Two Deaf Educators Breaking the Sound Barrier

Tom Humphries and Carol Padden have seen the look before--the judgmental scoff that starts deep within a student’s eyes, each time leading to the same unspoken question: “What could you possibly teach me?”

Such silent challenges are just the kind of hurtful assumptions that make the Del Mar couple more resolute in their self-declared war on behalf of the non-hearing world.

Humphries and Padden are both deaf educators--two people who cannot hear a student’s remark in class, a colleague’s greeting or even the chiming of a college clock tower. Their disability has made them watchful strangers in a foreign land--the complex and often insensitive culture of the hearing.

Born partially deaf to non-hearing parents, Padden is an associate professor in the communications department at UC San Diego, teaching courses to hearing students on pornography, the mass media and effects of television.

Humphries became profoundly deaf in the midst of a childhood illness. Thirty-five years later, he’s an associate dean with the San Diego Community College District, specializing in the education of the disabled.

Together, they’ve published two books on the deaf experience--one a best-selling guide to American Sign Language that will be updated and re-released this fall after 25 printings.

The other, “Deaf in America; Voices from a Culture,” is a personal journey into the realm of the non-hearing, told through the art, writings and life experiences of the deaf that the couple gleaned from nationwide interviews. It’s estimated that 10% of the nation’s population is hearing impaired, and that 1% are profoundly deaf.

For many back home, Humphries and Padden have become unofficial spokesmen for the deaf rights movement in San Diego County, which has an estimated 20,000 profoundly deaf people.

They’re a couple with much to teach--and change--in the hearing world, starting with the belief that the deaf are second-class citizens with little to offer society as artists, thinkers and teachers.

They have challenged their students, friends and readers to imagine a world with a different center, in which the ability to hear is not at the core. Like ethnic minority activists or ardent feminists, they continue their fight for equal rights in a society they say discriminates against them from deep within its fabric.

The battle, they say, includes college campuses--often with the looks of sometimes highly educated people. Outside her department, Padden has felt the stare of colleagues she imagines must silently wonder what a deaf woman is doing teaching communications.

Padden, who has limited hearing and can speak with a slight lisp, teaches with the aid of an interpreter to translate student questions. Still, some have dropped from her classes--a fact she attributes to her disability.

“I’ve met lots of people--both teachers and students, both hearing and deaf--who can’t imagine me being a university professor and a scholar,” she said recently at the couple’s spacious hillside home, speaking through an interpreter who translated her signed responses to questions.

“Some have never met a real live deaf person before. They don’t know how to talk to me. They just can’t imagine how a deaf person--a woman, no less--could be doing serious work. But I’ve been dealing with this kind of attitude for my entire life. I’m past being offended.”

And while Humphries’ job is to help in the education of handicapped students, people are constantly trying to box him into the one-dimensional role of a deaf man who is only useful in helping other deaf people.

“It’s a very deeply rooted idea in the hearing society that people who cannot hear are somehow sub-human,” said Humphries, 44, an extremely shy man who both signed and mouthed his responses. “They’re deaf-mutes. And that’s all they can teach.”

Humphries and Padden, who have been married for 13 years, met at Gallaudet College--a Washington D.C. school for non-hearing students--in the mid-1970s. Humphries was teaching at his alma mater when Padden gave a lecture there.

Soon, they were holding hands as well as using them to communicate. To this day, the bond remains strong--even with some occasional rough edges.

During an interview, the 36-year-old Padden described how Humphries had coincidentally attended the same Gallaudet conference where she spoke.

“Excuse me,” Humphries interrupted her, his fingers moving frenetically. “But I organized that conference, honey.”

In many ways, theirs is an unlikely pairing of two people from vastly different backgrounds--she from the Washington academic world; he from the tobacco roads of the rural South.

Padden was raised in suburban Maryland, the daughter of two Gallaudet College professors. Although she was born deaf, her parents enrolled her in public school at an early age--and even encouraged her to take tap dancing lessons--in order to better mix with hearing children.

A third-grader thrust into a strange new world with no interpreter or sign language to guide her, Padden witnessed for the first time the complex rules of the hearing world--lining up for lunch, who was going to erase the blackboard or be the first to go to the bathroom.

“I always tell people that I was educated abroad because I felt like a visitor in another land,” she recalled. “It was an ongoing thing of trying out new rules and seeing how many of them I was going to follow. I found the whole trip distressing.”

She eventually found her way through the hearing world. After graduating from Georgetown University in 1978, Padden joined the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla as a research assistant in its Laboratory for Language and Cognitive Study.

Before being appointed as an assistant professor at UCSD, she did post-doctoral work there, focusing on the relationship between language, culture and thought in the deaf community.

The son of factory workers, Humphries grew up in rural South Carolina in one of the most impoverished counties in the nation. One of the few memories he carries from the hearing world is a recollection to the tinny introductory theme to the Flash Gordon series he saw in movie theaters as a small boy.

He, too, soon learned how to make his way in the hearing society. Unable to hear teachers in his small schoolroom, he learned mostly on his own by reading voraciously. Or he would help other students with their assignments in return for their class notes.

Humphries never learned sign language as a child. There was no need to--he was the only deaf person in the tiny town where his parents did their best to shield their son from viewing himself as being different.

He only learned what he calls his second language when he left home for Gallaudet College at age 17--anxious to escape the small-town atmosphere of Johnsonville, S.C.

The lessons of youth--of making their way in a society where the rules were not written for them--has shaped the couple’s strong sense of who they are: driven educators who happen to be deaf.

The disability has its drawbacks, both acknowledge. Each must be accompanied by a school-supplied interpreter to help them with hearing people who do not know sign language. And, they often miss out on “the spin” of the politics and other subtleties of the office atmosphere.

“Of course we miss things,” Padden said. “But we’re still alive. We still have jobs.”

The couple also have support from their close peers. “It’s easy to think of people who are deaf as socially isolated,” said Chandra Mukerji, chairman of the communications department at UCSD.

“But Carol is a very skilled communicator. I made her graduate adviser for just that reason. She won’t let students get away with anything. She’s a very thoughtful teacher who knows that life can be difficult and demanding. Students know she has a big heart.”

Rod Smith, a provost at the San Diego Community College District and Humphries’ supervisor, said he is amazed by Humphries’ devotion to his work. “He’s certainly the foremost advocate for the disabled in this district,” he said.

“It’s just hard for me to imagine Tom struggling out there in the hearing world. In my eyes, he doesn’t need to do battle because he’s better than anyone else at what he does.”

The couple’s style is to never apologize for being deaf.

“I never introduce myself as a deaf professor,” Padden said. “There are no long explanations about me being deaf from a deaf family. My students take cues from me. I introduce myself and explain that I have an interpreter because I can’t hear them.”

Humphries has had some uncomfortable moments with students as well. Students unaware of his disability have visited his office, surprised to find both Humphries and his interpreter there. The resulting confusion of whom to address sometimes resembles the “Who’s on First” skit made famous by comedians Abbott and Costello.

“There’s always a minute of confusion,” he says. “The interpreter will be the one talking to them. They’ll get this expression on their faces like ‘Who’s the dean here?’ ”

Provost Smith also recalled throwing a Christmas party where he and his wife feared that Padden and Humphries would feel out of place as the only deaf guests.

“But it wasn’t awkward at all,” he recalled. “Carol stayed right with him--no matter who he talked to. And her sign language is very rapid. She’s very mindful that he doesn’t have all she does in the way of hearing. And she makes sure he doesn’t miss anything. They were the life of the party.”

Such experiences, Humphries says, teach hearing people that their way of communicating is not the only way. “They’re forced to look at the way someone communicates who can’t hear like they do--not speaking but signing,” he said.

“It raises questions about what language is. The irony here is that we as deaf people have more to teach you about yourselves than you could ever teach us.”

At home, however, the couple find a refuge from the confusion--a world tailored to the deaf. The house was chosen for its sense of open space where the couple can sign one another from any distance.

Lights in each room blink when the doorbell or telephone ring. Many shows viewed on their bedroom television are captioned. Humphries says the McNeil-Lehrer NewsHour on public television--a favorite program--was just recently added to the other shows he can view, such as a foreign movie with subtitles.

He’s not so lucky with sports--where only half the events are captioned. Some rental videos also come with captioning.

Padden says some funny surprises arise with captioned shows. The first time she watched “The Arsenio Hall Show,” for example, she was bemused by the caption, “audience barking,” as the audience hooted the comedian’s opening monologue.

But there’s still a long way to go, the couple say, until deaf people such as themselves will find they are on equal footing with others when communicating in a hearing world.

While they can presently make telephone calls with a Telecommunications Device for the Deaf--a phone that prints out a caller’s side of the conversation through the help of a special operator--Humphries says he still cannot use the equipment to make calls outside the state.

And so he must write letters to relatives and friends--or wait for a translator to help him make the call on regular phone lines. “That,” he said, “is discrimination.”

The couple are heartened by new federal laws such as the recently passed Americans with Disabilities Act, which they hope will eventually spell more rights for the non-hearing nationwide. Also by 1994, decoder chips by law must be installed in all televisions larger than 13 inches--another victory for the deaf.

The point, Humphries says, is to make such equipment standard throughout the hearing world--so the deaf do not have to pay extra in order to communicate on the same level.

But more must be done, they say.

Humphries says there is a need for more deaf teachers in schools to relate the deaf experience to deaf students in a way no hearing teacher could. The San Diego Unified School District, he said, is particularly in need of deaf instructors. The district has about 300 profoundly deaf students.

“We need 500 new deaf instructors in the county over the next five years,” he said. “The deaf need to take charge of deaf education.”

The inspiration for their struggle, the couple say, comes from mentors who have long fought for equal rights in an unjust land. “The blacks and the feminists--there’s a lot of people fighting for human rights in the country--the sames thing I need to fight for,” Humphries said.

“These people are my heroes. They’ve done more for their cause then I’ve ever dreamed. They’ve died for what they believe in.”

At the end of another frustrating day, both Padden and Humphries return anxiously to their world without sound--the one place they don’t have to be conscious about being deaf. They go home.

“This is a place of refuge for us,” Padden said. “Have you ever traveled abroad for weeks at a time without encountering anyone who speaks your language, and then finally meet another American?

“You feel like you’ve got so much to catch up on. You feel you can relax because you’re back on even ground with someone else from your own culture, your own realm of experience. That’s how we feel when we come home.”