Speaking without Words

In our IT shop in the school disrict I work at, I answered a knock to our door this morning and had a teacher shoved me a note scrawled on a white writing pad. She was tapping a pen to a request for me to meet her in a conference room to help get a DVD player to work. As I nodded calmly, we headed over wordlessly to the room. I didn't ask or delve any further into why this teacher, who typically speaks in vocal words, wasn't speaking to me except with a medium sized pad of paper and blue pen. As I was tinkering with the cables and TV, she wrote a couple of new directives which I immediately nodded and went along my way. After she wrote that she couldn't talk for 2 weeks due to a strained vocal cord, I smiled and told her my story. I said that my 4 1/2 year old son was non-verbal and I have an easy time decoding gestures, pointing and a host of non-verbal cues. At this, she gave me a broad smile as I went along figuring our how she was going to project her DVD with people speaking to a room of folks that would be silent.