No Class Participation for Me

Until I came to UPenn for my graduate studies, I hardly participated in any class in the New York City Public School System, Bronx High School of Science, or even Harvard College.

You ask, “Why?”  It’s because I was often a lone deaf participant in any classroom, and I never had any ‘reasonable accommodations’ such as American Sign Language (ASL) interpreting, as required by law (Americans with Disabilities Act [ADA]).

By the time ADA was passed and signed by President Bush, I was already a graduate student at UPenn.

Before ADA, all extra help I had was notetaking and, to a lesser extent, one-to-one discussion with a teaching assistant at Harvard (but not beforehand).  I did most of the notetaking by asking a classmate sitting next to me if I could copy his or her notes during class.  A few times, I had professional notetakers at Harvard – they were students themselves and they were taking the same courses as I.  Their notes were not always clear because they didn’t realize that unlike them, I could not hear all of what the professor had said.  Consequently, they did not write everything.

There was one time when I was sitting next to a fellow graduate student at Penn, and I was copying his notes.  Before he could realize that I was deaf, he wrote a sarcastic comment.  Of course, he apologized upon noticing my disability.

Another time occurred when I had an interpreter for my Cell Biology discussion section at Harvard during my senior year.  The only difference was that the interpreter was an oral one, not an ASL interpreter.  He was my first interpreter of any kind, and my last oral interpreter–EVER.  That type of interpreting required a lot of my lip-reading skills, and it went very poorly because there were too many terms that were too damned unfamiliar for me to lipread. 

In any event, before entering Penn, I almost never raised a hand in any classroom (with, of course, a major exception for my math class, in which I excelled).  I could remember very well that I raised my hands twice in non-mathematics classes at my junior high school, both during the eighth grade.  The first time I raised my hand, Mrs. Meltzer asked her students a Yes-or-No question about Shakespeare, and I raised my hand and said “Yes.”  She then asked me why?  I shut my mouth and someone else answered it.  I thought that was OK because I did give a correct answer. Big whoopee!

The second time I raised my hand in class made a deep dent in my mind – that is, it was most damaging to my self-confidence in public speaking.  All year, Mr. Wolfson kept telling my mother that he would love love love to see me raise my hand and say something in his Social Studies class, and Mom had told me a few times about Mr. Wolfson’s desire.  Remember that I had notetaking as my only extra help, meaning that I did not have any ASL interpreters that could help me understand what was being discussed in class.  Finally, in the spring, I raised my hand and Mr. Wolfson was thrilled to see it.  Or, wasn’t he? 

I knew the general idea of the discussion that had been continuing at that time was about a national strike by coal miners that lasted over three months.  Basically, the strikers demanded a better way of living, e.g., more money.  Again, I could not hear exactly what Mr. Wolfson and the rest of my classmates were talking about, but I decided to satisfy Mr. Wolfson’s desire and asked the following question:

“Why did the coal miners go on a strike?”

It was a g-ddamned stupid question, and I knew it.  Even Michelle, the student who sat in front of me, laughed out loud and clapped aloud too.  David, one of my closest friends who sat next to me, made a face indicating that the answer to the question was too obvious.  Mr. Wolfson must have realized that he had put so much pressure on my mother and more on myself that I blurted out a question that had been beaten many times to death.

Even though I’ve had interpreters since my graduate days at Penn and have improved my public speaking skills since then, I still shudder about speaking in public.

Postscript (dated December 30, 2023): I feel this above story is not complete without my further telling what happened at the end of that disastrous discussion.  After Michelle stopped laughing, Mr. Wolfson attempted very hard to look serious and asked anyone in the class if he or she could answer my question.  Nora, another classmate of mine, raised her hand, and she gave her answer.  I, of course, could not read her lips because she was so far away – she was sitting in the side of the classroom opposite to the side where I sat, but of course, I somehow knew the answer.  I didn’t want to put this part in the original story because it’s so anticlimactic, but at the end, it’s the money, dummy!