As you recall from my blog on Bronx Science, I was discriminated by the chair of the mathematics department at Bronx Science because she didn’t think I was smart enough for a honors mathematics class.1 But that’s not the only time that I had been discriminated at any public school.
The first time I was discriminated occurred before I even went to a public school. Lexington School for the Deaf already had allowed me to mainstream into a school for students with typical hearing.2 That meant my parents and I had to visit several schools before making a final decision. The first time I was discriminated against by a school occurred during a visit that my parents and I had at Public School (PS) 178 in my hometown of Holliswood. When we were at PS 178, we met its principal. Keep in mind that I was a sixth grader there – two years later. If the principal was smart enough, I would have been a fourth grader there. But no, the principal was standoffish, telling my parents that PS 178 had the highest average reading level among fourth graders across the borough of Queens and that he expressed concern that a deaf student like me might lower the reading class average there. Screw him.
A short while later, we visited PS 179 in Fresh Meadows, 15 minutes’ drive from home (and obviously farther away than PS 178). The principal was so welcoming that the following year, I went there for the next two years. Unfortunately, the school had to close due to budget cuts, and my parents and I had to look for another school.
Guess where we visited? Yes, you guessed right – we visited PS 178 again, but this time it had a different (and more friendly) principal. I attended there as a sixth grader, and then I went off to Junior High School (JHS) 216.
At JHS 216, I do remember a Black student. His incident with me could have been worse, but we somehow managed to defuse it. Before I describe the incident, I have to describe him briefly. He was born with a deformed arm, and he had been very self-conscious about his deformity. To mask his insecurity, he was very talkative and very loud. He had been consistently defiant to any authority – he didn’t like to be told what he ought to do. He believed he was being told what to do because people saw him as inferior. So he was resentful toward and resisted anyone authoritative. I remember several times that during lunch break in the school cafeteria, he had been reported by a particular teacher to the principal’s office. I clearly remember the teacher, Mr. Baum, because he was my 7th and 8th grade science teacher. Boy, both teacher and student were tough and stubborn to each other.
Now let’s get back to my incident with the student with his deformed arm. He had been very aggressive towards students whom he didn’t know. Obviously, he didn’t know me, much less my hearing loss. So one day when we were eighth graders (it was nearing the end of that academic year), I went to the bathroom and began to relieve myself in a wall urinal. While I was urinating, the bathroom door opened and the student came in. I saw him, but didn’t understand what he said. But I saw his body language, indicating he wanted to bully me out of his ‘own urinal,’ perhaps because I’m white, but he didn’t know that I’m also deaf. Fortunately, I finished my thing quickly and neatly zipped myself just in case that I might expose myself by ‘accident.’ As soon as he put his normal hand on my arms, I got out of his way and said ‘I’m deaf.’ He raised his hand up in the air and nodded, saying “Oh, OK!” I left the bathroom without further incident. Perhaps, he saw me as a kindred spirit because we both had a disability or perhaps he didn’t know how to respond to a d/Deaf kid like me. In any event, we never saw each other again because he did not return to JHS 216 for the ninth grade.
There was an embarrassing moment for me at JHS 216. You can guess that I rarely participated in class because I could not understand any of what the teacher and/or classmates were saying in the class. There was this 8th grade Social Studies teacher, Mr. Wolfson. In his class, he loved to discuss civil and social issues that had been affecting America. He also kept telling my mother that he’d love to see me participate during such a discussion. Well, that was really embarrassing, and I felt pressured. Nearing the end of the academic year, we were discussing about an active newspaper strike in New York City (that was the year of 1978). I finally raised my hand, and Mr. Wolfson was secretly thrilled to see that (he didn’t want the other students to note his happiness). I asked one simple question (whose answer was obvious to everyone including myself), but I wanted to satisfy the teacher. I asked, “Why was there a strike?” and saw Michelle (who was sitting in front of me) throwing her head back. She simultaneously laughed loudly and clapped hard. That classmate was really something—obnoxious and opinionated. My close friend David, who sat next to me, made a funny face, implying to me that everyone else knew the answer. Of course, the answer was more money, dummy, but I had hoped that Mr. Wolfson had learned his lesson by then. It was cool that he treated me like everyone else, but it was not so cool that he failed to understand how my deafness had affected my class participation until it was too late and that students themselves (including Michelle and David) were ignorant of the fact that I could not hear, much less grasp, what they were talking prior to my class question.
Now it’s onto Bronx Science. I do remember two incidents at Bronx Science, but neither incident was significant, as compared to the nearly disastrous meeting at the Math Department.1 When I was a sophomore, I had Chemistry. The chemistry teacher, Mrs. Steindler, was an effective one, but not a thoughtful one. One day, my parents were visiting the school – it was a Parents Day of sorts. They met Mrs. Steindler and discussed how I was doing. Unfortunately, we all lost respect for her when she told my parents, “Would it be better if Henry had gone to a school for the d/Deaf?” D’oh, by the end of my senior year, she even wrote a note on my yearbook, hinting her admission of guilt.
A tragicomic event occurred at a time when it was time for me to apply for colleges. My parents and I considered numerous colleges including Harvard University. One day, my parents talked with Mrs. Freeman, my guidance counselor at Bronx Science. They told Mrs. Freeman that I was considering applying to Harvard. She interjected that Harvard would never accept my application, implying that she couldn’t believe that an Ivy League institution would admit a d/Deaf applicant. Of course, we disagreed with her, but this discord didn’t continue because a few days later, Mrs. Freeman was discussing colleges with a classmate of mine (I still don’t know who the student was) in her office. All of a sudden, she suffered a massive stroke, collapsed and died. It was an unfortunate event because she didn’t stay long enough for me to prove her wrong.
These are incidents that happened at my schools before Harvard, and these incidents smacked of discrimination against not just me but also everyone with hearing loss. The offenders had little, if any, intent, but they were ignorant of how their actions could be harmful to people like me. As for me, I’m already thick-skinned – I have been that way since when I was a young child. I was happy and was always looking forward to the next thing without allowing my deafness to stop me. Now that I’ve gone through further harmful incidents after Harvard, I’ve become more conscious of the effects that have arisen from such incidents, especially when some of the incidents were done with intent. Am I still thick-skinned? I don’t know, but they have certainly affected the sustainability of any of my jobs. That’s another story, and has been present in different forms elsewhere in my website, www.the-eagle-ear.com.
References
1https://the-eagle-ear.com/bronx-high-school-of-science/
2https://the-eagle-ear.com/mrs-lois-holland-at-the-lexington-school-for-the-deaf/