Oh, so you're talking about unilateral dhh!!! Yup they pretty much neglected mildly HOH kids educations.....On one hand, they DO have one hearing ear....On the other hand, they DO really benefit from the typical HOH interventions,(while in the mainstream) so it's a good idea to take advantage of those.....Unilateral hoh kids tend to be the population for which public school HOH intervention REALLY works.... Which is why you did so well in public school.....Luckily most unilateral dhh kids don't really need super intense intervention/separate schooling. And even in the case where a kid with intellectucal disabilities has unilateral loss, most of the time their IEP label is going to be ID with HOH as a very secondary thing
IMHO, I think ASL should be taught to even unilateral dhh kids as a proactive measure, (and of course ALL HOH kids) just in case they may need it due to a progressive loss..... It's still fairly unusual but I've noticed some parents of unilateral kids being SUPER proactive about teaching their kid ASL "just in case!" Which is good!
Yes, growing up I had unilateral hearing loss. My family, teachers, and I found ways for me to do well in school without hearing aids, but I think that because I was told for so long, "A hearing aid won't really help you much - you don't need one for your type of hearing loss," when I started losing hearing in my good ear, I didn't go back to an audiologist to get hearing aids until my hearing in both ears was so bad that I was having trouble understanding what people were saying to me. When people would ask me, "Have you ever thought about getting hearing aids?" I said I'd been told that they wouldn't help my type of hearing loss.
It may seem obvious to hoh people who've worn hearing aids all their life that someone who's losing their hearing should get hearing aids, but because no one had ever talked to me about them or suggested that I try one, I simply didn't know. When I was younger, it would have been helpful for an audiologist to tell me that even if they didn't think I needed a hearing aid for unilateral hearing loss, if I ever lost hearing in my other ear, then I should definitely get hearing aids because they'd help me.
But now that I use 2 hearing aids and know more about them and about hearing loss, I think even for unilateral hoh children who do well in school it's very important for them to get a hearing aid sooner rather than later. That's because even though I had good hearing in one ear, I still had difficulty hearing in noisy places, I relied on lipreading, and often had to ask people to repeat themselves. I had trouble locating sounds, people sometimes thought I was ignoring them because I didn't know they were talking to me, and in order to have a conversation with someone sitting on my right side (my hoh ear's side) I had to turn my head around so that my left ear was facing them. Now that I wear a hearing aid in my right ear, I know what that ear was missing for so long, and I know that I definitely would have benefited from having a hearing aid when I was a child.
However, because my right ear went for 40+ years without being aided, even with hearing aids the sound in my right ear is distorted and "fuzzier" than the hearing in my left ear that wasn't unaided for as many years (because I started losing hearing in my left ear as an adult). If I'd had a hearing aid in my right ear when I was younger, I think that ear would have gotten used to hearing much sooner and I'd hear clearer sound in that ear today. It also would have been good to learn ASL when I was a child, just in case I lost hearing in my other ear someday.
