Top Ten List of Tips for Student Success

By Allison Pank, Minnesota H&V

Looking back on my high school years in a mainstream school, I wish I had known some of these things. I just graduated from high school with a cumulative 4.0 GPA. I will be starting college this fall. In my free time I love to read and travel with my family (we just achieved visiting all 50 states!). I am profoundly Deaf with cochlear implants. I use American Sign Language (ASL), listening with my cochlear implants, and spoken language. I gathered these tips the hard way…through experience! The tips are not listed in any particular order. I think that all of these are important. 

• Know Your Rights: One of the most important things for a person with disabilities is to know what accommodations are under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. This is important so you know what accommodations you can get and what you can’t get under these laws. 
• Advocate: Be assertive, it might take some practice. For example, I have been in mainstream classes for about thirteen years, and I still need to raise my hand and ask my teachers to turn on the captions. Even if I have an interpreter, it can be easier for both the interpreter and me to have the teacher turn on the captions because then the interpreter doesn’t need to try to keep up with the video without any preparation time, and I don’t have to go between the video and the interpreter. While this accommodation is on my IEP many of my teachers forget it is listed.
• Know Your Limits: This is a good thing to be aware of in general but more specifically, with homework, class schedule, whether you work better in the morning or after school, whether you have time for a certain club, or with listening fatigue. Often, teachers and other students don’t understand the effect of listening fatigue. Sometimes at the end of a school day, I’m too tired to do homework because of trying to listen and watch the interpreter all day.
• Know Your IEP: go to your meetings, you don’t have to participate, but it is good to know what goes on and what accommodations you have. My mom started bringing me to my IEP meetings when I was four years old. I looked forward to the meetings because typically people said nice things about me there.
• Grow a Support Network: Who else is on your team? Besides your parents, a Deaf mentor, a teacher, or a school counselor can be invited on “your team”. It’s good to have a wide variety of people in your support network, because at different times you might need different opinions or assistance, and one person might not have the background to help you with a certain topic.
• Be Flexible: Once in middle school when I didn’t have an ASL interpreter and a video playing on the Smartboard didn’t have captions, my physical science teacher put my DM system on a stack of chairs so it would be able to amplify the smart board speaker, which was on the ceiling.
• Learn From Your Mistakes: This one is pretty self-explanatory; learn from your mistakes. What can you do differently next time? Don’t be afraid to apologize if needed. 
• Be Kind: To yourself, your teachers, and your support staff (interpreters or language facilitators). In my experience, people are more willing to give you something like additional time if you are kind and courteous to them. 
• Ask For Help: Everyone, people with disabilities or not, needs help sometimes, even if you can’t see it. 
• Have Fun! School can be stressful at times. It’s good to plan something to look forward to, whether it is something big like the school dance or something small like getting to hang out with your friend on the weekend. The summer before my senior year I attended ASL camp at Gallaudet University. I had lots of fun and made new friends there.   ~

H&V Communicator – Fall 2024