The BIG School; Part One

The last sixteen years before my retirement (1991-2007), I taught in Toronto. The secondary school where I worked has close to 2,000 students! It was a school that had a wonderful reputation in the city. The staff were known to be highly qualified and caring. The students were active in a variety of ways; sports, dozens of extra-curricular clubs and charitable work. (Example: every year, the students raised between $15,000 and $20,000 for the United Way.) It was a busy and challenging place to work.

Part of this school's attraction is the fact that it caters to a number of exceptional needs. It has a large program for "gifted" students and an even larger department for learning disabled and special needs students. These two areas serve hundreds of young people in the building. And, in addition, there was the deaf and hard-of-hearing department where I was located.

In the time that I taught at the school, our department averaged between 35 to 45 students - just a few in the midst of a huge school population that hardly even knew they were there! 

Our department's students came from various elementary programs across the city. 

• A few came from a city school for the deaf - where the kids had been taught using ASL.
• Others came from programs that would be designated "oral" - possibly with some signing available. 
• Hard-of-hearing youth came from classrooms where the emphasis was on listening and, with hearing aids, acting as much like the hearing kids around them as possible.
  

As teachers in that department, we were faced with the challenge of teaching classes that generally contained a few students from each of those backgrounds at the same time.

I want to say that it was a good school and our department had hard-working and committed teachers and students with great abilities and talents. It was, in some ways a great place to be, but it was not adequately meeting the needs of the deaf students in my opinion.

I'll Blog more on this in the future.