The FM System That Helped Me Hear and Made Me a Target

In third grade the school gave me an FM radio system to help me hear the teacher, and I hated it from the first day.

The setup was a box about the size of a deck of cards that clipped to my pants, wired to a set of headphones I had to wear all day. My teacher wore a matching box with a microphone clipped to her shirt, and her voice came straight through to my headphones. On paper it solved the problem. In an actual classroom full of third graders, it made me a target.

I was already an outsider and already getting picked on, and now I was sitting there wired up like a walking radio station while every other kid just looked normal. I rejected it almost immediately. I never gave it a fair shot, and I know that now, but at eight years old fitting in mattered more to me than hearing the teacher clearly.

They tried again in sixth grade with a newer version. This time, instead of headphones, I wore a necklace that sent the audio straight to my hearing aids. It was less obvious without those bulky 90s headphones, but there was still a cord, still a box, still something that marked me as different. Same result.

The hard part is that the technology probably would have helped, and I’ll never know, because I was too busy trying to survive socially to judge it on whether it actually worked. An eight-year-old doesn’t sit there weighing whether he can hear better against whether the other kids will leave him alone. He just wants to disappear into the crowd.

#LLHearingMyStory #HearingLoss