In my new job, I am responsible for teaching young adults. Most of the work that they do is individually-directed, but my supervisor, volunteers, and I are around to teach students the subject matter – we teach them everything from basic addition to analyzing complex texts.
In my time at this job, I’m finding that I am really enjoying the social studies component and I am starting to think seriously about teaching in a classroom setting. I didn’t experience a teenagerhood nearly as difficult as what I see in most of my students every day, but it wasn’t an easy ride either because I was openly queer in a very conservative state, deaf, and easily bored by most typical high school classes. My parents helped keep me in school, but I was lucky enough to have wonderful, engaging teachers who made me want to come to class every day.
As a token of thanks to those teachers that helped me learn how to think critically, I want to do the same thing with high school students – teach them how to be better citizens in this transition to adulthood. I’m especially interested in teaching history and social studies because I feel like it’s misrepresented in a lot of high school classrooms and that myths are taught as if they were fact – for example, “Oh, yay, Christopher Columbus discovered America and learned that the Earth is round!” – no, that is not true for several reasons. Also, a lot of teachers present history as this incredibly boring subject that only a severely dull person would find interesting – that’s not true. I would definitely try to bring the drama of past events alive.
However, I’m starting to wonder if I can teach a classroom of hearing students.
First of all, I’m still learning how to work with groups. I have enough on my plate when I’m trying to work with three students individually at the same time. I’m getting better at multi-tasking every day, but I still can’t imagine what a classroom of thirty students would be like.
My second concern is how to maintain the respect of students. I’ve noticed students talking about me while I’m sitting right across from them, and although I told them not to do that, it was definitely a blow to my self-esteem. I also have students who refuse to talk to me – my theory is that they’re used to being low on the social ladder, but at least they have deaf people below them. So when a deaf person is actually more successful than they are, they become upset and defensive.
And finally, I wonder about how I’d be able to get the rumors. If I were a hearing teacher, I would use rumors to help with my instruction – if I hear students think that my class is boring, I’d change it. If I hear students talking about Occupy all the time, I’d do a class about that. Etc. But if I can’t hear students whispering amongst themselves, what then?
I am sure I will figure something out. Overall, I think I am able to keep most students’ respect – it’s only a few students who are nasty towards me; the majority are very respectful and understand that, just because I’m deaf, it doesn’t mean that I can’t teach them how to add fractions. I think that, given some time, I could become more comfortable in a classroom full of Hearing teenagers.
With that being said – is a teaching position at a Deaf institution in my future? Possibly, especially because the nearest one is only about half an hour’s drive away. Despite some of my misgivings about the changing composition of Deaf schools, I definitely think I could contribute to a Deaf institution – for example, I’m very academically successful even though I was born Deaf, so I think that I could be a good role model to students. And I am a total Deaf history geek, so I would be able to teach students about our history in addition to talking about mainstream history.
We will see. In the end, the biggest obstacle may not be communication – it may simply be that my personality is not super well-suited to teaching. At this point, I’d rather do one-on-one counseling to help people work their problems out than try to lasso a classroom full of 30 kids into doing the same thing. But who knows? People change all the time.
