Rocky Hill Diversity Talks I Teddy Haddow

I'm excited to have our first student speaker to do a community talk today. Please give Teddy your attention. [applause] Hi. I'm Teddy. When I was born, I had a severe hearing loss in my right ear, and a profound hearing loss in my left ear. This means that I'm deaf. My hearing loss was discovered in a newborn hearing screening when I was only one day old. My parents worked really hard to find the right doctors and audiologists, so I could get my first pair of hearing aids when I was only 8 weeks old. So, I've never really known what it's like to be deaf, in the way that you might see on TV or in movies. And, growing up, I always went to regular schools. Instead of playing sports, I was in speech therapy. I'm just a regular kid, like most of the other people in this room, there's just a little something about me that's different. Like, if I'm in a noisy environment, I might not be able to hear people properly, because there's just all sorts of noise coming from everywhere, and my equipment can't properly differentiate what the noise is. [camera shutter clicks] And if somebody far away is trying to get my attention, I probably wouldn't be able to hear them. Some people might think that it's easier to hear noises when I essentially have a giant earbud right in my ears, but truthfully, it's pretty difficult. Even without my hearing aids and my cochlear implant, it's even more difficult. I mean, the only way that I could possibly hear somebody is if they yelled really loudly into my right ear. And I can't hear anything at all out of my left. I don't know what it's like to wake up in the morning with an alarm clock. I need this giant industrial bed shaker that I put between my box spring and my mattress that not just wakes me up, but practically the entire neighborhood. [laughter] Despite all of these extra things that I need, I'm not that much different from most of you. I am much, much different though, than the kind of deaf people that you might see on movies or in TV. Whenever I see a TV show or a movie with a deaf person in it, they usually seem so angry, so serious, so dissatisfied with their disability, their lives, and I am not like that at all. I love telling jokes. I love hearing jokes. I have a satisfying social life. And I play guitar. Three of my five closest deaf friends actually play an instrument. And while I'm not much different from a lot of you in personality, I still do have a disability. I need thousands of dollars worth of equipment in order to make it through my everyday life. I often need to ask my teachers and my friends to repeat themselves because I didn't understand them the first time. And, some of you might think it's annoying at first, but imagine how annoying it is for me. And if I go to a movie theatre, I probably wouldn't be able to understand all of the dialog because I don't have access to captions. And this is precisely where diversity comes into play. Diversity doesn't just revolve around the color of a person's skin, or where they're from, or what language they speak. It can include people who have physical and learning disabilities as well. People who have autism are diverse. People who are born without a leg are diverse, I'm a privileged white kid from the suburbs, and I'm diverse, because... you know. I also think it's important to recognize that diversity is not the only important thing that can happen in a community. Diversity focuses on people's differences, and in some cases can create a divide right through a community. But what's important about diversity is that it can lead to a much more important thing, and that's unity. Unity is all about briging people together. It's celebrating their similarities as much as they do their differences. And that's what I love about Rocky Hill. I feel like I can come in here and be open to every single person in this room, and be completely comfortable with it. Certainly I'm different from you. Like, I don't know what it's like to hear when I take a shower, because my hearing aids aren't waterproof. Even if it's really humid outside, my hearing aids might go on the fritz. Thunderstorms don't wake me up. And if my parents are yelling at me, I can just turn my stuff off. [laughter] I bet you're jealous right now actually. But even so, I love a lot of the same things that a lot of you people love. I love movies, I love rock music, I love Breaking Bad. [laughter] And just because I have one difference from all of you doesn't mean that I'm completely different, it doesn't mean that I'm an outsider, or should be excluded from anything. I just hope that me being here has enriched all of your lives as much as your being here has enriched mine. Thank you. [applause] Does anybody have any questions? [man] How did you learn to speak? You speak very well and it's hard to tell that you're a deaf person just by the way that you speak. Sometimes deaf people have a different tone to their voices and different pronunciation. [Ted] That's a very good question. Since I got my hearing aids at 8 weeks old, I essentially have the speaking ability of a normal person. I was never, I never went to a deaf school I've been in the public school system and eventually the private school system my entire life. And just being around normal people and being taught by the same teachers as them is what makes me the person that I am today. [man] Can you explain all the equipment you wear? Would you be comfortable explaining how it works? [Ted] Of course. My hearing aid is essentially a microphone with a giant amplifier in it. It receives noise, and pumps it at high volume straight into my ear. Whenever I get a new one, I usually program it so that it's not super quiet or super loud. And my cochlear implant is much more complicated actually. So, as you can all see, the microphone is right here, this little bulge, and it takes the sound and transmits it into this tiny little middle part, and then the sound is transformed into an electrical signal that goes down this wire, and into this headpiece that is magnetically attached to my head. I have a magnet in my head, basically. So if I ever needed to put a shopping list up there... [laughter] The signal is sent across the skin into a small computer that's in my head. The computer translates that into small electrical impulses that go into an electrode array inside my cochlea. It's basically a tiny little pea-sized organ in your inner ear that takes noise and turns it into signal that's sent to your brain. And the electrical impulses that the computer in my head does, it's basically simulated sound. [young man] Do you have any difficulty going through, like, metal detectors or anything like that? [Ted] Sometimes. But a more interesting fact, you know the backscatter machines, the big cylindrical ones that violate your privacy? [laughter] Yeah, well, I can't go through those because the x-rays mess with my implant and can permanently damage it, so I need to get patted down every time I take a plane. [audience 'awwww's] [young lady] You said that some of your deaf friends played instruments too. Are any of them fully deaf? [Ted] Well, they're varying degrees of deaf. One of them has two cochlear implants, yeah, I think another one has two hearing aids, and I think the other has one just like me, an implant and a hearing aid. [young lady] Do you know how to, like, understand sign language? [Ted] No. I don't actually. I never really saw a need to do it. I kind of wish I did know it then, because I could speak to my deaf friends more easily. [man] Do you read lips? [Ted] Yeah, I do. A lot. [laughter] [young lady] How old were you when you got the implant? [Ted] I actually just got it last year, yeah, I got it when I was a freshman. It's kind of a funny story. My mom wanted me to get a cochlear implant for a long time during my life, and I never really wanted to do it because I was scared of surgery. Especially on my head. But then one day during summer vacation, when we were riding in the car, she said to me, you know, because you'd have a magnet in your head, you can stick stuff to it. [laughter] That's what hooked me on to it. [laughter] It hooked me on to it, it's not the only reason. [laughter] [man] So that implant connects magnetically? [Ted] Yes, it's magnetic, yes. [man] I was surprised when you pulled it off, I thought you couldn't do that. [Ted] Well no, it's a magnet, there's a magnet inside my head, and this is a magnet, and it's magnetically attached. [man] In addition to what you already shared, what's the one message that you want all of us to take from you today? Everybody is diverse. Everybody has a difference, whether it's a disability like mine, or if somebody has an injury somewhere in the audience, or if you were born someplace else. Even if you were born in Canada, and you came down here, just a week after that, you're diverse. The slightest difference makes you diverse. [young man] Did they do something to keep the magnet from, like, affecting your brain? [Ted] The magnets don't affect my brain, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. [young man] OK, sorry. [applause]