Hello.  My name is James Duncan Powell and I would like to welcome you to my website. 

     Here is something that I wrote when I was younger:

        "When someone calls me deaf, I feel like I don't belong there and that hurts.  It shows that they don't know a lot about me. With my hearing aid and cochlear implant, I can hear almost like a hearing person and I can understand what people are saying without lip-reading. I don't talk like I'm deaf. I can go up to anyone, anywhere and have them understand me and I can understand them, unless they speak Spanish or something like that. I can even whisper and understand when someone whispers to me.

        When I was little, I had to do a lot of catch-up on my school work because the teachers let me slide.  They viewed me as deaf and didn't expect me to do as well as the other kids. They would give tests which I would almost always fail and then send home and give my mother one or two weeks to teach me the material. My biggest fear was that if I didn't do well on those second tests, they would use that as a reason to send me to the special school for the deaf where they use sign language to talk, although Mom assured me that wasn't going to happen. My mother didn't always like to do this for me because she felt I was missing out too much on being a kid, but I would beg her to help me because there was NO WAY I was going to give them a reason to send me to that other school. I always aced the second test and my grades didn't reflect all the failed ones. One year the school had me go in before school each day to see a special teacher who was supposed to help me with tests: wording, vocabulary and stuff like that. Mom found out all she was doing was teaching me the answers and not the concepts behind the answers and that was that. Then we moved to an area where my mainstream teachers had training with kids like me. I no longer have to spend hours at home each day after school trying to learn what I should have learned in school. I hardly ever need to even bring home any homework because I get it done during study time in school. I graduated my mainstream middle school on the honor roll, and that's even with taking an advanced math class for high school credit. I passed all areas of the state wide end of year assessment this year: reading, writing, math, science, and social studies. I even won a first place medal and a third place medal in my school's science fairs.

        When I'm not wearing my amplification I am deaf, but I don't even want to talk about that."

You can view my resume here.