I'll just leave this here....

quote:

I pointed out that having all rooms equipped with a PA system and getting pin mics for the teacher will be important because it's hard to hear when someone's talking through a mask.

This should help somewhat, but yeah, there's a lot lost when we can't see the bottom half of someone's face (or more like bottom two-thirds, with the masks I'm wearing)

We have Deaf faculty in my college, so our dean and chair and other folks in our college are a lot more tuned into these issues than others. People have been asking for the upper-upper admins to look into those masks that have a plastic see-through screen front.

There are all kinds of things we can do, but whether we can have all of it in place by the beginning of fall semester is a big fat question mark!

Yes -- that is something else I worry about, but in high school for LL#2. He was born with moderate hearing loss and has refused to wear his hearing aids since he started middle school. (We didn't realize he had a problem til he resoundingly failed his hearing screening in elementary school, so we were late on getting him the aids and he always hated them because he was already used to how the world sounded without them.) I made him a deal that the minute his grades started to slip, he'd go back to wearing them, and so far so good. He compensates amazingly well but I suspect he relies a lot on watching people's mouths so I think he's in for a world of hurt if everyone is masked when school goes back in the fall. Ugh.

Lisa, that’s so hard. And probably the last thing a teenage boy wants to do is raise his hand and say “I’m slightly hard of hearing...” in front of all of his classmates.