Life comes full circle for student, teacher
Former student now teaching hearing-impaired.
By Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje, [email protected]
December 29, 2011
When Cindy Lauer was 2, her parents noticed she would stand inches away from
the television screen while watching episodes of “Sesame Street.”
Diagnosed with severe hearing impairment from a genetic condition, Lauer was
fitted with hearing aids.
Two years later, she found herself at Sunshine Cottage School for Deaf
Children, in a preschool class taught by Blane Trautwein, a new teacher
embarking on his life’s mission to help hearing-impaired children.
The two didn’t know it yet, but their destinies would entwine in a nifty
case of things coming full circle.
Today, Lauer, 25, is enrolled in the Deaf Education and Hearing Science
master’s degree program at the School of Medicine at the UT Health Science
Center — a program directed by none other than her first teacher, Trautwein,
who worked at Sunshine Cottage for more than 20 years, including eight years
as principal.
Even niftier, Lauer is assisting a teacher three days a week at Sunshine
Cottage as part of her graduate work-study requirement, helping open the
world to kindergarten pupils.
In the small but well-regarded two-year program at the health science center
— last year it received a prestigious, $800,000 federal scholarship grant
— Lauer currently is the only student out of 24 to actually have a hearing
impairment.
She admits she doesn’t recall much from her pre-kindergarten days: Her dream
of teaching hearing-impaired kids took root in fifth grade, when a teacher
unlocked the secret of figures of speech for her one day.
“I had that moment of understanding and I wanted to pass it on to other
kids,” she said, sitting next to Trautwein at a gargantuan conference table
inside Sunshine Cottage. “Not a lot of hearing-impaired kids have motivation
or confidence. I want to show them that I did it, so they can do it. I want
to be an inspiration.”
Trautwein, who’s not hearing impaired but got interested in teaching deaf
children through a high school friend, couldn’t be prouder of his long-ago
student.
“Cindy earned her place in the (graduate program),” he said. “She had the
grades and she was outstanding in her student teaching. Because of our
relationship, I disavowed myself from her admissions process. She got in all
on her own.”
Lauer first reconnected with Trautwein while she was working on her
associate’s degree in education at San Antonio College, calling him for an
assignment that entailed interviewing someone involved in teaching the
hearing impaired.
They kept in contact sporadically and touched base again when he spoke to
one of her classes at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she
earned a bachelor’s degree in education last spring.
Enrolling in the master’s program, which has been in existence since 2002,
took a bit of courage on Lauer’s part.
“I was a little self-doubting at first, whether or not I could do a
spoken-word program,” she said. With her hearing aids Lauer can hear
reasonably well and reads lips but doesn’t use sign language.
The health science center curriculum involves teaching children with hearing
loss to listen and speak and not use signing — a concept not as
controversial as it once was, said Trautwein, thanks to advancements in
hearing technology, such as cochlear implants and classroom amplification
systems.
Lauer is engaged to marry engineering student Brian Jones, who has normal
hearing. They met when they attended Clark High School and played in the
school band together. Her goal is to become an itinerant teacher of the
hearing impaired at various public schools.
Or — who knows? —she might end up at Sunshine Cottage, where currently three
of the 17 teachers on staff have hearing impairments to some degree.
The future is wide open.
“I just love being in the classroom,” Lauer said. “Even just being able to
teach kids the alphabet, like I’m doing right now, is so rewarding.”
Source:
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Life-comes-full-circle-2430085.php