Deaf Student Teacher Opens Pupils’ Eyes

The 120 kindergarten students were bewildered at what Jane Newkirk had brought to Sandburg Elementary School.

An alarm clock connected to a board.

Newkirk, a student teacher, plugged in the device--which sits astride her bed--and turned it on.

As the wooden board began to vibrate and clatter on the assembly stage, many of the students howled their approval and applauded. Others jabbed each other in the ribs and broke into broad smiles.

Newkirk couldn’t hear them.

“I feel that on my pillow and I get up,” she told the students, speaking loud enough for the last row to hear. “I hate to be awakened by a light.”

Different Worlds Meet

Newkirk, 36, is deaf. The students at the Mira Mesa school, including the kindergarten class where she is a student teacher, can hear.

Newkirk, who has full command of the spoken word, is more than a typical student teacher, gathering her credentials and preparing for her own class. For her students, she offers a window into the world of the deaf.

During the assembly, she also showed the students a videotape of a close-captioned episode of “Jeopardy” and a telephone device for the deaf. But first she showed them the film “Deaf Like Me.”

Newkirk wants to be a teacher for the San Diego Unified School District’s parent-infant program for the deaf and hard of hearing.

Although all the infants in the program are either deaf or hard of hearing, only one program parent is deaf, said Dr. Barbara MacNeil, a school district program specialist.

In the meantime, Newkirk is working with hearing students to get her multiple-subject credentials, which she should complete by month’s end.

From there, Newkirk plans to complete her communication-handicap credential in December and her master’s degree in education of the deaf sometime next year.

She hopes her work with deaf infants and their parents will help them establish a communication base, whether it be through speech therapy, sign language or gestures.

Doesn’t Come Easy

None of her success comes easy, however. Each day can be an enormous task when you can’t hear.

Newkirk gives lessons to the 30 students in the kindergarten class of Joan Dunn, her master teacher. She reads to them and helps them with their class projects through one of four interpreters who rotate working with her.

The experience can be touching and rewarding. Other times it is trying, she says.

“I do have bad moments,” Newkirk said. “When that happens, I tend to cry a lot.”

Family, friends, Dunn and other student teachers are there to lend encouragement and support. Newkirk has been married 12 years, and her husband, Don, knows sign language. They have a 5-year-old daughter and an 8-year-old son. Neither of the children nor her husband is deaf.

After 11 years of speech therapy that started when she was 7 years old, Newkirk mastered the spoken language. She didn’t learn sign language until she was 22, the same time she met another deaf person for the first time.

Newkirk could teach in Dunn’s class without an interpreter, but the process would be enormously tiring and would slow the instruction.

“Without the interpreter with me, I’d have to work harder to read your lips,” she said.

Speaking has created myriad difficulties and misconceptions she labels “mainstreaming.”

The Problem of Speech

People view her differently because she can talk. She is disturbed that many people think that only those deaf people who speak can lead successful lives.

“Those who use sign language have made inroads,” she said. “I will agree that speech is very important, but, at the same time, I don’t think we should ignore academics for the sake of speech.”

Yet being able to talk has put her into challenging spots.

“I get into situations where I’m over my head and, I am expected to know more than I can,” she said.

One example, she says, involves a “method of teaching where (teachers) point and talk at the same time.” Training her eye on the area pointed to and capturing what a person has said is tough, if not nearly impossible.

Despite the frustration, the plucky Newkirk plows forward.

Dunn said that having Newkirk in the class breaks down stereotypes about the deaf. The first-hand experience for students cannot be duplicated unless someone in their family is deaf.

“Of course her being here opens up their (the students’) world,” Dunn said, as Newkirk held up a book and read to the students about dolphins.

As Newkirk read aloud, a boy in the back was jostling with a boy next to him. He started to rise up on his knees--a no-no in a kindergarten classroom. Newkirk saw him and walked over.

Instead of telling the boy to sit down, she signed the request, holding open her palm and placing her index and middle finger over the edge to resemble a pair of legs sitting.

When the boy, who knew the sign’s meaning, failed to sit, Newkirk gave the sign to stand.

The boy stood while his classmates remained seated and Newkirk went back to the reading lesson.

Want to Learn More

Besides the signs for sitting and standing, the students know a handful of others and have expressed an interest in learning more. Newkirk says she will teach them some basics, like boy, girl, pencil and desk. They already know signs for jump, stand on one leg and for animals such as octopus and dolphin.

Newkirk graduated from Grossmont High School in 1970 and completed her bachelor’s degree in biology in 1974 from the University of Redlands.

By borrowing notes from other classmates, reading extensively and reading lips, Newkirk was able to stay in class with hearing students.

After graduation from Redlands, Newkirk worked as a medical technologist for 13 years, part time for the past eight. But she found the job limited because she could not use a regular phone.

Working in isolation much of the time and having little chance to “meet new people,” Newkirk decided to consider teaching. Looking back now at her first day as a student teacher, she recalls how students made note of the way her speech sounded.

“One of the boys came up to me in the first week and said, ‘You talk funny,’ ” Newkirk said. After Dunn told the students that Newkirk couldn’t hear, the comments faded after two weeks.

Just holding down the position of student teacher is difficult, Newkirk has found.

There is no pay and earning a multiple-subject credential takes a year beyond four years of undergraduate work. After full days in the classroom teaching, nights are spent hammering out lesson plans, some of which SDSU professors, who oversee her work, praise and some of which they send back for retooling.

But each day, Newkirk--like other student teachers--is thrilled with the response that she gets from a student who catches on to a new concept, word or skill.

Newkirk says she can see when that happens, even if a student doesn’t tell her.

“It’s not what they say, but their smiles and the look of comprehension on their faces,” she said. “As long as I can communicate with the students and see progress, I will be happy.”