Deaf in DC: A Memoir

31. Challenges in Teaching

129 31 Challenges in Teaching HAVING A PRESTIGIOUS MASTER’S DEGREE FROM GALLAUdet assured me of a good job and also provided me with the tools to teach effectively, not necessarily in that order. I was full of confidence and was sure that I was going to become a great teacher and change the lives of students that passed through my classroom. Me and millions of other young teachers! The students at Kendall Demonstration Elementary School (KDES), as it was known then, weren’t the kind of students any of the professors in our department had taught or even knew. The curriculum was geared for teaching the average middle-class white American deaf student . Almost all of our students came from the northeast neighborhoods in Washington, DC. Almost all the students were from families on government assistance. None of these students’ parents had received any support or guidance in parenting a deaf child. Most of our students didn’t have access to preschool. They started school late—when they were six, seven, or even ten years old. They had no spoken or signed language and depended on gestures to communicate. I was assigned to the middle school. There were twenty students—all age fourteen to fifteen—and five teachers. All of us, except for Dennis Cokely, were deaf. However, Dennis was also the most skilled signer of “Kendalese,” the term he had coined for the variety of gestures used by our students. Jackie Mann was our part-time supervisor. She taught one or two classes. Gordon Bergan taught arithmetic, reading was Marianne’s area, Dennis had communication, and I was to teach social studies. The five of us worked very well together. Jackie was more of a colleague than a supervisor. She gave us full rein to do our job, which we did by flying by the seat of our pants. There was no curriculum to speak of and we had to do “our own 130 d e a f i n d c thing.” After meeting with the students, I knew following a formal social studies curriculum or using a textbook was out of question. None of the students could read and some couldn’t even spell their names correctly. I talked to some teachers who had worked with this group and learned that they had been in school for five to seven years. Why they weren’t able to spell even three-letter words correctly was a mystery to me. I put my photography skill to work and prepared a montage of class members with their names under each photograph. Their job was to learn to spell names of each classmate and teachers. I thought I’d be able to do that in one or two days, but after a full week, I found myself where I’d started. One student kept spelling egg as g-e-e even after a full week of practice. All the students were of normal intelligence but they hadn’t been exposed to language when they were younger. When they were babies and toddlers, when their hearing peers were learning a spoken language, these children were just staring at moving lips and trying to decipher ambiguous gestures made by their parents and siblings. This didn’t help them develop a meaningful language—spoken or signed. Trying to teach Playing Santa Claus in a Christmas play at Kendall School. c h a l l e n g e s i n t e a c h i n g 131 them how to spell at the age of fifteen was like trying to teach someone to sprint who had never learned to walk. They tripped over letters. Two weeks later, with limited success in my efforts to teach them to spell each other’s names, I realized that there were more important things that they need to learn: they needed to learn how to protect themselves. We teachers had a continental breakfast with students every morning. During that time, we had good conversations. The students told us about what was going in their neighborhoods, which was very educational for us. One day, a student showed me a crumpled slip of a paper. He had written on it “High Voltage.” He asked me what it meant. I explained and then asked him where he had seen the words. He told me it was around the corner from his house. He was...