Why there should be more awareness about listening fatigue

Individuals with disabilities experience different challenges than individuals without disabilities. Some people struggle to open doors or walk upstairs. Some people struggle to pay attention in class or write their own notes. Some people struggle with hearing. Individuals who struggle with hearing sometimes have to expend so much energy into hearing, that they get tired after spending a whole day of listening. This is called listening fatigue.  

Regarding listening fatigue, the American Academy of Audiology  writes: “To maintain optimal understanding, listeners with hearing loss must allocate more cognitive resources, or brainpower, to listening than do listeners without hearing loss. This increase in cognitive resources required to listen to speech has been referred to as an increase in listening effort. Cognitive resources are not unlimited; using additional cognitive resources to listen leaves fewer resources available for other tasks.” 

This has been my life since I was about five-years-old, but it went undiscovered until I was 13-years-old when I finally received hearing aids. Prior to when I received them, I relied heavily on context clues, as well as lip reading, and even then the words I most often spoke were what? Even at home, I was being “lazy” by not wanting to do the work, or not listening and being “disrespectful” as my extended family indicated many times growing up. I was average in most subjects, and never really stood out to teachers until I earned the label of “problem child.” Eventually, I stopped caring about trying in class and did my best when I was alone with the little information I had. My mom often thought I was sick because I just wanted to sleep after school. And when I woke up, I would do the work to the best of my ability. 

But that wasn’t enough for most of my teachers. The most common report card remarks included the following: “She needs to learn how to use her inside voice,” “Constantly disruptive with talking with other students,” “Pleasure to have in class but often doesn’t follow directions”—and so on and so forth.

Listening fatigue comes with a host of problems. I was denied many times to record teachers’ lessons so my mom could help me create effective notes; I wish people had recognized that I wasn’t a bad kid—I was just a kid who needed someone to understand or recognize there was something wrong earlier on.

However, a wonderful woman by the name of Deb McPhearson recognized this; she saw my struggle and my hesitation. I don’t know if she noticed my lack of engagement with teachers and students or if she noticed my dependence on lip reading, but she noticed listening fatigue. She noticed how uninterested I could be, or how I would hyper focus on the teachers’ lips to read them, followed by the annoyance about when they turned their backs. 

In one such case she was speaking with a teacher who was highly annoyed with me for not listening. In that case, the teacher was facing my way so I could read her lips, and I read all of the things she said. I was ready to cry. I wasn’t trying to be a bad kid. The teacher pointed toward my work indicating I should be focusing on that and McPhearson turned around and looked back to the teacher and then back to me. She then faced me and said, “Charlie, please come over here.” I got up and came over as she asked.

McPhearson looked right at the teacher and said, “I asked her to come over here. She read my lips.” Then, she allowed me to go back over to my desk and try to do my work. She is the reason we found out I was hard of hearing and experiencing listening fatigue. She recognized it; she advocated for me. My own school said I did not need any assistance, and that I was performing perfectly fine (mind you, I got low B’s at best). But once I received the resources I needed, I shot up to A-level student, thanks to the woman who advocated for me.

All of these events, all of these things I was told as a young kid, were attributed to listening fatigue and the fact that my hearing loss went undiagnosed for so long. To educators: there are no inherently bad students, only students who are dealing with the various hurdles of life. Before you label a student a problem, try to exhaust every possibility first.