How Cued Speech Found Me

It was in the summer of 1999 when I stumbled upon Cued Speech.  I had just finished my freshman year of college at Roger Williams University and was getting ready to head down to Washington, DC to participate in LEAP (Leadership Enrichment Adventure Program), a leadership program designed for oral deaf and hard of hearing college age students.  I’ll admit I was a bit nervous, after all this would be the first time I’d be around this many individuals with hearing loss.  Although I grew up oral and was fully mainstreamed into my hometown public school this was new, uncharted territory for me.  I typically was always “the only one” in my school that had a hearing loss using listening and spoken language.  So I inquired with the program directors at AGBell to see if there were any other participants who wouldn’t mind meeting up before the start of LEAP.   Sure enough, I was connected to another participant.  I decided to fly down to Pennsylvania a few days prior to the program to meet her and from there we’d drive together to DC.  It didn’t take long for me to realize that she and her family were using a very unique communication system, one I hadn’t seen before!  Of course being full of questions I wanted to know more and quickly found myself learning Cued Speech in a matter of two days.  I carried my little Cued Speech card (one little business sized card contains the entire system) around for the next week and took every opportunity I had to practice my new skill.

What an exciting time!  It was then I recognized the value and impact Cued Speech could have in my educational environment.  As a child, I loved school and my hunger for knowledge was insatiable.  I got what I needed and thrived, yet I was facing an opposite reaction to college.  Frustration was high on the list of emotions I was experiencing.  Freshman year of college was rocky due to the inability to access my academic curriculum in the same manner as my typically hearing peers.

At LEAP I found the missing “key”.  While a personal FM system coupled with lipreading was an appropriate accommodation for me to access my education growing up in the public school system, unfortunately the same didn’t ring true in college.  The lecture halls were bigger, the professors “didn’t get it” and I was surrounded by new classmates who didn’t have the first hand knowledge of what to do with a deaf classmate who looked and sounded just like them.  I tried a sign language interpreter and although sign was effective for me in social situations, it just didn’t work for me academically, thus calculus, organic chemistry and marine biology became more confusing.  Although I tried, I’m not a native signer and I recognized that immediately.  I needed my instruction in my native language.

Cued Speech was a tool necessary to access my education, the education I was paying loads of money for; in my first language, English.  Yes, the cliche “Cued Speech opened doors for me” rang true.  No longer struggling to acquire lecture information or participate in group activities and discussions, I excelled in the classroom and was afforded the opportunity to fully immerse myself into my college community without worries of “What did I miss today?” or “What time is the tutoring center opening tomorrow morning?” hanging over my head.  The light at the end of the tunnel suddenly became visible again.  I found myself learning with ease, enjoying classes and loving college!