On Hearing

It isn’t only Kyra Phillips of CNN and George Dubya that have to worry about off-camera mics. For those of you who don’t follow the bland repetitions of the daily media broadcast-and cheers to you- Kyra, a CNN news-anchor, left her mic on while taking a pee, and chatted up the details of her brother’s marriage with a co-worker (which betrays a facet of her personality, that she is a ‘sit-n-speak’ sort of restroom patron). This was about a week ago (ok, a year and a half ago. These are re-runs). After hearing this, and given my situation, I knew it was only a matter of time before it happened to me. I just didn’t figure it would be a week later.
The Magnet School has a sizable deaf population, or at least I assume it does. The first day at work, the beginning of the school year where we don’t have to deal with children yet, the whole faculty met in the auditorium. It was a sort of ‘meet-n-greet’ the administration, at least for those of us new to the school. Seeing as no students were present, I figured they must have a big enough deaf population to need an extensive ASL speaking staff, enough to warrant an interpreter signing for the duration of the speeches. There were many ASL interpreters, and they had to switch a lot- I guess your hands get tired. This brings up some terminology questions- Do you ‘speak’ ASL? Is ‘signing’ the proper verb for ‘speaking ASL?’ Clearly, I am clueless.
So clueless, in fact, that when I was informed via 504- a classification for a student meaning s/he has special needs- that one of my students was hearing impaired, I had no idea what was expected of me or how to approach the problem. I read the 504, I understood the situation to some degree, but office memos, particularly in the Public School System, often have little to do with reality. I received an obscure graph, sent to me by the Hearing Impaired Coordinator. I only know it was her because she stapled her business card to the graph, and I only know that Hearing Impaired Coordinators exist, as a profession, because she had a business card to prove it. Now, mind you, school had started at this point, we had spent the last week of class going over graphs, what each axis means, how to be clear in what you are trying to present, to keep things easy and readable and scientific. It was quite fresh in my head, this notion of simplicity.

That said, I had no idea what this graph meant. It was an antiquated thing, clearly a Xerox of a Xerox of a mimeograph from 1976. I even looked for the graph online, with designs on showing you how incomprehensible it was, but clearly it had been altered since, as I could at least somewhat understand the ones I did find. The graph in question had megahertz on one axis, pain thresholds on another, and some unaccountable measurement, unlabeled, on the third. Bringing a ‘third’ axis into a 2-dimensional graph is a dicey prospect- usually, it will make no sense unless you know exactly what you are doing, and is something kids are apt to do when they don’t understand exactly how to incorporate all the information they need to. However, this came from adults-adults who should know better, given that they were drawing a salary. As well as the mystery axis, there were also, inexplicably, various line drawings of various day-to-day activities in seemingly random places all over the graph. Some bear mention- the normal pets making normal pet noises, a man working a jackhammer, someone flying a kite- I didn’t get it. What kind of noise does a kite make, once it’s flying? Do I have hearing loss?

Given the Hearing Loss Coordinator’s rather hastily penned-in marks and circles on the graph, my best interpretation of it was that the kid couldn’t hear either dogs barking or candy floss being made, depending on the Megahertz value, but was fine hearing the sound of snakes slithering on concrete and Vespa moped engines built before 1967. As always, I was still clueless.

As it turns out, I didn’t need the graph. This kid was an expert at being hearing impaired, having done it his whole life and -initially- I was relieved. He had a high-tech hearing aid. So high-tech, in fact, that it was wired to a microphone that I wore around my neck, and transmitted my voice on an FM frequency directly to the hearing aid. I wore it dutifully. In the beginning, though, I didn’t really know how to shut it off.

You don’t need to be a genius or even a Hearing Impaired Coordinator to see where this is going. On the day of the Incident, I made quite sure I had given the class proper instructions and set them up to carry on without me for a minute. I felt safe enough to slip away from class to go take a pee. It wasn’t until I noticed the loud and telltale sound of urine filtering through the splash-guard at the bottom of the urinal that I realized that it was being broadcast. Poor fucking kid. I felt awkward seeing my teachers at the grocery store.

I didn’t even flush for fear of tipping him off more, just in case he hadn’t heard it. Still, though, if he did, I could see the blackmail opportunities for this kid immediately, should he want to expose me*. I envisioned myself ducking behind the file cabinet during the next test, saying “ Allright, Quincy, number 1 is C……number 2 is D…..number 3 is B….

*Pun intended