Just This Banjo

The Guitar Girl

When the blind girl visited my classroom, I was sitting in the back, and I couldn't hear a goddamned thing.

Teachers usually stuck me back here where I was out of sight and bored out of my mind.

I could not hear. I have conductive hearing loss. I have had so many ear infections that my inner ear can no longer send sound waves to my auditory nerves.

As a child, all I knew was that my ears hurt, and people were hard to understand.

In Catholic school, the good sisters laughed at me for crying over a little earache. When mocking me didn't work, the nuns slapped me around.

I guess the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary didn't buy into the whole suffer the little children part of the Bible back then.

Even when I switched to public school in the third grade, I was still stationed in the back of the class and ignored. My parents coached me to speak clearly. Being understood was useful in holding a conversation, but my teachers assumed that I could hear because I, as they eloquently put it, "didn't sound deaf."

I adapted to the situation. I taught myself to read lips and interpret body language. When my teacher realized I was reading her lips, she started covering her mouth with a sheet of paper.

My mother introduced me to literature. Jack London, H.G. Wells, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Emily Dickenson, and Edgar Allan Poe quickly became favorites. I sat in school learning nothing and then went home and educated myself with stacks of books from the library. The librarians would get excited over the range of books I was devouring.

School days went by in a slow, silent crawl. The only break in the boredom was math. It made no sense to me. No matter how hard I tried, numbers got jumbled in my head. The only thing that was more bewildering than numbers was the way adults reacted to my difficulty. Teachers yelled or slapped me. My parents got angry. My Quaker tutor came scarily close to violence more than once.

It was a shame because I liked the tutor, but she really sucked at her job when faced with a student with a different perspective. Once she spread some coins on the table saying, "You have five coins. I take away two. How many do you have left?"

I counted the remaining coins. "One. . . Two. . . Three."

She slammed her hand on the table. The coins jumped. "No! Don't count it!"

"Then how do I know how many are left?"

"You should just know!"

I was trying hard not to swear. "How?"

Throwing her arms in the air, "You should just know!"

Mimicking her gesticulations, I yelled, "Jesus Christ!"

She put her hand on my copy of A Tale of Two Cities. "How can you read this and not understand math?"

"This is about the French Revolution!" It was my turn to slam the table. "The only math in the French Revolution was counting how many heads were in a pile!"

She held her head in her hands. Her boyfriend stepped in to end the session and make us all a cup of herbal tea.

Nowadays, they have a name for my trouble with math: dyscalculia.

I have trouble doing math in my head, difficulty with time, warped spatial relationships, and trouble with analog clocks. I can't remember names. I have no sense of the passage of time.

It should not have been a big deal. I did well in history, science, and English–but none of that mattered. Teachers told me to my face that my trouble with math stemmed from the fact that I was stupid, lazy, and stubborn.