High School Fun

I haven't written anything about school in quite a while, and it's been somewhat intentional*. Ever since the start of the school year, I've been struggling to hear in a couple of my discussion-based classes. The discussion is fast, and it's nearly impossible to run a single FM across the room when one of my classes is a double classroom with over 40 kids. Of course, this was only compounded by the lack of closed captioning and the struggles that every other freshman has- adjusting to the workload, reading, lack of free time, etc.

There were/are only two main classes that I was struggling in. They're college level classes, so I guess that's part of the reason so much of it is discussion rather than lecturing. I occasionally have trouble hearing/missing things in other classes, but I can deal with that. It's when I spend hours studying out of the textbook, trying to compensate the discussion I missed, only to score significantly worse than others who don't study at all, I get frustrated. It's not that they're smarter than I am, it's just that I'm sick of sitting in class feeling like I'm missing everything that's going on. Anyway, after much more than my fair share of meetings and tears, I asked if I could try out CART or C-Print and see if it would help me.

I'd already gotten the opportunity to try them out at various conventions and events for people with hearing loss. From these conventions, I also know various adults who are just past college age with CI's. I contacted a couple of them to ask if they'd struggled in high school, and they said they'd also experienced the same issues I had. They were able to get CART (often, after a long and hard fight with the school system) and it helped them dramatically.

The people from Deaf/Special Ed said that they'd have to evaluate me and determine that I have an educational need in order to access this technology. They sent a lady from Deaf Ed to answer any questions we had about the CART evaluation ahead of time. If it wasn't so frustrating, it would have been somewhat comical that this lady had absolutely no clue how the evaluation worked, and answered every question with, "You know, I'm really not sure..."  The only thing we could get out of her was that they would come by and evaluate me, both with and without CART, to find out if it was giving me better access. Okay, then... They were allowed 45 days to complete the evaluation. After 41 days, and not a single person coming to evaluate me, my mom sent an email inquiring when we would find out the results of the report. "We'll have it ready in just a few days," they said. Seeing as they had yet to step foot in a single classroom of mine, I could definitely see where the whole thing was heading...

I've decided to break up the school thing into more manageable segments, since it's an unbelievably long, drawn out story. I'm sure you could figure this out from the fact that we asked for CART in September, and it's now almost February.

*I didn't want to just complain when I actually had no answers to share. There's also the fear of anyone being able to read this blog, but at this point, I really don't care.