SAN MARCOS – Mark Brudney went halfway around the world before discovering where he belonged – and that was back home doing exactly what he used to avoid.
The journey turned him from a boy who disliked academics into the man who plans to spend his life there, teaching high school.
What's different about his journey is that Brudney is deaf and studying at California State University San Marcos to earn the university's first American Sign Language teaching credential.
Sign language education has exploded nationwide in the past few years, and ASL has been accepted as a foreign language in many U.S. colleges. It is the fifth most studied foreign language, behind Spanish, French, German and Italian.
At the University of California and California State University systems, the number of ASL courses has jumped from 1,000 in 1998 to 10,000 this year, according to the state Department of Education. In California high schools over the past four years, ASL offerings have increased more than 200 percent.
At the same time the number of Americans with hearing impairment has more than doubled in 30 years, according to the nonprofit American Speech-Language Hearing Association, with an estimated 28.6 million people affected with auditory disorders.
With such heavy demand for American Sign Language instruction, state officials will start credentialing teachers in ASL this fall, putting Brudney in the first wave.
Where, he believes, he belongs.
He sees himself as one of the lucky people who has successfully bridged the hearing and hearing-impaired worlds, and wants to use his hard-earned skill to provide bridges for others.
"I don't want to see the deaf go through the frustrations I went through (in school)," explained Brudney of his new career quest. "I want the hearing and deaf kids to be able to interact with each other."
Brudney became deaf after a childhood illness and has spent most of his life in mainstream public schools with no special education assistance, except for private speech therapy that helps him converse with ease now.
From the time he was small he learned to read lips and get along in the hearing world, but it was a lonely struggle trying to fit in. "As a child, I dreamed of becoming a hearing person. As a child, I remember watching people being able to talk without looking at each other. I told myself that is who I want to be."
Sports became his salvation, and he threw himself into the jock world, participating in soccer, football, basketball, swimming and baseball. He became so popular his classmates chose him as the 1988 homecoming king of his upscale Los Angeles-area high school.
"They hoisted me up on their shoulders and carried me in, I'll never forget that," said Brudney, still athletic at 35.
But college proved such a struggle he abandoned it for a career as a model, working in Europe for several years until he became frustrated at not being able to understand the many languages and the multiple speakers around him.
Overwhelmed, he came home and did some soul-searching.
"I asked myself, where do I fit in, in the deaf world or in the hearing world? Where do I fit in if I'm in between? Sometimes, it's harder to be the one in between," he realized.
He entered the deaf world for the first time when he attended the renowned Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., a school for the hearing-impaired where he finally learned sign language.
He played college football, an experience that brings a laugh in his otherwise earnest manner. The deaf squad was hardly a powerhouse, he said, but they could lip-read all the plays and coaching coming from the opposing team.
Brudney's experience reflects the problems with deaf education of the time, said Nancy Berrigan of the Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center at Gallaudet. It's only been in the past two decades that awareness of the special needs of the deaf and the hearing-impaired has prompted U.S. schools to intervene with assistance on their behalf.
At Cal State San Marcos, professor Pat Stall said having Brudney as a student has given her perspective as an instructor. She has to think ahead when preparing lesson plans. If she shows a video, she has to make sure closed captioning is available. And she doesn't just throw out comments during classroom discussions, she puts them down in Power Point.
For other students, Stall said Brudney provides a perfect example of what she's talking about in theory. "We teach students to differentiate their instruction to meet their students' differing needs. It's one thing to talk about it in the abstract; it's powerful for all the students to see it in practice."
Brudney is one of an estimated 200 students at CSUSM receiving disabled student services, and one of a handful of deaf students, according to John Segoria of the university's disabled student services. What's really helped deaf students like Brudney keep up has been the dramatic improvements in technology, such as closed captioning, the Internet and instant text messaging.
As for Brudney, he's looking forward to the challenge of teaching 30 students in a high school class who have a variety of backgrounds and abilities. "As long as I work hard every day, then I'll be OK."
