Nearly Deaf Professor Teaches English Literacy, One Student at a Time

This professor, who is almost deaf, teaches English to immigrants. He teaches each one individually and feels that reading the lips of the students helps to assure they are pronouncing everything correctly. DP

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

nytimes.com: ASHEVILLE, N.C. — After three degrees, after five universities, after 40,000 pupils, and after 84 years, 10 months and 25 days, John Kuhlman has circumnavigated his way back to the essentials of education: a teacher and a student in a room.

Decades ago, he was a student, the 6-year-old son of a wheat farmer in eastern Washington, going to a school that fit all 12 grades under a single roof. His earliest memory of academic life is of hiding behind the classroom stove lest he be called upon to wash the lunch dishes.

Now, or as close to now as Monday afternoon, Mr. Kuhlman is the teacher, sovereign of a single room in the inconspicuous brick headquarters of an adult English-literacy program here. The adult seated just inches from Mr. Kuhlman, Raul Funes, had come after working an overnight shift doing maintenance at an inn and then attending a morning class at a local technical college. He had been awake for nearly 20 straight hours.

No pedagogical technique explains why Mr. Kuhlman sat so close to Mr. Funes, or why he peered so insistently into his student’s face. Forty years ago, while he was a charismatic professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Mr. Kuhlman had begun inexplicably to lose his hearing.

With a cochlear implant to capture sound and a practiced skill at reading lips, translating the random noise into words, he had since learned to converse face to face, particularly in quiet settings like his tutoring room.

“A deaf person, a person with damaged hearing, is exactly like a Spanish speaker or a Chinese speaker in a room full of English speakers,” Mr. Kuhlman put it. “If I’m in a room for a cocktail party, I can hear everything, but I can’t understand a word. So I’m pretty good at understanding their problem. I’ve got empathy, sympathy, patience.”
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