hilltopics Images Features 10A Friday, October 6. 2000 For comments, contact Clay McCuistion at 864-4924 or e-mail features@kansan.com
Student-teacher Beth Yoder, Lawrence senior, gestures to her ninth-grade civics class at West Junior High School. Yoder, who is deaf, eventually wants to teach at the Kansas School for the Deaf in Olathe. Photo by Jamie Raper/KANSAN
Limited hearing doesn't limit student-teacher in classroom
By Jason Krall writer@kansan.com Kansan staff writer
"Which U.S. track star retired his gold shoe at the Olympics?" student-teacher Beth Yoder asks a ninth-grade civics class at West Junior High School.
Nearly every hand shoots up.
Yoder points to a student at the back who has already collected a couple of candies from the reward dish.
"Michael Johnson," he answers.
The other students groan as Yoder smiles and gestures to the dish. It would be hard to tell for someone who walked into class at that moment, but Yoder is deaf.
The Lawrence senior will collect her degree in elementary education next spring. And despite her disability, she has excelled at something many educators with hearing impairments never attempt — teaching a mainstream class.
Carolyn Derusseau has watched Yoder lead the class's weekly current events trivia games for the past six weeks. She said Yoder was the first student-teacher with a hearing impairment she has worked with and that Yoder was better organized and more assertive than any student-teacher she's ever had.
"Of all the student-teachers I've had, Beth, more than anyone, sees what has to be done and does it," Derusseau said. "She manages the classroom so well. And I couldn't ask for anyone who was as hard a worker or more observant."
Yoder will leave the class next week and return to her classes on the KU campus.
Several ways of communicating
For Yoder, communication is a combination of lip reading,
sign language and asking people to write things down.
She wears a hearing aid that allows her to pick up some sound, although it does not allow her to hear clearly enough to understand by sound alone. Without it, she's unable to pick up anything other than someone screaming in her ear, she said.
Yoder's parents began to notice that she couldn't hear when she was 3 years old.
"When I was 3, I just stopped talking," said Yoder, who speaks with only a slight speech impediment. "They couldn't figure it out. It just happened. I hadn't been sick at all."
Doctors never identified a cause for her hearing loss, which has grown worse as she's gotten older, she said.
Soon after her parents discovered her hearing impairment, they enrolled her in lip reading and speech classes. She said it was easier to read the lips of people she knew than strangers.
And men with beards and mustaches are a real challenge.
But taking words in context helps, especially when she has trouble seeing the difference between certain sounds, such as Bs and Ms.
"They look exactly alike," she said. "But I know you probably said, 'Let's go to the mail,' not, 'Let's go to the ball.'"
Yoder has two sisters, 21 and 15, neither of whom have hearing disorders. But both can sign better than their parents, so the girls sometimes used sign language when they didn't want their parents to know what they were talking about.
Yoder said she was never teased about her hearing as a child. In elementary school, she wore an amplifying device that
required anyone who wanted to speak to her to use a special microphone. Her classmates often invited her to join them for group work because they liked to talk into the microphone.
One afternoon in the cafeteria at Lawrence High School, where she was a student, Yoder decided she had to start asking people to write things down for her when she didn't understand. A boy she didn't know came up to her and said something.
Student-teacher Both Yoder, far right, Lawrence senior, calls on a student while her interpreter, Christy Kilpictur, far left, signs to her. Yoder has led the current events trivia games in the ninth-grade civics class at West Junior High School for the past six weeks. Photos by Jamie Roper/KANSAN
She couldn't read his lips.
He repeated it several times, and Yoder still couldn't understand him. Just as she was about to ask him to write it down, he gave up and walked away.
"It was a bad experience," she said. "I was upset because I wanted to know what he said. After that I started asking people, 'Please write it down.'"
Because many deaf people can read lips, Yoder said there was no reason to be afraid to approach deaf people and talk to them.
"I've had a lot of experiences where people don't come up to me because they are uncomfortable and they're not sure how to talk to me," she said. "They just need to remember to talk like they normally do. Don't overexaggerate your words."
Even if a deaf person has an interpreter nearby, talk to the deaf person, not the interpreter, she said. Yoder has an interpreter with her when she teaches, and sometimes students talk to the interpreter instead of her.
"People go up to the interpreter and say, 'Tell her that I need to borrow your book,' or whatever they need, and I'm standing right there able to understand them," she said.
Yoder has battled her difficulties in speaking and hearing with an army of instructors, speech therapists and interpreters. She said the different styles of interpreters she's worked with have changed the way she hears what is going on around her.
"I've had so many different interpreters," she said. "Some just interpret what the answers are in the class, others will interpret the conversation going on in class."
But she has had problems with teachers who didn't respect her need for an interpreter. On occasion, teachers asked her interpreter to go make copies or run errands during class.
A role model
Yoder plans to begin graduate school at the University next fall. After obtaining her master's degree in the education of deaf students, she hopes to teach at the Kansas School for the Deaf in Olathe, she said.
She said she decided she wanted to work with deaf students after serving as a counselor at a week-long camp for deaf children the past several summers. The summer camp, which was in St. Joseph, Mo., brings students from the Olathe school together with students at the Missouri School for the Deaf.
Mary Lynn Hamilton, director of education administration, and Yoder's academic advisor, said Yoder has worked hard to overcome her disability.
"She's very determined," Hamilton said. "She works hard to do the best she can, which is always fabulous."
Yoder said deaf students often got trapped into thinking they couldn't go on to college and lead successful lives. That's one of the reasons she's hoping to inspire students at the school in Olathe to set high goals and pursue them.
"I knew a deaf student in high school who said, 'My teacher said I wouldn't make it in college,'" she said.
But Yoder never doubted that she would obtain a college degree because her parents encouraged her early on. They've also helped her overcome her difficulties with speech.
"My parents have been very supportive in everything I've done," she said. "My mom always helped me by taking notes for me in church so that I could understand what the sermon was about."
Yoder said she hoped to visit one of her favorite ski spot this winter — Keystone or Copper Mountain, Colo. She plays pick-up volleyball and frequents an Olathe movie theater that offers screenings with closed-captioning.
Yoder said she was looking forward to the start of the KU basketball season. She can sense the energy inside Allen Fieldhouse the same as any other lifelong Jayhawks fan.
"I like the atmosphere there," she said. "I can hear and feel what's going on in the crowd."
— Edited by Warisa Chulindra
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