Insulted by an Incompetent Idiot

Today I met a teacher for the first time (To keep the identity relatively anonymous I will be vague, but you GOTTA ask me who this person was). Of course he/she started signing to me right away and I had to explain that I don't know sign.

He/She immediately starts spouting off about making people wear earplugs so they can "gain empathy" for people who are deaf/hard of hearing. For some reason it immediately struck me as off. He/She promptly pops in some ear plugs and started talking (a lot). An interesting sidebar though: ear plugs apparently mimic a 30 decibel loss. After about 1 minute of talking with these ear plugs in, he/she says: "Ugh! Not being able to hear is annoying. I'm going to take these out now." I just stared at them. I made some comment to the effect of "Gee, I wish I could do that."

He/She then proceeds to talk to me like I have no idea what it's like to be hearing impaired. INCLUDING, "modeling" how when teachers wander around or turn their backs, students cannot understand them. Of course as this person is "modeling" this - I cannot understand them for the next 10 seconds of our conversation. They do this not once, but twice in our conversation. If you know better - why would you do this to a person who IS hard of hearing???

Finally I get so annoyed with them that I manage to slip in that not only do I have my master's in special education, but that I went to Dartmouth. He/She may be used to talking to incompetent people - but I am not one of them. They ask me if I've taught and I say I had. He/She asks me where and I said "On Oahu." He/She asks me "Where?" again and I say "Ewa Beach." She then proceeds to say, "No...WHERE?" - with that overly loud and over-exaggerated articulation that makes me feel stupid. All I can think is - he/she must make the kids they work with feel like complete crap.

But that's not even the worse part of the conversation. THEN, at the mention of me saying that I worked in special education, we start talking about politically correct language when talking about people with disabilities. This person describes how back in the day there were three kinds of mentally retarded: the educatable, trainable and "hopeless." I'm already offended and this just takes it to another level.

But it gets better... This person then decides to start describe each of the types and when they get to "hopeless" they literally stands there and starts drooling and blowing bubbles for a horrifying 5 seconds. As I stare in shock, manage to utter "That's horrible" (which this person interprets as the categories of MR rather than their own behavior), they literally slurp up their spit back in their mouth, wipe off their chin while laughing and saying, "Not so politically correct!" all cheerful...and clearly not recognizing that I am stunned-horrified-disgusted.

Needless to say, when I talk about how miserable I am on the Big Island - this is not as uncommon an encounter as you might hope. Hours later, I am STILL angry about this conversation.