not.
So, it was in 11th grade, I was in high school, I was 16 years old, and in US History Class,
my teacher made fun of me in front of the entire class for something that was out of my control.
And yes, it has to do with my hearing loss
So I know that in schools, and in the United States and in Canada, I don't know about any other countries...
Occasionally, we would have to watch films, which can always be fine, and great, whatever.
But, sometimes, usually half of the time, we had to write facts about whatever we were watching.
So we would watch the film, listen to the film, and copy what we heard on a piece of paper, whether it be 15 facts, 30 facts, whatever.
The number always varied.
Now, I was a deaf student - I would still be a deaf student - and this was hard. Why? Because there were no captions!
At all. None of these videos, not even the films that we watched for fun, had captions on them.
And my teacher was aware of the fact that I was hard of hearing at that time. My hearing was better back them but I was still deaf enough that I couldn't understand
A lot of what was going on. I went to my teacher and I said "Hey, you know, I need closed captions on videos
This doesn't have closed captions. What am I supposed to do because I can't understand the film?"
The solution was to sit in front of the computer. And I just agreed, I was 16 years old, this was a time that I was not very comfortable with who I was.
Deafness and all. So I just kind of pushed things aside and said "Fine, okay."
So I did that and all it did was make the sound a lot louder, which made it a lot more muffled.
I read stories all the time from other deaf people who's parents or friends or whoever always said
"Why don't we just turn it up? You don't need captions. I don't like captions."
All it does is make the sound louder and it doesn't really make it more comprehensible. Usually.
I sat in front of the computer speaker, I tried my best to get facts and I'm pretty sure I had less than half of the sentences we needed to write
But not only that, a lot of them were very incomplete. It would be half of a sentence, or each sentence would have every few words
That I could make out and it was horrible, I didn't like it, I was very embarrassed about it
And maybe I could have copied off of somebody else's paper but we weren't allowed to do that so...
So we had to turn our papers in, and as we are waiting in line to get out because we had about 3 minutes left
So we were just waiting for the bell, my teacher was looking through the papers and reading the papers to himself, and he saw my paper.
He saw how incomplete it was and then he decided to pick on me out loud in front of the entire class.
He didn't pull me aside and you know talk about it, which I would have still said the same thing " You know I can't understand these movies without captions...So..."
But he saw the paper, he laughed out loud, he chuckled out loud, and then he read the sentences out loud and laughed to the entire class about it.
And then of course they joined in. It's a true story, I'm not making it up.
And I didn't say anything about it, I just kinda went along with it. That was something that happened a lot when I was younger.
I wasn't very comfortable about myself with who I was. I couldn't really accept the fact that I was hard of hearing or that I was deaf, whatever.
It was a mess, honestly, it was a mess. If I could have gone back, if it was me now and I had a time machine
Or something I would go back and I would be calling the guy out for that because that wasn't very nice, it's just not nice to pick on somebody, especially as a teacher!
Like it's not nice when a student does it, but it's even worse when a teacher does that, like, really?
I really wish I would have said something but like I said, I wasn't comfortabe with myself enough and I couldn't stand up for myself at that time.
Unfortunately, this isn't the only time something similar has occurred, not really making fun of me but just you know treating the fact that I was some sort of deaf like it was nothing.
But that will be covered in another video that talks more about being in a mainstream school.
Just to throw it out there for any future teachers out there that may have a deaf or hard of hearing student because occasionally that happens in public schools.
1: Try to find captions on the film, I mean it's 2016 now, like, come on. or, I don't know, maybe try to find a similar assignment that they can do because it's difficult!
And I feel like it's just not fair that if we want to try to do some work but it's something that we physically can't do then we get penalized for it.
And last but not least, don't make fun of the kid. Like it's just not nice! At all! Why would you do that?
There's my first little story time video, feel free to check me out on all my social media, that's down below.
Check me out on patreon if you want to support content, link also down below.
I make videos every Monday and Thursday unless otherwise stated because of some sort of emergency and I will see you later, bye!
Subtitles by the Amara.org community