Cued Speech transliterator enjoys job
Many people feel called to their chosen careers. Brent Burrow, a Cued
Speech transliterator at Gideon Pond Elementary School, grew up with his
“calling,” transliterating for two of his sisters who are deaf.
“My first paid job was to transliterate for my sister,” Brent said. “I wasn’t
trained, but, no one else could do it. I was the oldest sibling with typical hearing.” Brent grew up in Salt Lake City with three hearing siblings and two profoundly deaf siblings. His mother also has a hearing loss. Hearing loss runs in her family, Brent said.
“So, I have lots of aunts, uncles, a grandmother, and a great grandmother
who have hearing loss,” he added.
Even with hearing loss, everyone communicated orally, including Brent’s sisters who attended the Utah School for the Deaf until they were introduced to Cued Speech. That introduction happened in 1993 by chance—or, it could have been destiny.
At that time, Brent’s mother worked at a ski resort where she met a family
from Virginia with children who were deaf. The family used a communication
method Brent’s mom had never seen. She asked them about it, and they told her about the system of Cued Speech.
“My mother became fascinated with the idea of my sisters learning it,” Brent
said. When his mom couldn’t find anyone locally who knew Cued Speech, she
flew in instructors from Virginia who taught their whole family how to cue.
“For my sister who was 10 or 11 at the time, it was as if a light was turned
on,” Brent explained. “She had access to information she never had before.”
His other sister was about 6 then, and, transitioned smoothly into cueing.
Brent, who was 13, was a little more reluctant to learn to cue.
“Cueing in public was embarrassing at first,” he said. But, gradually he came
to like cueing.
“My mom made it fun,” he explained. “She had a rule that we had to cue at
the dinner table. She told us if we could cue our burps, we could burp. So, we learned how to cue all our bodily functions. We were slow at first, and then became more fluent.”
In 1995, when Utah held its first cue camp, “Cue-Tah,” Brent was a counselor.He has continued to work at cue camp since then. Now, he also teaches cue classes for kids at the summer camps. He worked at last summer’s Cue Camp Minnesota in Collegeville.
Brent worked as a transliterator while he attended college.
“I got huge employee discounts for college by working there. That’s what
really motivated me to transliterate,” he added.
He took a break from transliterating to become a fire fighter for a year, but
decided he wanted to get back to his true calling. While there’s no official degree in Cued Speech, Brent found ways to get additional training. He took courses from Language Matters, the only cued language transliterator graduate and undergraduate college credit in the world. He also took classes at the Utah Community Center for the Deaf, became a staff transliterator and developed workshops. In 2002, he took the Cued Speech American Competency Screening and the national certification test, scoring “better than I expected,” he added. That same year, he followed a job lead to Minnesota and has been working in District 917 (Burnsville, Eagan, Savage) since then.
His sisters continue to use Cued Speech transliterators and do well in school. The sister who is older attends Brigham Young University on a scholarship. The younger sister, who is still in high school, just got her driver’s license. Another brother, who has a progressive hearing loss, also uses a transliterator for his college classes.
Brent’s mother, who has been so dedicated to teaching the family to cue, has earned a degree in linguistics and a minor in special education. She trains transliterators and has worked with many of the top professionals in Cued Speech, including Tom Shull, who developed the curriculum for Cue Camp Minnesota last summer.
Brent has worked with students of all ages. He finds it rewarding to watch a child’s language develop as they learn to cue. He has witnessed “amazing leaps” in kids’ language comprehension, he said.
“I was transliterating for a child once and I was describing that they were going to have a ‘present swap’ at school,” Brent said. “The child I was transliterating for said, ‘Swap…what does that word mean?’ That wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t exposed to ‘swap’ in conversation.”
He finds that kids whose families cue with them really excel at school.
“Cue can help when used alone at school, but the results are tenfold if the child has exposure at home,” he explained. “Once the kids get it, they rock it,” he added.
