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Deaf teacher speaks from the heart | Great Falls Tribune | greatfallstribune.com
After Tyler Hansen was born 23 years ago, his doctor called the sickly preemie a miracle baby because he had beaten the odds against his survival. Now, he hopes he can be someone else's miracle through his work with children.
"I never stopped believing in what I could do," he said. "I wanted to show what I can do, what deaf people can do."
At the Boys & Girls Club of Cascade County on a recent afternoon, Hansen clapped his hands for attention and asked a dozen second- and third-graders clustered around him, "How many signs do you remember?"
Small hands whipped into the air as the children all vied for his attention and the opportunity to show off their signing skills.
They reviewed the signs for mom and dad, angry and happy, yes and no.
As she demonstrated the sign for friends, which involves hooked fingers, Mackenzie Crabtree, 9, said everybody likes Hansen.
"He's fun, nice and generous and fun," she said.
She decided to learn sign language because "it looked fun, and it was," she said. "He taught us sign language so we could talk to deaf people," she said.
The kids find ways to communicate, even if it means everybody yelling his name in unison, she said.
Mackenzie's face and that of her friend Adriana Cobb, 11, lit up as they made the sign for "trouble," which involves waving their hands in front of their faces.
Payton Fowler, 8, and Jerry Smith, 7, easily signed the words Hansen taught them but added some extra animation as though there were exclamation points at the end of every word.
Hansen reminded them of the whys behind the signs, such as the way "garbage" looks like a pantomime of someone taking out the trash.
"I love hanging out with these kids, even 30, 40 kids at once. I love to teach them," he said. "It's the best gift I ever had, to help them. One little thing can change their whole life."
Hansen began as a volunteer at the club for several months and then was offered a job a year ago. He remodeled the art room, helps with homework and gives lessons on science, cooking and art.
At first, children in the club struggled to understand him and thought the problem was his voice. They asked if he was Australian.
For a man as social as Hansen, the difficulty making himself understood can be frustrating, though he takes it in stride and remains good humored — however much he wishes people didn't have to say, "What? What?" sometimes when he talks, or worse say "Oh, never mind" when he's trying to understand them.
Hansen tunes into the children at the club in his own intense way and reads lips well. He has a hearing aid that helps, but he'll eventually be totally deaf. Children at the club still yell for him, but now they pat him, too, to draw his attention, and they practice understanding his speech and do it well.
"Lip reading and body language are the most important things to know as a deaf person," he said.
As for connecting with the children, "you just show them you're a fun person," he said.
For a science lesson on density and the nature of immiscible liquids, Hansen presented a clear pop bottle that would be central to a lava lamp experiment.
Pandemonium broke out when the girl pouring water into the bottle flooded the table. Hansen poured the oil himself.
A boy added food coloring, and the class watched it drip through the oil.
Hansen asked the children what they thought would happen when he added Alka-Seltzer tablets to the mixture. The more optimistic children predicted explosions.
"Whoa!" they said as suddenly blue water erupted through the oil like a fountain of fish eggs.
"It's a cool experiment for kids to do," he said.
Hansen passed out magnets for the next experiment, testing what in the room attracted the disks.
"Tyler!" Jerry yelled. "This chair is magnetic! Look!"
A dozen children tested every surface in the classroom that they could reach and talked Hansen into stretching to reach a metal strip above all of their heads. He's remarkably patient as each student goes in a different direction.
Maybe the lessons will spark a budding young scientist, but Hansen hopes they all take away the bigger lessons of how to treat others with respect and how to be good role models.
"I love helping people," he said. "Help one person and it spreads like bacteria. Everybody grows and gets better."
Hansen was born seven weeks early in Butte to a mother who already had buried his older brother, also born prematurely.
Sickwith respiratory syncytial virus, Hansen was sent to Salt Lake City at 2 hours old.
The next day, his parents set off to join him. It was a time before cellphones were popular so the hospital asked the state troopers to find them so they could make an urgent decisionn. Before they did, mom Wanda Sutinen called from an Idaho highway rest stop payphone to check in.
Doctors told her Hansen had less than a 10 percent chance to live, and "10 percent is not much of a chance," she said. Doctors said they could perhaps boost that chance to 50 percent if she would agree to put him on an ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine, for a relatively new procedure. She said yes.
Sutinen arrived at the hospital thinking everything would be OK if she could just be with her new baby. But she saw him with his carotid artery taken out of his neck and hooked to the ECMO machine and tubes everywhere on his tiny body.
Doctors warned Sutinen the machine can cause brain damage, and then they told her an ultrasound showed the damage was severe. His blood wouldn't clot, and he nearly bled to death.
"He would get worse and we'd have no hope; he'd get better and we'd have hope," she said. "You just don't think your prayers are going to be answered. It was a roller coaster of emotions."
But then his blood suddenly started clotting. And when he was taken off the machine after eight days of treatment, another scan showed whatever indicated brain damage had disappeared.
"He's quite the miracle," Sutinen said.
When people called to see how they could help the young family, Sutinen's mom told them to "pray real hard. She's not going to able to lose another one," Sutinen said. "I don't know what I would have done. The first was hard enough and then to think I was going to lose Tyler".
Hansen was in the hospital for two months and on oxygen for six months. His mother carried him and the heavy backpack oxygen unit that helped him breathe.
When Hansen was 3, a speech therapist mentioned the Montana School for the Deaf and the Blind, and within a month, Sutinen and her then-husband quit their state jobs and moved from Boulder to Great Falls.
"Tyler has done so well," she said. "MSDB is just like one big family. They offer total communication, speaking and signing and education and the chance for extracurricular classes."
Hansen participated in basketball, track, academic bowls and traveled to Washington, D.C., with Close Up. He graduated from the Montana School for the Deaf and the Blind in 2007 and also took some extracurricular classes through Great Falls High School.
In 2010, Hansen earned his associates degree in carpentry at the University of Montana-College of Technology in Missoula.
Hansen loves to build but also teaches cooking classes. He's a brother to Nathan and Wesley, as well as to a stepbrother and a stepsister.
"I try to do as many things as I can," he said. "When some people sit and don't think they can do it, they see me. If I can, they can."
With the joy and energy that carries Hansen all day, you'd never guess he's working a schedule that would kill a lesser man.
Between 1 and 3 a.m., he goes to work for UPS as a pre-loader. Sutinen said he tries to work twice as hard as his hearing co-workers to prove himself. Hansen finishes at 7 or 8 a.m.
Thirty minutes later he begins work as a teacher assistant at the Montana School for the Deaf and the Blind. He finishes at 1 p.m. and 30 minutes later begins at the Boys & Girls Club with a shift that lasts until 6 p.m., usually, or to 9 p.m. sometimes. He's also father to a brand-new baby girl, born at the end of December.
Hansen tries to live with no regrets about his lack of hearing.
"I'm in the hearing world, and it's tough," he said. "If I was hearing, I would join the Air Force ... but I'm glad where life took me. I'm proud of being deaf, of what God made me."
After Tyler Hansen was born 23 years ago, his doctor called the sickly preemie a miracle baby because he had beaten the odds against his survival. Now, he hopes he can be someone else's miracle through his work with children.
"I never stopped believing in what I could do," he said. "I wanted to show what I can do, what deaf people can do."
At the Boys & Girls Club of Cascade County on a recent afternoon, Hansen clapped his hands for attention and asked a dozen second- and third-graders clustered around him, "How many signs do you remember?"
Small hands whipped into the air as the children all vied for his attention and the opportunity to show off their signing skills.
They reviewed the signs for mom and dad, angry and happy, yes and no.
As she demonstrated the sign for friends, which involves hooked fingers, Mackenzie Crabtree, 9, said everybody likes Hansen.
"He's fun, nice and generous and fun," she said.
She decided to learn sign language because "it looked fun, and it was," she said. "He taught us sign language so we could talk to deaf people," she said.
The kids find ways to communicate, even if it means everybody yelling his name in unison, she said.
Mackenzie's face and that of her friend Adriana Cobb, 11, lit up as they made the sign for "trouble," which involves waving their hands in front of their faces.
Payton Fowler, 8, and Jerry Smith, 7, easily signed the words Hansen taught them but added some extra animation as though there were exclamation points at the end of every word.
Hansen reminded them of the whys behind the signs, such as the way "garbage" looks like a pantomime of someone taking out the trash.
"I love hanging out with these kids, even 30, 40 kids at once. I love to teach them," he said. "It's the best gift I ever had, to help them. One little thing can change their whole life."
Hansen began as a volunteer at the club for several months and then was offered a job a year ago. He remodeled the art room, helps with homework and gives lessons on science, cooking and art.
At first, children in the club struggled to understand him and thought the problem was his voice. They asked if he was Australian.
For a man as social as Hansen, the difficulty making himself understood can be frustrating, though he takes it in stride and remains good humored — however much he wishes people didn't have to say, "What? What?" sometimes when he talks, or worse say "Oh, never mind" when he's trying to understand them.
Hansen tunes into the children at the club in his own intense way and reads lips well. He has a hearing aid that helps, but he'll eventually be totally deaf. Children at the club still yell for him, but now they pat him, too, to draw his attention, and they practice understanding his speech and do it well.
"Lip reading and body language are the most important things to know as a deaf person," he said.
As for connecting with the children, "you just show them you're a fun person," he said.
For a science lesson on density and the nature of immiscible liquids, Hansen presented a clear pop bottle that would be central to a lava lamp experiment.
Pandemonium broke out when the girl pouring water into the bottle flooded the table. Hansen poured the oil himself.
A boy added food coloring, and the class watched it drip through the oil.
Hansen asked the children what they thought would happen when he added Alka-Seltzer tablets to the mixture. The more optimistic children predicted explosions.
"Whoa!" they said as suddenly blue water erupted through the oil like a fountain of fish eggs.
"It's a cool experiment for kids to do," he said.
Hansen passed out magnets for the next experiment, testing what in the room attracted the disks.
"Tyler!" Jerry yelled. "This chair is magnetic! Look!"
A dozen children tested every surface in the classroom that they could reach and talked Hansen into stretching to reach a metal strip above all of their heads. He's remarkably patient as each student goes in a different direction.
Maybe the lessons will spark a budding young scientist, but Hansen hopes they all take away the bigger lessons of how to treat others with respect and how to be good role models.
"I love helping people," he said. "Help one person and it spreads like bacteria. Everybody grows and gets better."
Hansen was born seven weeks early in Butte to a mother who already had buried his older brother, also born prematurely.
Sickwith respiratory syncytial virus, Hansen was sent to Salt Lake City at 2 hours old.
The next day, his parents set off to join him. It was a time before cellphones were popular so the hospital asked the state troopers to find them so they could make an urgent decisionn. Before they did, mom Wanda Sutinen called from an Idaho highway rest stop payphone to check in.
Doctors told her Hansen had less than a 10 percent chance to live, and "10 percent is not much of a chance," she said. Doctors said they could perhaps boost that chance to 50 percent if she would agree to put him on an ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine, for a relatively new procedure. She said yes.
Sutinen arrived at the hospital thinking everything would be OK if she could just be with her new baby. But she saw him with his carotid artery taken out of his neck and hooked to the ECMO machine and tubes everywhere on his tiny body.
Doctors warned Sutinen the machine can cause brain damage, and then they told her an ultrasound showed the damage was severe. His blood wouldn't clot, and he nearly bled to death.
"He would get worse and we'd have no hope; he'd get better and we'd have hope," she said. "You just don't think your prayers are going to be answered. It was a roller coaster of emotions."
But then his blood suddenly started clotting. And when he was taken off the machine after eight days of treatment, another scan showed whatever indicated brain damage had disappeared.
"He's quite the miracle," Sutinen said.
When people called to see how they could help the young family, Sutinen's mom told them to "pray real hard. She's not going to able to lose another one," Sutinen said. "I don't know what I would have done. The first was hard enough and then to think I was going to lose Tyler".
Hansen was in the hospital for two months and on oxygen for six months. His mother carried him and the heavy backpack oxygen unit that helped him breathe.
When Hansen was 3, a speech therapist mentioned the Montana School for the Deaf and the Blind, and within a month, Sutinen and her then-husband quit their state jobs and moved from Boulder to Great Falls.
"Tyler has done so well," she said. "MSDB is just like one big family. They offer total communication, speaking and signing and education and the chance for extracurricular classes."
Hansen participated in basketball, track, academic bowls and traveled to Washington, D.C., with Close Up. He graduated from the Montana School for the Deaf and the Blind in 2007 and also took some extracurricular classes through Great Falls High School.
In 2010, Hansen earned his associates degree in carpentry at the University of Montana-College of Technology in Missoula.
Hansen loves to build but also teaches cooking classes. He's a brother to Nathan and Wesley, as well as to a stepbrother and a stepsister.
"I try to do as many things as I can," he said. "When some people sit and don't think they can do it, they see me. If I can, they can."
With the joy and energy that carries Hansen all day, you'd never guess he's working a schedule that would kill a lesser man.
Between 1 and 3 a.m., he goes to work for UPS as a pre-loader. Sutinen said he tries to work twice as hard as his hearing co-workers to prove himself. Hansen finishes at 7 or 8 a.m.
Thirty minutes later he begins work as a teacher assistant at the Montana School for the Deaf and the Blind. He finishes at 1 p.m. and 30 minutes later begins at the Boys & Girls Club with a shift that lasts until 6 p.m., usually, or to 9 p.m. sometimes. He's also father to a brand-new baby girl, born at the end of December.
Hansen tries to live with no regrets about his lack of hearing.
"I'm in the hearing world, and it's tough," he said. "If I was hearing, I would join the Air Force ... but I'm glad where life took me. I'm proud of being deaf, of what God made me."