When Becca Gleicher began teaching at Foothill Knolls Elementary School in Upland, Calif. four years ago, her students decided to test her limits. They shouted and screamed. They banged on tables and slammed chairs. Just about every day, they did whatever they could to raise the classroom decibel level. Their reason was simple. The students were deaf. They didn’t believe their teacher was actually deaf as well. “I don’t wear a hearing aid so I don’t hear anything, which is a godsend,” she said. “One of the interpreters told me that, ‘You know they’ve been making every nose under the sun?’ I said, ‘For how long?” Oh, for a couple of months now.'” Gleicher was the first deaf teacher any of the students had ever experienced. “I want kids to have an opportunity to have a deaf teacher,” she said. “It matters. I think it’s so important, a role model. If it wasn’t for me, they might not have a deaf teacher at all until high school.”

Gleicher, 37, taught for 14 years at schools in her native New York City and at the California School for the Deaf at Fremont and Riverside before coming to Foothill Knolls. Her students thought she was hearing because she can speak; Gleicher was born with her hearing, but after a case of the mumps at age 4 she began slowly losing that ability. She is third-generation deaf on her father’s side, and about 30 members of her extended family are deaf. “I am Deaf. Do not call me ‘hearing impaired.’ It may be politically incorrect, but I don’t like it,” she said. “Impaired to me means broken or damaged. I’m not.” She has high standards for her students. In her classroom, there is no pointing and shrugging, no shying away from the effort and the legwork, no getting around learning how to communicate formally with the larger world. “I tell them it’s important for their future because I want them to have a good job,” she said. “Some of them could go to junior college or college. They don’t think of themselves as handicapped, but they say, `I can’t.’ I tell them, `This is what I expect of you.’ ”