This is for Susan, who left a comment on my post, Oh, leave AGBell alone! My response got to be too long to be a response, so I decided to make it a new post instead.
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Hi Susan …
Thank you for taking the time to write. Once again, I am not supporting AGBell’s positions, I am supporting their right to have and promote their positions, just as we can do the same.
I myself support ASL so I didn’t like it when you said, “Tom, you should not destroy ASL.” That was not the point of this post at all. And to understand my position on ASL, you might want to read one of my earlier posts, Free sign language classes a MUST!
I am sorry to hear of your upbringing. Unfortunately I have heard this same story from other people over the years. But I like to think the world is changing for the better and with IEPs and No Child Left Behind and more general enlightenment, there is a better focus on the individual students and what is the best approach for each one.
ASL is also more accepted nowadays and we don’t hear about kids being swatted for signing. If we did, it would probably be in regard to a teacher being arrested.
It is also much more normal nowadays to have interpreters in mainstream schools and for kids to have a variety of options.
Interpreters would have helped me when I was in high school and losing my hearing, but such a thing was unheard of in the early 1970s. I sat up front and tried to lip read and borrowed people’s notes and read like crazy, and somehow I made it out with good grades.
I didn’t have much of a social life, though, being the only deaf kid in a school of over 2,000. But I made a life for myself on the school newspaper, writing and taking pictures and breaking through the communication barriers with my cohorts. They liked that I could take good pictures of them and write nice things in the paper. You can see how it shaped who I am today.
I understand what you mean about low self esteem, though, because it kind of crushed the spirit to be the odd man out during one’s formative years. Fortunately, five years after high school, I decided to attend NTID and I learned sign language and began to feel a part of the deaf community.
Every deaf person has their own experiences of pain and hurt and sadness from interactions with the hearing, non-signing members of their family.
I tend not to get together with my family, the one I grew up with. They are hearing and don’t sign, except for one brother who knows fingerspelling. When I was visiting Mom in the hospital last February, I learned by finding photos at her house that the family had held a reunion the previous summer and did not tell or invite me. I thought it was a classic example of what deafness can do to a family.
It is usually us who must conform to their way of communicating. There is seldom an effort to meet halfway (learning the manual alphabet and some basic signs) or coming fully over to ASL (i.e. becoming fluent). We have to do it their way, speech and lipreading. There’s paper and ink involved, too.
Last year I had a lot of interaction with my hearing family members due to my mom’s illness and death. After years of dealing with our communication issues by avoiding one another, we were forced together by circumstances and HAD to communicate.
I think they want to believe I’m still the same guy who used to be able to lipread them when I was hard of hearing. It just doesn’t work that way anymore, though. At one point, my older brother was still trying, telling me something long and complicated. As I watched him, I could hear sounds via my hearing aid and realized he sounded exactly live a caveman.
It was a sudden and stark realization (so THAT’s what people sound like to me) and it struck me as quite humorous, as if he had taken a Berlitz class and was trying out his Caveman. Fortunately I was able not to laugh, because he was probably saying something serious, though I’ll be damned if I know.
My point is that I’m not against ASL at all, and like most deaf people, I understand your feelings of suffering just fine.
2 Comments
February 12, 2008 at 12:00 am
Alright I understand now what you try to say… What your point is not against ASL at all.
This time we need to support deaf children have right to use ASL is important communicate with hearing parents but hearing parent must to use ASL for their deaf child would be more happy familys relationship even if their brother or sister whatever they should be learn to use asl for deaf brother or sister whatever is happen to born or illness who know..
Deaf child can learn better english langauge by hearing brother or sister to use their asl communciate even parents..
It is kind of damaged spirit inside but i am still love with Jesus in my heart.. Jesus know it..
It best for me to “just let go”.. I am happy have with interpter who are hearing or coda either..
Sometime deaf child can be lip read but still ” not normal as hearing” it is very tough..Sometime deaf child can’t lip read either. I prefer to have deaf child to use asl and less lip read.. Lip read is not really helpful but better than nothing as little can do.
I can see ASL is best key more open mind to use eyes communicate than lip read is limit as fact.
my mother’s thought mind is big to form mental picture ” wrong picture “she think I am just like little girl .. Really she don’t even know how much i have in my mind plenty of news but very very difficult to with her just feel alike as ” magnet negative and positive “not know how to connect communicate “. you know what I mean. ” no feeling mother and daughter relationship”.
March 4, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Why not encourage people to be bilingual? The more ways we can communicate (and by ‘we’ — I mean all of humanity) the better, no? I think too often we get into communication silos as Americans (look at the controversy over “English only”) and not see that our brains and eyes work better (and we develop a much richer form of Empathy) when we are able to communicate across barriers.