…it’s not just about mechanics and understanding which “th” words are voiced and which are voiceless. It’s about collaboration, understanding, and communication. Oh, and motivation.

I’m a native cuer. I’m also deaf—profoundly deaf. And I don’t exactly have the best auditory processing skills. I can discriminate the difference between high heels clacking down the hallway and a loud bang close by. I’ll hear a weird sound every so often and say, “what’s that?”

Most of the time, it’s usually an air conditioner, heater, fan, or vacuum cleaner whirring. Even in a coffee shop, I still have to take a couple minutes to process that rattling, banging sound that is a cappuccino or Frappucino™/frozen/blended drink mixer.

So, forget speech discrimination. I’ll be very upfront with you—I can barely understand a thing someone says, unless I’m reading lips, or even better, if the other person is cueing or signing. So, then, how does a deaf person like me work with hearing people on their cueing skills?

Well, it’s not easy. After all, there’s always a certain amount of trepidation going into a new teaching situation, especially with brand-new hearing cuers. I never know who’s going to pick it up quickly, who I might have trouble getting through to (and wanting to bash them in the head with the nearest blunt object), or who I might have a hard time understanding. Because, after all, cueing is supposed to help facilitate communication in English, right?

What I’ve found, though, is that most times the people taking the workshop or class become pretty darn motivated to learn and to communicate with me.  There’s no “abstract” component to learning how to cue, especially for college/graduate students in the field of deaf education or speech-language pathology who may or may not use CS at a point later in their life. They gotta learn how to cue because their instructor needs it for optimal communication purposes.

It doesn’t matter that I’m a fluent signer. It doesn’t matter that I’m a proficient lipreader. What matters is encouraging all students of all types to work on their cueing skills and communicate with me as best as they can, in my native (and preferred) mode.

It doesn’t matter whether I have students learning or trying to improve their speed and fluency. What matters is walking into a classroom, and being able to deal with all types of learners and proving that I’m not only as good as a “normal” hearing instructor, but that I provide a benefit to them that hearing instructors can’t provide—realization at the importance of cued communication.  It warms my heart when I see students helping each other out if someone’s not sure how to cue something to me.

But, I will give people a hard time if they try to resort to signing instead of cueing. I may be pretty flexible as an instructor and let people take cueing breaks, but if I see someone start to sign or just voice because it’s easier, they get “the look” from me.

Case in point: Last year I worked with an intermediate-level class at a cue camp, and I had two parents who signed and cued. They had admitted they were signing more with their child because that’s what they started out doing, but wanted to rededicate themselves to cueing. At one point, the father started signing to me, asking me a question. I refused to answer, and just stared at him. He asked the question again, and I still stayed silent. *THE LOOK*

“Oh man! You want me to cue this, don’t you?”

“Yup.”

Works every time!