Daniel S. Koo was born deaf. When he was 4 he started attending a public school where he spent part of each week getting intensive training in speaking and listening with the help of hearing aids.
He remembers those early years as increasingly frustrating because, try as he might, he could not understand what his teachers were saying. By fourth grade he was falling behind academically, and his parents transferred him to another public school, which practiced a little-used method, called cued speech. As teachers spoke, they would make rapid hand movements near their mouths to visually represent the sounds they were producing.
"The light bulb just went on," recalls Mr. Koo, and a world of learning opened to him. He attended the University of Maryland at College Park attending classes with the help of an interpreter and went on to graduate studies at Gallaudet University, in Washington, where all his classes were taught in American Sign Language. Today he is a postdoctoral fellow in eurolinguistics at Georgetown University Medical Center.
Mr. Koo's academic success is all the more remarkable when compared with the academic performance of most deaf students. According to the latest nationwide survey, the average deaf 18-year-old reads below the fourth- grade level. Despite decades of efforts, the scores have remained largely unchanged.
