Teaching the Unteachable

For the first 27 years of his life, Ildefonso lived in total isolation. No, he wasn’t locked in solitary confinement or stranded on a desert island. He was born totally deaf and never even learned that there was such a thing as language.

When Ildefonso was a boy, his Mexican-Indian family wrote him off as a lost cause. They wrote him off as unteachable.

Sometime during his mid-20s, Ildefonso was taken to a center for special needs people in Los Angeles, California. Several teachers tried to work with him, but they also thought that he was unteachable.

But then came an educator named Susan Schaller.

When Schaller first met Ildefonso, he was at this center, sitting in a corner of the classroom. “His face looked like a painting from a Mexican mural with wild black eyes above high cheekbones and a broad straight nose,” she wrote in her book A Man Without Words.

She approached him, and in sign language, said, “Hello, my name is Susan.”

Ildefonso looked at her, and signed right back to her: “Hello, my name is Susan.”

Shaller shook her head and signed again: “No, no, I’m Susan.”

And he responded: “No, no, I’m Susan.”

This went on for several minutes. Everything she said, he mimicked. But Schaller was sure she could see intelligence in his eyes. “There was a bewilderment and fear in his look, and something else as well—alertness, intensity and yearning,” she said.

She soon realized that the fact that he was mimicking her meant he didn’t know what she was doing. He didn’t understand that she was using signs, words and language to convey ideas. She realized that this man didn’t have language and didn’t even know that language existed.

The enormity of this is hard to grasp. For those of us who use language to formulate every thought, and to convey every idea, the idea of languageless-ness is almost impossible to comprehend.

Ildefonso was 27 years old and didn’t know that he was deaf.

He didn’t know there was such a thing as sound. His whole life, he’d seen people’s mouths moving. And he saw that other people responded to those movements. But he thought that everyone else was figuring it all out visually—just by what they saw. And he thought, I don’t get it, so I must be stupid.

But Schaller was convinced that he was not stupid. She was sure he was intelligent.

In the days that followed, she decided to try to teach him some basic sign language. She took out a book, and then she made the sign book. But the sign for book—palms pressed together with thumbs up, and then swung opened at a “hinge” on the pinkies—looks like opening up a book. So Ildefonso thought she was telling him to open a book. He grabbed the book from her and he opened it. He was eager to follow orders, but he just didn’t understand that she was trying to show him the word, the symbol, the language for book.

She would point to a door and then make the sign for door. And Ildefonso would either mimic her, pointing to the door, or he would go to the door. He couldn’t make the connection in his mind.

This went on for weeks and weeks. For hours a day, she would try to teach him, and for hours a day, he would fail to understand.

Shaller said that even though they were only inches apart for these lessons, they might as well have been on different planets. She said it was the most frustrating thing she had ever experienced in her whole life.

She thought about giving up. She thought he was maybe too old to be helped. Maybe he had been languageless for too long.

But she persevered. She was convinced that there was intelligence trapped inside of him, and she ached to free it. “I refused to accept the idea of hopelessness,” she wrote.

An Exceptional Idea

One day, after weeks of him constantly mimicking her and misunderstanding her, she had an idea.

“Perhaps it’s just possible that if I died tomorrow I would have had only one really, really good thought in my life,” Schaller later said in an interview about her experience.

And here was her idea: She decided to pretend to ignore Ildefonso.

She set Ildefonso off to the side of the classroom, and instead of teaching him, she taught to an invisible, imaginary Ildefonso. She set up an empty chair across from her. She stopped talking to or making eye contact with the real Ildefonso and only talked to this imaginary Ildefonso.

To the empty chair, she would hold up a picture of a cat. And she would explain to the invisible Ildefonso what the word was for cat.

Then she would hop into the other seat—the invisible Ildefonso’s seat—and she would pretend to be him. And she would pretend to finally understand. With her facial expressions, she would demonstrate this revelation: Oh, I get it! This motion of the hand is a symbol or word that means that furry animal. The sign means cat!

Schaller would go back and forth, playing both parts, student and teacher. And Ildefonso watched the whole thing from the side of the classroom. This went on for days, and Ildefonso often looked bored. At the end of some days, Schaller felt sure it would be the last time she would see him. She thought that after failing to understand for so long Ildefonso would give up.

But he always came back, and late one afternoon, as Schaller was showing the cat sign, for the hundredth time, to the imaginary Ildefonso, she saw the real Ildefonso shift in his chair.

“Suddenly, he sat up, straight and rigid, his head back and his chin pointing forward,” she wrote. “The whites of his eyes expanded as if in terror. He looked like a wild horse pulling back, testing every muscle before making a powerful lunge over a canyon’s edge.”

Ildefonso had broken through.

He realized in a flash that the idea of a cat in one person’s mind could join the idea of a cat in another person’s head—just by speaking the word cat.

He looked all around the room and realized that everything has a name. Everything has a word. He slapped his hands on the table and looked at Schaller. She signed table, and he understood. He pointed to the door. She said door, and he understood.

Schaller’s face was wet with tears, but Ildefonso was excited. He was so enthralled by this discovery.

But after a few minutes of rapidly learning words, Ildefonso realized what this all meant. He turned pale and collapsed on his desk sobbing. He finally—all at once—saw the prison that he had existed in alone for those 27 years. He saw that he had been cut off from the human race. He understood why he had felt so isolated for his entire life.

It was an emotional time for student and teacher, but they fought through it. After that moment, teaching Ildefonso to speak was easy and fast. He was eager to learn, he was intelligent, and he was in love with words. He carried around papers and notebooks and would ask Schaller to write all manner of words for him. He cherished these papers and studied them often.

Schaller saw that her work was done, so she left the center and left Ildefonso to continue learning with other teachers.

Some five years later, she came back for a visit, and Ildefonso was fluent in American Sign Language (asl), and he could read and write English proficiently. She asked him to describe what the world had been like for him before that breakthrough moment. What had it been like to be languageless? What had his thoughts been like before he had language?

Ildefonso was visibly uncomfortable with the question. He said he could not think that way anymore. He was incapable of thinking in the dark, isolated way he used to think. Schaller pushed him about it, and the closest he ever came to any kind of an answer was saying that it was dark and that he didn’t remember what his thoughts were for those 27 years. He grew annoyed and said he didn’t want or know how to talk about that “dark time.”

A Precious Lesson

Each of us can learn a valuable lesson from this story. In just about every role in our lives—-as husbands and wives, as fathers and mothers, as sons and daughters, as uncles and aunts, as siblings, friends and employees—we will be more effective and more valuable to others if we are more effective teachers.

The quality of our lives and the lives of others can be enhanced if we are effective educators.

And sometimes those whom we teach may be difficult students. They might be totally in the dark about the topic or skill they need to learn. They might have serious barriers to learning. And we as teachers may need to dismantle those barriers.

We will often need phenomenal amounts of drive and patience—like Schaller had with Ildefonso. We will often need extraordinary resourcefulness, like Schaller used in teaching Ildefonso. And we will often need astounding perseverance, just as she had with him.

If we use these tools, as Schaller did with Ildefonso, we will be able to more effectively teach. We will be better able to enrich the lives of others. We might even be able to teach the unteachable.

To learn more about the vital importance of lifelong education, order a copy of our free booklet Education With Vision.