What?!

Hello all my English 103 friends! I hope all is well in blog town. So this week has been mostly about language. Epiphany, knowledge and even failure in how language effects people. For my entry, I want to talk about a communication barrier I had as a child that has stuck with me to adult. Yet dealing with it in my youth has made it easier for me to live and learn with.
When I was about six years old, I had an ear infection that got so bad my eardrum burst and I had to go into surgery. They tried to fixed the damaged eardrum yet the doctors said I would experience hearing loss. Though it didn’t turn out that way, I suppose “hearing loss” is was optimistic words, because afterwards I was almost completely deaf in my left ear. Needless to say “what” became a large part of conversation, I constantly needed people to repeat themselves. The most embarrassing part as a kid was when someone told me a secret in my bad ear, I had no clue what they said. As a kid that kind of thing is weird and different, I may as well have had cooties. I found it really hard to adjust to the world when I could only kind of hear it. I would feel dumb when people would laugh at the way I said things, or even when people would give up trying to tell me things because the didn’t want to repeat themselves a million times.
Eventually it came to the point that my elementary school refused to enroll me without a hearing aid. Not easily affordable by my parents, I had to figure out a way to get by without it. I would catch myself staring at the kid next to me so my good ear would be pointed toward the teacher. So I stopped talking, nodded a lot, and learned how to read lips. I got pretty good at it and was finally able to hold a conversation without feeling stupid or crazy. Yet even reading lips gave me a habit of pronouncing words incorrectly, I remember getting ambulance wrong several time on spelling tests because I couldn’t say it right, therefore sounding it out didn’t work. Though I have figured out how to deal with my lack of hearing as an adult, I still have instances were it becomes a communication difficulty. In high school I wrote a short story and used a scene were someone is in a car looking out the “rear-view” mirror. Well I had no clue that’s what it was called, sounds ridiculous but people say it so fast I never understood how to say the word. Anyway I spelt rear view-rervue. I can laugh about it now but for a teacher to correct me I felt pretty stupid then. It’s never easy to deal with the loss of one of your senses, but oddly enough it has made me a great listener and self learner.
In our Exploring Language text we do have an example of Helen Keller and her struggle with being deaf and blind. Yet for me the author I most closely relate to on this subject is Malcolm X. A man who created a prison education for himself. I relate because, granted I wasn’t in jail, but I was metaphorically imprisoned. I went from being a normal kid to being thrown into a world I couldn’t hear. Like being stuck in a foreign country and not speaking the language. On page 66 paragraph 7 he says “ It was because of my letters that I happened to stumble upon starting to acquire some kind of a home made education.” This sticks in my mind because I also gave myself a knowledge from reading lips, books and honing in anything I could hear. Though certain things take a little extra effort or accommodation, in the long run my language difficulty has benefited from observation.
Well that's-that for now. I'll be harrassing everyone's blogs soon :)

Vanessa!!!