Juliet England: Life lessons – teaching with a hearing loss

It’s been a brisk time in terms of leaving my usual pit to go and venture out into the wider world. I’ve previously written about returning to an office with cloth ears, if only on a part-time basis.

Then, not so long ago, I had an email from an agency that I’d registered with ages ago before promptly (and completely) forgetting about them.

The agency supplies English tutors, and wanted to set me up with a young Italian called Antonino who worked locally. (Well, how could I possibly object – and what could possibly go wrong?)

However, the email sparked a number of concerns, not least of which was the prospect of having to leave home to work, never something I particularly relish.

Then there was the minor fact that I am not even a qualified teacher – my experience is limited to a few hashed attempts as a student and one Frenchman who I tried to teach with varying degrees of success some years ago.

Oh, and I also attempted to run a lunchtime Spanish club at a local prep school a few years back, an experience which was as miserable and short-lived as it was underpaid, and about which the less is said the better.

Most importantly, there was the small matter of my hearing loss. How would I cope in a situation where the ability to communicate was so fundamental to its success?

Anyway, having weighed up the pros and cons, the overriding factors being that I needed the money, and also quite fancied the idea of being set up with a smart young Italian, I decided to go for it.

I’ve now just finished the course, so can assess the pros and cons. I was lucky to enjoy a good few of the former. For a start-off, only the student and I were ever in the room, apart from the odd occasion where a colleague popped their head around the door.

So there was no background noise, although the meeting room we used was rather large and echoing. It must also have magnified my notoriously loud voice, for my poor student frequently looked pained when I was speaking.

The large table meant we had to sit side-by-side, rather than opposite each other, which would certainly have helped with the old lipreading.

Equally, there were times when I just asked him to work on something, giving me much-needed phone surfing time, so then of course no hearing was needed.

I was also lucky to have a pleasant, diligent and professional student, who quickly adapted to my cloth ears and accepted the need to repeat things or occasionally write them down. He appreciated, too, that I would never be able to phone him to cancel or rearrange a lesson.

However, again on the downside, inevitably Antonino had an Italian accent (well, he is from Sicily.) And while I love all accents, his was particularly strong. I do hate it when people think I can’t understand them because of their accent, rather than because I simply can’t hear, although to be fair I’m not entirely sure that was the case here.

Another niggle was when I tried to correct his pronunciation. He often claimed in bemusement that he hadn’t pronounced things the way I insisted he had, and it may well be that my badly functioning ears caused the poor chap some confusion.

Despite all that, in many ways the downsides had little to do with my hearing loss. Teaching is ultimately not my core business. Equally, I woefully underestimated how long it would take to prepare for a two-hour class or how quickly he would whip through the material prepared, leaving me desperately wondering what to do with the 40 minutes left.

It’s true that I am perhaps not the best or most natural teacher the world has ever seen.  It’s also hard to know how much Antonino has really benefited from the time we had together, although when I looked at some of his written work towards the end of the course, it was noticeably freer from errors than it had been at the start.

But, while I am not entirely sure how I would cope in a classroom full of sixteen-year-olds baying for my blood, at least I got through this course in one piece. Offered the chance to teach one-to-one again, I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand.