An exceptional student is, by definition, one who differs significantly from the norm. I was privileged to teach many such students over my years in the classroom, but three of these merit special mention for the way in which each of them showed extraordinary determination to overcome physical, psychological, or linguistic handicaps to take his or her rightful place as a valued and contributing member of three very different English classes of mine in different schools during the long-gone years of my enjoyable teaching career. At no point did any of the three bemoan their impediments, feel sorry for themselves, or expect additional privileges other than those permitted them by their unique circumstances. Their quiet stoicism and cheerful acceptance of these circumstances were admirable, and an object lesson needing no explanation for all who knew them and accepted them as their friends and fellow-students. All of their names have been changed, and I have not seen any of them for more than forty years. If by unlikely chance they read this, I hope they will all be pleased with my tribute to them.
The first of these was Elaine, who had been seriously hearing-impaired since childhood. She was a tall, slim, friendly, self-effacingly quiet girl with expressive eyes and a great desire to succeed. She was cut off from the world around her by her inability to hear clearly what it was saying to her. At the time, she had to wear powerful hearing aids which tended, she said, to distort sound painfully in magnifying it. When she spoke, it was through her repetition of sounds she could only hear as fogged or incomplete, as she could not hear some end-consonants at all, so her friends and classmates had to supply these themselves, which they did with becoming helpfulness. It may well be that the technology involved in the manufacturing of hearing aids has improved dramatically since that time, but as her teacher I then had to wear a microphone around my neck, and whenever I wished to encourage discussion, which in English was most of the time, I had to walk up and down the aisles, microphone in hand, offering it, like the long-gone TV host Geraldo, to any student who wished to say something. Only in this way or through repetition of what a speaker had just finished saying could she feel a meaningful part of the class. She showed admirable patience and dedication to the work at hand, and ended the year with a high mark in English. I saw a newspaper photograph of her as a team member running in a cross-country race some years later, older, taller, and just as determined.
