I thought it would be fun to take one psychology course at Harvard College. So, I took an introductory course in Psychology during the spring semester of 1984, my sophomore year.
Instead, I nearly failed that course. The reason I almost flunked the course is that I received a failing grade on my psychology midterm. It was the only time I got an E anywhere at Harvard, and it was also the only time when I received an offer of remedial help. I politely rejected it.
Let me elaborate a bit further about my attending any class at Harvard. Due to my deafness, the two accommodations I had gotten at Harvard were one-to-one sessions (meaning that I would discuss what I’d have learned in class with either the professor or teaching assistant) and notetaking.1,2 I’d use both accommodations for liberal arts courses such as the one on the Russian Revolution and another on Lying, a Moral Reasoning course. But for all science courses, I used only a notetaker. My Psychology course was one of the science courses.
Now, can you imagine looking at notes written by someone else who doesn’t fully understand what it’s like to be deaf in a class, much less a science class? Do you think you could comprehend any of the notes without hearing every word that was spoken by the professor or teaching assistant? If you think that way, you are kidding yourself. There is always something that the notetaker would perfunctorily mention or even leave out, because he or she would assume that a deaf student would learn and/or understand in the same way as his or her hearing peers would do in the same class.
I did remember reading the term ‘Freudian slip’ in the notes I received from my notetaker in preparation for my midterm. But the notes mentioned only these two words, nothing more. There was no explanation as to what ‘Freudian slip’ meant or what examples would be appropriate for such a term. Since Sigmund Freud was so famous and so important in the history of psychology, the notetaker must’ve assumed that I’d understood the particular term as well. Wrong! The notetaker didn’t realize that, unlike my hearing classmates, I could not hear, much less comprehend, that damned term at all.
So, when I took my midterm, I read question after question, asking about Freudian slips and their examples. My mind went blank, and the rest is history. In any case, it didn’t matter, because I passed the course at the end of the semester. Everyone in my class received a list of questions for the final exam. I memorized my answers, and got a B minus on the final exam as well as for the course.
The problem (i.e., not being able to cover, much less grasp, everything that’s being said in a class, a seminar, or a professional gathering) I have with any notetaker, American Sign Language interpreter, and/or real-time captioner still continues to this day. Even speech-to-text technology is not always accurate. This problem has been discussed elsewhere.1,2
References
1Adler HJ. Why I Chose Neuroscience over Marine Biology – Welcome (the-eagle-ear.com).
2Adler HJ, Ratnanather JT, Steyger PS, Buran BN. Scientists with Hearing Loss Changing Perspectives in STEMM. Acoustics Today. Spring 2019, 15(1): 66-70. Scientists with Hearing Loss Changing Perspectives in STEMM – Henry J. Adler – Acoustics Today.
Henry, when we were at Harvard, I wondered how you dealt with the amount of information shared orally in lectures. I am a hearing person, so could try to understand the words spoken as the lecturer talked, even when s\he turned their heads away from us. It must have been very hard for you.
I appreciate your story here.
One way I ended up taking notes was to turn off my analytical mind and simply write the lecture down, verbatim, into a spiral-bound notebook. This was like simultaneous transliteration. I did this with lectures by Stephen Jay Gould, but not for all speakers. This skill has been useful since then.
Do deaf students have access to transcripts now? Hope so. Still, it must be a challenge for them.
Not every person with hearing loss likes the term ‘deaf.’ Some prefer ‘hard of hearing.’ There was one teenager with hearing loss whom we met two years ago at an airport in Chicago. Denise and I met him and his mother, and we noticed he had a cochlear implant (or two, I can’t remember). He was very oral, but he was very adept with American Sign Language (ASL). We communicated in both voice and ASL, and we even vocalized a bit with his mother — he and his parents are originally from Japan. I don’t remember why he and his mother were in Chicago, but somehow we initially identified him as deaf (or Deaf). He quickly ‘corrected’ us by identifying himself as “hearing”! Why would he do that, I do not know, but I think it has to do with pressures he has had from his parents as well as possible environmental pressures (he’s from Japan, and I have no idea how severely the Japanese generally look on their peers with hearing loss). Nevertheless, the situation in which the teenager claimed to be ‘hearing’ can’t take away the fact that he still has a hearing loss. The hearing levels he had obtained with the help of his cochlear implant(s) will never be equal to those among people with normal or typical hearing.
To answer your question, Karen, as to whether or not deaf students have access to transcripts, it’s much easier to obtain lecture notes via various means now than it was 10 or more years ago. The ability to obtain notes (not just for people with hearing loss but also for everyone else, including those whose native language is not English) has shot up to the sky with the addition of speech-to-text technology. Ten or twenty years ago, there were captioning services that would be paid for by universities if and when students with hearing loss requested such services. Now with speech-to-text technology, it’s basically almost free — you can download several different apps into your smartphone (e.g., Live Transcribe, Live Caption, Ava, Otter.ai, etc.), and whether you pay depends on which app you’d use.
I admire how you have persevered and excelled, despite adversity, throughout your life. Speech to text technology is often very inaccurate. I can only imagine how frustrating that must be, Henry— you read a nonsensical sentence and wonder what was actually said?
I recommend Henry Kisor’s What’s That Pig Outdoors?