A Day in the Life of a Deaf Student

We think this post by staresinspace is absolutely amazing!— Sparkitors

Yeah, you heard right. Uh, wow—unintentional pun there. I meant to say you read right: I'm deaf, and I go to a teeny tiny little itty bitty K-12 school in St. Paul, Minnesota. There are about 100 students total, which comes out to six kids per grade. Our whole school could probably fit into your math class. Anyhoo, let's get rolling!

7:00 AM: Roll out of bed to my mom shaking me awake. Alarms are useless in this case. I mean, hello? I can't hear them!

8:15 AM: Wait inside my house for the bus to pick me up. Because I'm deaf, I get to ride the Special Ed short bus. Wo-hoo! *my sarcasm hand is raised*

8:45 AM: Finally get to school, after 30 minutes of commuting in the early morning traffic in St Paul.

9:00 AM: Homeroom. We basically just sign and ignore the teacher. There are only four of us, as my whole grade has, like, eight students.

9:15 AM: Off to first hour, which is Advanced Algebra. There are five kids in here, and I'm the only sophomore. The rest are juniors. We mostly just stare at the teacher or down at our sheets of paper. Fun!

10:15 AM: I bustle around the corner (the next classroom is four feet away) to my English class. We are currently reading To Kill a Mockingbird, so we discuss Atticus, and whether or not Scout is really a girl.

11:15 AM: World History! Yay! We get to chat with the teacher because she basically lets us do whatever we want. She'll open with "Well. I've got nothing planned today. What do you think we should do?" Mostly we discuss Hitler and Communism.

12:15 AM: My favorite class of the day—lunch. It's terribly short though; it only lasts about 15 minutes. So we cram the food down our throats and hope we don't choke. Bottoms up!

12:30 PM: Chemistry. One of my favorite classes, because I'm a nerd like that. Mostly we just discuss elements and formulas. You know the drill.

1:30 PM: Video Production. We make random videos for a grade; I made our teacher sprint for my video, which automatically makes it super-fantastic. Probably one of the easiest classes I have.

2:30 PM: Civics. Only three-fifths of the class actually participates—I do my work with two other girls, and the two guys usually just make faces at each other. Phooey to them; they need this class to graduate.

3:30 PM: Finally, we're out of here! Unfortunately, I'm in volleyball, basketball, Student Council, Academic Bowl, and the Drama club, so I never go home until 6ish. There are so few students that everyone gets a chance to participate in everything.

To sum it all up, my days is filled with 5% sarcasm, 20% chatting randomly with our teachers, 40% actually learning, and 35% activities.

5% sarcasm sounds like a pretty good daily percentage! Think your school can top that?

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