In the 2019 film Sound of Metal, noise-punk drummer Ruben faces a sudden disintegration of hearing, brought on from night after night of his ear-splitting performances in Blackgammon, the band he shares with his girlfriend Lou. A doctor warns Ruben to limit his exposure to noise, but Ruben isn’t willing to shred his heavy-decibel lifestyle and persists in playing another show.
A distressed Lou contacts Ruben’s addiction recovery sponsor, who locates a sober living community for the deaf. After a seemingly infinite journey through middle rural America to a soundtrack of disorienting low hums and buzzing and chirping insects, Ruben and Lou arrive at a farmhouse.
Joe, a thin leathery-skinned, and self-possessed man greets them and explains the philosophy of their deaf community: “In this community being Deaf is not thought of as a problem to be fixed.”
Ruben mulls over the possibility of staying but flees when Joe explains that Lou cannot stay with him while he works the program.
The following morning, Lou awakes to Ruben tossing around music gear and churning out guttural screams. Lou takes off, and Ruben breaks down into tears. The next shot shows Ruben’s surrender, walking into Joe’s with his bag.
Slowly, Ruben integrates into the deaf community. At first, Ruben appears wide-eyed and squirrely. But as Ruben embraces Joe’s regimen of journaling in silence, volunteering in an elementary school class of deaf children, taking adult sign language classes, and socializing with the sober living residents, he begins to appear more comfortable in his own skin.
I first watched Sound of Metal in my second year of teaching Jorge. On Jorge’s first day in my middle school bilingual classroom, I noticed his beige hearing aides right away.
I smiled and greeted Jorge: “Bienvenidos a nuestra salón.” Welcome to our classroom.
Jorge said nothing and winced at Jansel, his tablemate, who looked directly at Jorge and proclaimed: “ELLA QUIERE DECIR BIENVENIDOS. ELLA ES LA PROFESORA DE INGLÉS.”
Jorge’s face still formed a question mark, but I chalked it up to first-day nervousness. During the day’s lesson, students worked in groups to answer questions about a reading. Jorge sat nearly motionless, even while the other students tried to engage him. His group became louder and louder, shouting at him in Spanish.
I pulled Jorge aside and gave him a piece of paper. On the top I wrote: “Escribe el abecedario”. Write the alphabet.
Jansel peered over my shoulder.
“ELLA QUIERE PA’ TU ESCRIBE EL ABECEDARIO. /AH/, /BE/, /C/,” Jansel explained. SHE WANTS YOU TO WRITE THE ALPHABET.
I left Jorge to the task while I circulated around the room. When I came back around to Jorge, he had not written anything. I pulled a textbook off the shelf and turned to the page with the alphabet. I copied the first few letters, and, finally, it clicked. He began to copy the letters.
In the following weeks, Jorge did not progress beyond copying off the board. In a parent-teacher conference, his father shared that Jorge’s hearing aides didn’t work, and, not only that, but Jorge hadn’t ever been able to really hear or speak.
It took months of special education meetings, dozens of communications with the district’s deaf and hard of hearing team, and myriad medical appointments for Jorge to finally receive working hearing aides, but by then, it was June.
That first year, Jorge’s academic growth had languished in my classroom. While he made friends by presenting them with his drawings of animals and playing baseball with them at recess, he developed little in his speech beyond saying “Hola” and “no” and remained unable to complete academic work besides copying.
I felt dismayed that I had not made more progress with Jorge, but still, at an end of the year meeting, I advocated for Jorge to stay in my classroom for the following year rather than go to a school for the deaf. With his now-functioning hearing aides, I anticipated exponential progress.
I hadn’t predicted that Jorge would often take out his hearing aides and hide them inside his pencil box and then put his head down on his desk and when I instructed him to put them back in his ears. He only cooperated fully when I had him in a small group outside the larger classroom.
Sound of Metal indicated a possible explanation for why Jorge’s behavior. Ruben eventually leaves the deaf community to have ear surgery. But when the doctors activate his hearing device, the results stun him. Yes, he can take in more of the sonic world around him, but it sounds distorted and metallic. The contrast between the muffled underwater pre-activation soundscape and the crunchy static of the device makes the former far more appealing. Perhaps, like Ruben, Jorge found hearing too invasive.
Jorge went off to high school with some basic reading skills and some social language, even occasionally complaining about an energetic boy who sat next to him: “Él es muy hiper.” He is so hyper. Still, I felt I had failed him.
In high school, Jorge hasn’t fared much better. He can still barely read, and he struggles to communicate beyond basic requests.
Upon a recent re-watch of Sound of Metal, it struck me how Ruben was healthiest when fully integrated into the deaf community. I had believed that hearing aides would serve as the solution to Jorge’s deafness problem. I never seriously considered the possibility of Jorge attending the school for the deaf because I believed that the hearing aides could fix him and that he needed Spanish language instruction more than learning how to live in the world as a deaf person.
I now see that Jorge and his family should have had the opportunity to seriously consider the district school for the deaf, to see that hearing aides were not the only solution, and to understand that Jorge deserved to connect with others who could guide him into independence in deaf adulthood.
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