This week at work was interesting. I had a full week of classes and one of the teaching strategies I use is to stimulate discussion on certain points with my students. This is fine except that I can't hear what my students are saying, or worse, when they are asking a question. To keep the class moving along nicely I often pretend I've heard, make some sort of generic comment, and move on.
However, this wasn't the most challenging thing of my week.
Friday I had a meeting regarding a big project I'm working on. It was a really important meeting and I needed the information being presented to complete the project. This meeting however, was being held in a restaurant, a noisy restaurant. I can hear the collective sighs of deaf people the world over. Yes, they were holding a make or break meeting in a noisy restaurant!!!!
Still, a free feed is a free feed, so off I went. There were four other people dining with me, one had great hearing but a quiet voice, the other had great hearing, the other wore a hearing aid, another had a grommet and had lost hearing in one ear and then there was me with a cochlear implant. I had to explain to the great hearing people (whom we were there to speak with in the first place), that I was lip reading and that they didn't have anything stuck in their teeth.
Anyway, I got about half of what was said and nodded and made some intelligent sounding comments on the stuff I didn't hear. Sometimes I would just agree enthusiastically when I had no idea what was going on. This seemed to work. Now I need to follow up with some of the others in the meeting and check everything that was said. My work now seems to use up twice as much energy and time as it once did. Lucky I don't waste time watching TV anymore!
