Working with Hearing Impaired students

At 2 am one morning in 2015, a loud alarm startled me out of my sleep.  My alarm clock was not on. It was in my head. The beeping would not stop but eventually changed to high pitched buzz. Sleeping was difficult.  I was only 35. Seven years later it is still there. Constant ringing in your ears is called tinnitus. In my case, the cause of tinnitus is unknown. Since that morning my hearing has steadily declined. I wear two hearing aids (which are ridiculously expensive devices). Even with the aids, I regularly do not hear what people say---it depends on the room acoustics, the pitch of the person's voice, and where they look when they speak. 

In recent years, as my hearing has gotten worse, I've learned to advocate for myself. I ask people to speak up,  to look up, even to remove their masks. I ask professors for captioning on videos, and I get special headphones when I go to movie theaters. Sometimes I get what I call advocation exhaustion. If I have repeated my requests for accommodations many times and asked people to repeat themselves multiple times, sometimes I give up later in the day, I start nodding and pretending I understand. I know this is bad. But it is reality. Sometimes I retreat to room where I can be alone and stop working so hard to hear.  Listening is exhausting when it requires intense focus. 

As a teacher or a librarian, you should know ways to help your students who are hearing impaired or deaf. 14.9% of kids ages 6 to 17 have hearing loss in one or both ears (CDC, 2021). Do not assume your students with hearing aids are hearing well. Many are too shy to speak up. Others are not yet comfortable advocating for themselves. Ask them how much of what you say they can hear. Let's go over some simple ways to help all of your students hear. 

If mask mandates continue, consider getting a clear mask for your students who read lips. Be aware that many people read lips a little bit and don't even know they do it, until everyone around them wears a mask. Clear masks can be difficult to clean and to keep from fogging. I've tried several.  RaFi Nova makes the best ones--smile masks they are called. 

You can also use classroom audio enhancement systems. If your library or classroom is large and open, this might be especially helpful. Kids will feel like you are right next to them but you will never have to strain your voice. You wear a small microphone either on a lanyard or clipped to your shirt. You press a button whenever you want to speak to the whole class or you set it up to be permanently one (like when you read a story).  Then one or more speakers in the ceiling of the room projects your voice. You have volume control. The speakers can be attached to your computer's audio or the intercom as well. With audio enhancement, all kids can hear the teacher better--the hearing impaired and the kid who is not paying attention. Of course, mask wearing has amplified the benefits of classroom audio enhancement systems.  I have been in classrooms that use these systems. Kids feel more connected to their teachers, reminders are easier, and teachers don't have to repeat themselves so much.  Check out the website of the top selling classroom audio enhancement system here: Audio Enhancement.  If having audio enhancement is cost prohibitive, you don't need customer support, or you don't care if the system is connected to your video/intercom system, there are cheaper voice amplifier systems for teachers on sites like Amazon. 

Finally, all teachers should know how to add closed captioning to a video. Kids don't always know they are not hearing well and captions always help. Consider teaching older students how to add captions too. Teaching students to be inclusive without being asked benefits us all. 

The simplest way to add captioning is to use YouTube. YouTube will automatically add captioning. If you want the captioning to be more readable, you should edit it. Editing is especially important if your content is technical. Science words (even  ones like mollusk or homo sapien), names from History are rarely correct or even discernible with automatic captioning. Editing for grammar or if you are short on time just do spelling.  Here's how: 

I don't have many videos in my You Tube account, so I picked a video I posted for a project in another class. Below is an image  of the captioning before editing. 

After editing. Notice the captioning now reads like written text with capital letters and punctuation. So helpful...

If you are someone who already captions your videos and edits them. Thank you. I truly appreciate the extra time you took to help me understand what you have to say. 

Let me know if you have questions about serving hearing impaired or deaf students. I hope these ideas helped. 

Center for Disease Control and Prevention. (2021). Data and Statistics about hearing loss in children. https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/hearingloss/data.html