Learning To Read With Hearing Loss

A woman named Mrs. Rios taught me to read, thirty minutes a day, every day, for six years.

I was diagnosed with profound hearing loss in first grade, and that diagnosis triggered an IEP, an Individualized Education Plan, which is how Mrs. Rios came into my life. One-on-one, half an hour every morning, from first grade all the way through sixth.

Most kids learn to read by connecting letters to sounds. You sound out the word, you hear the pieces, and you put them together. The whole method assumes you can hear those pieces clearly, and I couldn’t. My hearing loss meant the sounds the other kids were blending together were never fully there for me.

Mrs. Rios figured that out and went a completely different direction. She broke words apart visually and showed me the patterns inside them, the shapes and the structure, so I learned to see language instead of trying to hear it. She didn’t stop at reading either. She taught me to write, she taught me cursive, and she gave me the foundation everything else in my education was built on.

I think about it sometimes, a profoundly hearing-impaired kid sitting with one patient woman every morning for six straight years, decoding written language through patterns instead of sound. There was no app, no shortcut, no clever workaround. Just consistency and a person who understood that the standard method was never going to work for me, so she found another one.

She didn’t treat my hearing loss as something to fix. She treated it as something to work around, and that one difference shaped the rest of my life.

#LLHearingMyStory #HearingLoss