:eek: :smack: :smack: :smack: Fuck me on a fucking sandwich with mayo and bacon and a fucking pickle. Fuck! :mad:
I meant to say:
“Note that I’m not defending his sympathies, here.”
Let the record show that I believe Eugenicists are poopy-heads who need a good talking-to about human decency. In no way would I ever advocate their beliefs!
Stupid typo!
Going to bed now! Good NIGHT!
You might want to check out this article in the November 2005 issue of Wired. The author completely lost his partial hearing, and got implants, but was unsatisfied with the sound they provided. He worked with the engineers on the software for the processor until he was able to enjoy music.
I’ve been on the Net since 1988 and have always been surprised by how rarely one saw e-mail addresses from Gallaudet.edu. In a text-only forum, I had naively assumed that the deaf would be eager to communicate. The only deaf people I regularly communicated with tended to be those who had learned lip-reading.
NTID is actually completely integrated with RIT and deaf students take all of the same classes hearing students take. It was a rare class indeed if it didn’t have at least one deaf student.
My daughter was born nearsighted. My husband and I have always made her sight correction needs one of our top priorities. I cannot imagine any loving parent would WANT to cripple his/her child, in any way. And being deaf is being crippled/handicapped. Sure, there are ways to compensate for deafness or partial deafness, but hell, they’re a poor substitute for being able to hear, IMO. You had a limited timeframe to get this done. I’m glad she’s able to hold a spoken conversation with you.
((((Subway Prophet)))) and send some to your Kid too, dude.
It’s tough, but for what it’s worth, I believe you made the right choice with the CI’s. I don’t fully support your rant vs. the Deaf community, but I can see it for what it is. Which is someone needing to vent about the subject, and I *do *agree with it in parts and pieces.
That being said, I do hope you teach your kid to the fullest extent possible- let her learn English, a foreign language, music, whatever she wants. If she has difficulty, that’s fine, but don’t discourage her. If it were my child in such a position, I would do the same thing you’ve outlined here as well. So yeah, screw the community for it can be, but just raise your daughter to be the best person she can be period.
My wishes are sent your way.
No dig at you BG, but this point just stuck out at me. Hey, why not William and Mary? Or Harvard? Or any other college out there? If she’s got the grades and the skills to pay the bills she should get to go where ever she wants to go. Yeah, the CI and the hearing issues are there, but just because someone has a deficiency at an early age, doesn’t mean one should try to limit themselves.
Sure, Gallaudet might be a good school, and it might be what some people need, but it shouldn’t be seen as the only place out there for someone just because they’ve got a hearing disability. I know a few people with hearing disabilities and even the CI’s and they’ve done just fine in their classes at the colleges they went to.
Frank Zappa said it best:A mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it’s not open. So just keep on promoting the learning, and always be open to the possibilities that life has to offer, and end up wherever you may, just be happy wherever it be.
Peace out, and take care!
I may just not be fully aware of the details of deaf culture, but…
Are literate members of the deaf community rare?
[I had written a long explanation of my thoughts on the matter, but maybe I should see what the answer to this question actually is, first]
Subway Prophet writes:
> ASL differs a lot from English.
Read my post. I never said anything that contradicts this. I said that written English differs a lot from spoken English. Nobody is claiming that ASL is similar to English. It’s a different language.
> Plenty of people have “bothered to create” a written form of ASL, but they’ve all
> been failures, lacking in various vital areas - e.g. hand location, direction, etc. -
> but most notably acceptance by the ASL crowd.
By “bothered to create” it, I meant bothered to create a written form that is generally accepted. The reason that no written form is generally accepted is there is no particular use for it except for linguists who study ASL in the same way that other languages are studied (including many obscure languages that have no written form). Linguists need something to use for their linguistics papers to talk about it. There’s no reason to write ASL down generally because it’s more convenient to write things in English.
This means that deaf people grow up bilingual. There’s a bizarre notion among Americans that being bilingual is some awkward, difficult thing that most people can’t do. Nonsense. It’s sometimes estimated that half the population of the world grew up bilingual and speaks at least two languages natively.
Indistinguishable writes:
> Are literate members of the deaf community rare?
No, but it’s estimated that the average deaf adult in the U.S. has a fourth-grade reading level.
There are idiots everywhere. And I’m sorry that you ran into one of those purist types.
Pretty much what **RoOsh ** said.
Regarding the literacy issue, I have an unposted thinky post somewhere on the state of the educational system as it’s supported (or failed) deaf kids, but what a lot of it boils down is to whether people push the kid to succeed or fail at regular academia. Especially at the state schools for the deaf. Education is a huge issue in Deaf culture because so much of it is the communication issue, which is at the heart of the handicap.
By literate, you’d have to define what you meant. I’ve heard that quite a few Deaf kids who don’t get adequate support from family + school wind up exiting the system with a very substandard reading level because everyone is so hellbent on communicating with them that they forget about the meat+veg part of one’s education. And then by the time they do remember, it’s a bit late for that. It’s a fairly depressing statistic but I wouldn’t be able to pull up factual numbers, I’m afraid.
These days though, more and more deaf kids are stuffed into mainstreamed schools with IEPs to help them from the get-go. Ideally, they’ll get good interpreters and can focus on the meat+veg of academia instead of struggling with the communication part during the key parts of their academic lives.
Regarding a written form of ASL, aren’t there also different notation systems for dance and stage choreography that are also similarly buggy?
I have it second-hand from a number of friends who work with the Capital-D-Deaf that the community (but not necessarily even a majority of the individuals) are petulant, militant, political, and focused on identifying the Deaf as victims whom only the community can rescue. The OP’s use of the word “claim” really resonates. For a group of people who struggle so hard to communicate, it amazes me how many cultural taboos, forbidden words, and discriminatory speaking rules there are, e.g. “Oh, a Hearing person isn’t allowed to name themselves in ASL. They’re given names by their Deaf friends, but until then their name is finger-spelled.” Think about that: until they name you, you have no name. It’s an insular community that relishes victimhood but abolishes the word “disability”. They demand better-than-equal treatment while openly deriding and scorning the people who help them. They love the (self-?) righteous fury that comes whenever a Hearing person accidentally treads on one of their taboos and they can blast them with shame. It’s not unlike certain religions and cults in those respects.
I’m glad your kid got the cochlear implants. I strongly believe that only she has the right to determine how she will relate to herself and the world around her despite her disability. I wish you both the best of luck in helping her find a path that suits her.
I have a question that is totally off-topic, but…
How do deaf people generally react to a random hearing person (without a deaf family member) learning to sign?
In my experience, russians adore foreigners learning to speak russian. The same is true for faroese, and many other languages. Others (norwegians, possibly americans?) just take it as a fact of life, and may even make fun of a foreign speaker with an accent. Where do deaf people fall on this scale? Do they welcome this foreign speaker, or ridicule him/her? Or something else?
Fuck 'em. Fuck 'em in the ear.
If it helps, I just read that as a typo of “Not that I’m defending…”
Huh, I never knew there was a tightly-knit deaf community like this. Is this a worldwide phenomenon, or something that’s largely confined to America/the English speaking part of the world (inasmuch as that distinction makes sense)? Because I’m not aware of anything comparable in Germany, but I might just haven’t heard of it. Maybe even subconsciously turned a blind eye.
Anyway, the whole thing strikes me as absolutely bizarre – I mean, it’s not a great revelation that everybody tends to seek out a pedestal from which to look down upon their peers, and any form of insularity is a natural conduit for that, but to make the basis for this a disability?
I would have thought that being deaf entailed to want to be able to hear; I’ve got no olfaction (which isn’t in any way comparable in regards to the handicap it poses, of course), and I’d certainly rather be able to smell than part of a community of similarly afflicted.
They’d probably stink to high heaven, anyway.
Be that as it may, I hope everything goes well for the OP; raising a hearing afflicted child must be hard enough without getting grief from some hypocritical ‘best interests’ association with misguided communal notions.
Oh, I wouldn’t worry, they’ve got a rather blurred notion of culture anyway.
NTID is cool. I had no idea it even existed until I showed up at RIT for my first semester and asked my RA, “what’s with all the deaf people around here?”
I was even able to learn some rudimentary ASL just by watching the interpreters in my classes. (One of them was really hot.)
I’ve since forgotten it all, though.
Regarding the OP rant I have this to say: Hear, hear.
I can’t speak for the world, but I know the US has little pockets of deaf communities in places nearby deaf schools such as Upstate New York (NTID), Washington DC (Gallaudet) and Southern California (various smaller schools for the deaf).
Nitpick: that should be cleft palate. A cleft palette is something that keeps spilling paint everywhere.
SP, I don’t have anything to add to this conversation. I’m not deaf and I don’t know anyone who is. You sound like a pretty good parent to me, though.
You are bringing back flashbacks of a certain woman in some of my classes recently. She was not totally deaf; I don’t know the degree of deafness she had. She had an interpreter in her classes and she had some kind of amplifier that she used. The classes met mostly online, with some on campus days. Day one, we are “introducing” ourselves online and she says she’s deaf. Ok. She participates in class just fine or so it seemed–in fact, she rather monopolized class “discussion” online with the instructor egging her on. It got to be a joke–we could almost time the prof’s response (always positive, no matter what input the deaf person made) to her–all the while the prof is ignoring other, more informed responses.
Fast forward to on campus: she again monopolized class with the aid of her interpreter. She sat in front of the class and then would say stuff like, “That person has to speak up!” when someone would make a comment from the back. She told people to talk more slowly because she didn’t catch what they said (she lip read, fair enough), but mostly she was just obnoxious about her “differently abled” self. She wanted to be treated like any other student, but then got upset when she wasn’t catered to.
But the worst thing was when we were in a circle (god knows why–grad school can be a lot like kindergarten)–we had to relate our favorite childhood book to our decision to become librarians or some such, and tell a few things about ourselves. This person said she was deaf, that she had an interpreter with her, that her favorite childhood book was X and that she had recently lost a lot of weight and was no longer fat… all the while standing next to someone who’s BMI had to be in the 30s. I can only suppose she was also tone deaf, socially. (that and she was still well, kind of hefty, made her comment odd to say the least).
I don’t say she’s representative of all (or even many) deaf or Deaf people–she got into grad school, so she must have some degree of literacy and intelligence. No doubt she has both, but her social “skills” (the monopolizing of class, the rudeness) coupled with an overweening sense of superiority (she worked at a famous library as an aide) did not endear her to her fellow students.
But what bothered me most was the response she got from others: they bent over backwards for her, catered to her ego, excused what would have been confronted or condemned in a hearing person. How is this helpful to anyone? It’s a natural impulse, I suppose (I see it happen to people in wheelchairs, this able person guilt or whatever), and it’s better than regarding those with handicaps as freaks (or being afraid of them), but it seems to me we have a long way to go before the blind, deaf, wheelchair-bound are truly mainstreamed.
I am sorry that the Deaf community has responded to CIs as some sort of threat. I remember the demonstrations at Gaulladet when the new President (provost?) was chosen and she was deemed “not deaf enough”. Gah.
I see what you did there.
This is why my (deaf) best friend hates the deaf community. He’s got a cochlear implant that nobody - yet - has given him any shit for, but the fact that he mingles with us hearing folks gets him shunned something fierce.
I think you’re doing the right thing by giving your daughter as many tools as possible to help her succeed in life. I second the notion to fuck the haters in the ear. Hugs to you and yours.