A Silent Environment

Growing up in a silent environment at home, one would think that it would provide the perfect environment to learn to read and write. But, in fact, it is quite the opposite. The silent environment I grew up in hampered my ability to learn to read and write at a normal age. Something was different about my family and me, but this is what makes me unique and special in my own way. In the end my love and passion for reading came from my difficulty of learning to read and write in a silent environment.
So before I dive in and explain how I finally learned to read and write I am going to give a little background as to what it was like growing up in my household with my family. I grew up having two parents that were deaf and hard of hearing, and eventually both became deaf. We had a rule at our house that we had to sign instead of using our voices to talk even though my brother, my mom, and I could hear; it was the right thing to do so that my dad could always understand and be a part of all our conversations. This way of growing up is what I call the silent environment. The reason I call it the silent environment is because a house that has deaf people living in it, for the most part, tends to be quieter than your average hearing household. The reason for this is that noise and sound are not needed to communicate to one another. One example is to get someone to look up at us so we can talk, we use the flickering of lights, which is far more quiet than yelling someone’s name throughout the house. Now moving on to why this silent environment did not help me with learning to read or write. As we found out later in my childhood, I had problems learning reading and writing when it was silent; we found out that I instead must have noises in ...

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...dergarten said I would never be able to read and write on the level that I should be able to do so, and in the end I proved them wrong.
Now even though living in the silent environment of the deaf world made learning to read and write a lot harder for me, in the end it actually gave me a cool special and unique story of how I learned to develop those skills. This just goes to show you that no matter how long it takes – whether its nine or ten years or maybe even longer – it is a great idea to continue to try and learn to read and write because who knows someone might find a passion and love for either one of the two like I did. Reading and writing is something that is being done everyday and is a big part of our daily lives with working and communicating with other people; whether people realize it or not, this is why learning to read and write well is so important.