Had a hearing-impaired student in my class today. We utilized a service where we call in on a conference call and a person (who was in Anchorage, Alaska!) types in everything I say and the student logs in to a web page and sees this typed text on about a 2 second delay. The student seems to really like this option, and the typist just types what they can make out.I asked for and received the transcript of the full day’s class, and reading (parts of) it was both humorous and humbling. First, my day’s class — only about half of which has me doing the talking — turned out to be 36,000+ words and 66 typed, single-spaced pages. No wonder my voice is tired at the end of a day of teaching! But the part that bothered me was that there were 89 places where the transcriptionist had to type “[INDISCERNABLE]”. My defense would be that some of these were questions, but I should have been repeating those. It’s fairly obvious that I don’t enunciate as well as I should, and things sound muddled over a phone line. Simple put, I need to get better.There were also quite a bit of funny things typed when the transcriptionist didn’t know a particular technical word or jargon, and just made up what it sounded like. Those were enlightening on a different level. If you talk jaronese, your speech may as well be a foreign language.
Your speech should be clear to any listener.
