I really don't remember how I learned, but I remember it being traumatic. It's one of my earliest memories of authority figures causing me to feel fear and betrayal and knowing that something was wrong but not what because nobody bothered to tell me that I was supposed to hear better than I did.
It was kindergarten, third semester for me because I'd just moved to the US from Argentina and the school year is opposite in the North and South hemispheres and they'd elected to hold me back half a year instead of skip half a year. I did not yet have HA, had not yet had any speech therapy, and my teacher had not been informed that I was HOH. I remember sitting at the table with my teacher with a book open in front of me and the teacher telling me that she knew that I knew what it said and if I didn't read it aloud to her immediately she was going to put me in time out. I recognized enough of the words to know the basic gist of what was going on on that page, but I couldn't sound them out and to me written and spoken words weren't the same word yet. I don't remember what happened after that, but that one snapshot of frustration and emotional pain and fear of punishment for something I couldn't help is burned into my memory.