Here’s a story I haven’t told before, I suppose because it puts my father, who I loved dearly, in a bad light.
I became deaf in kindergarten (spinal meningitis outbreak, four other kids in my school died, I’m told). So starting in first grade I would commute from Levittown to Fairmont in Philadelphia, to the Martin Bache School, a block from the Eastern State Penitentiary. It was an oral school, no sign language, and I was a superstar there. (My parents were very well educated, books everywhere.) Plus, I could already speak clearly. (Another reason I haven’t brought this up before. Most of my classmates were born deaf and I really had an unfair advantage as far as being able to speak was concerned. And my Irish Catholic spinster teachers were all very impressed with my Irish Catholic Jesuit priest uncle. But I digress.) it was my mother’s fondest hope that sooner rather than later I’d be able to be mainstreamed in our local schools. She really really really did not want me to grow up in the Deaf world. Anyway, my math was too good for my teachers to keep up with so in the spring before I turned ten it was arranged that I’d take an algebra class at Masterman JHS, three or so blocks away from Martin, starting in the fall. My mom died a week before school started that year. I go to class at Masterman and I’m totally lost, getting Cs and Ds, not being able to understand the teacher, totally overwhelmed. The teacher, most likely motivated by pity for this bereaved deaf boy, gives me an A+ and says that I’m the best student he’s ever seen. And so my dad, of course, thinks that I’m ready to be mainstreamed and I’m put into 8th grade in Sandburg JHS, skipped a grade. What the hell am I supposed to tell my father? That the teacher was flat out lying? (Dad was going through a horrible time himself, of course. Five motherless kids, the oldest was 12.) Anyway, I started going to the local school and nobody could understand why this supposed math genius couldn’t do better than a C in algebra. And I had zero support, nobody knew what to do with a deaf kid. Anyway…I guess it all worked out in the end but boy was I a misfit. It wasn’t fair to anyone, my teachers or my classmates.
