[QUOTE=Lemur866]
Well, Lord Ashtar, I think a certain Mr. Aesop told a story that could shed some light on your situation. The psychology behind your teacher’s comments should be pretty obvious.
[/QUOTE]
That’s certainly a probable explanation. It also seems to me that it’s likely someone who was deaf from birth would not believe that there were qualities to the vibrations/sounds that are considered parts of music that just don’t come through? That is, I could see a situation where someone who “gets” part of the sensory experience believing that they “get” all of it, and the people who talk about the stuff that they have no referent for are like some people consider oenophiles to be doing: making up words to show off their knowledge.
[QUOTE=Lord Ashtar]
I took an ASL class early in college, primarily because I had a foreign language requirement which it filled and I thought it would be neat to study. The teacher was completely deaf. I had to write a paper about what I would miss most if I was deaf for the deaf culture part of the class. Seeing as music is a passion of mine, I wrote about how I would primarily miss that. He tore my paper apart, lambasting me about how deaf people can “hear” and appreciate music just fine (think back to the scene in Children of a Lesser God where Marlee Matlin was dancing to the vibrations she could feel from the huge speakers).
I don’t pretend to know what it’s like to be deaf, but I have to assume that there’s a lot about music that a 100% deaf person will simply never be able to understand. The way a blues guitarist can tell a whole story by the way he bends a note to the pain a metal vocalist can express through an epic scream. Seriously, how can a deaf person tell me what I’d miss if I lost my hearing? Isn’t that just a little arrogant?
[/QUOTE]
He probably would have torn up *anything * you wrote - I suspect that was the point of the exercise.
[QUOTE=WhyNot]
Here’s the part I don’t understand: why not raise them bilingual in English and ASL? Is it just because it’s harder for the parents to learn a second language and some (many? most?) parents won’t bother?
If so, then I guess I’d be pissed off at my parents for not bothering, too. But I’d be pissed at them for not helping me learn ASL too, not for teaching me English.
It’s the hatred of English and hearing folks that I don’t get, not the love of ASL and deaf folks. I love people who can speak my language and “get” me, too, but that doesn’t mean I hate those who don’t.
[/QUOTE]
It’s because English is associated with oral-only education.
But this is obsolete now, almost all schools teach “total communication”, meaning that the teachers sign and vocalize at the same time. The only trouble with THIS is that it encourages teachers to use Signed English rather than ASL, because then vocalization and sign will match exactly. And Signed English is a problem for Deaf culture people because ASL is sacred. And ASL is sacred because it defines and creates Deaf culture, and “They” tried to take ASL away from Us, and “They” said ASL was inferior, and “They” were wrong.
Of course signed english would be more logical, since deaf kids HAVE to learn at least written english. But ASL was here first, and it’s not going anywhere, because Deaf people see ASL as created by and for the deaf, while signed english systems are created by and for hearing people.
[rhetorical question] Just what the heck is it about homo sapiens that make us crave persecution, to the extent that if we aren’t persecuted, we invent persecution, or take our ancestors’ persecution as applying to us? :rolleyes:[/rq] Deaf Culture isn’t unique in this, mind, just the most recent example in my awareness.
[QUOTE=Lord Ashtar]
I don’t pretend to know what it’s like to be deaf, but I have to assume that there’s a lot about music that a 100% deaf person will simply never be able to understand. The way a blues guitarist can tell a whole story by the way he bends a note to the pain a metal vocalist can express through an epic scream. Seriously, how can a deaf person tell me what I’d miss if I lost my hearing? Isn’t that just a little arrogant?
[/QUOTE]
They have a point as far as saying that we should “accept” people who are born deaf and realize how isolating it is for them. As I understand it, these implants (at the time of the article at least) weren’t for everybody etc. so some will remain deaf without any choice. But when they go so far as to wish deprive those who could gain the ability to hear… :dubious:
It’s fascinating, too, how the quote I made mentions that the girl could hear honking cars. Hell, something like that could save her life. But apparently that isn’t cause enough for those opposed to the operation.
[QUOTE=Lemur866]
…the teachers sign and vocalize at the same time… Of course signed english would be more logical, since deaf kids HAVE to learn at least written english…
[/QUOTE]
I must say, while it seems silly to teach signed English when ASL is more useful, I can hardly imagine the kind of intelligence needed to communicate in two languages simultaneously. I guess it would be a whole other can of worms (financial, hierarchical, etc.) if there were two teachers, one translating whichever language for the other, but geez.
[QUOTE=lizardling]
To which I respond: Esperanto.
[/QUOTE]
Another good idea! Everyone should learn their native tongue and a world-wide common language (Esperanto for example.) Wouldn’t that make life on spaceship Earth a lot easier?
[QUOTE=amarinth]
Really? Because every time I’ve been to a Deaf event, they’ve been loud. Really loud. You know how hearing people don’t scrape chairs across the floor because of the sound it makes? Well, if you can’t hear the sound, you scrape. Things clank, and scrape, and bang, and clatter. There’s a low level of vocal noise, but the ambient noise is a lot louder.
[/QUOTE]
One lovely and talented poster here (Francesca, who started the “Ask the Hearing Daughter of Deaf Parents” thread) was born to two deaf parents. I remember her saying in the past how loud her parents could be, apparently not realizing how much noise they were making. They’d stomp heavily up stairs, clomp around overhead without caring about people downstairs hearing them. And of course, they apparently had no idea that farting produces noise, so there was that as well. The worst part, as I remember her saying it, was eating. Loads of rather disgusting noise while eating, in blissful ignorance of how the rest of the world perceived it.
I’ll let Francesca know about my post so she can correct me with an appropriate smack-down if necessary.
[QUOTE=lobotomyboy63]
It’s fascinating, too, how the quote I made mentions that the girl could hear honking cars. Hell, something like that could save her life. But apparently that isn’t cause enough for those opposed to the operation.
[/QUOTE]
My limited, outdated, barely remembered HO question: aren’t implants potentially detrimental to your quality of life in some cases? If you don’t adapt well to them? Sort of like surgically induced tinnitus?
[QUOTE=emilyforce]
My limited, outdated, barely remembered HO question: aren’t implants potentially detrimental to your quality of life in some cases? If you don’t adapt well to them? Sort of like surgically induced tinnitus?
[/QUOTE]
Some effects of implantation are irreversible; while the device promises to provide new sound information for a recipient, the implantation process inevitably results in damage to nerve cells within the cochlea, which often results in a permanent loss of most residual natural hearing. While recent improvements in implant technology, and implantation techniques, promise to minimize such damage, the risk and extent of damage still varies.
But isn’t it like anything else? You take into account all the medical information and make a decision. Ultimately that’s an individual choice. I wouldn’t criticize people who have it or choose not to.
But isn’t it like anything else? You take into account all the medical information and make a decision. Ultimately that’s an individual choice. I wouldn’t criticize people who have it or choose not to.
[/QUOTE]
Right, but it’s a bit stickier since it’s usually parents making a choice for their child, rather than an adult making a choice for themselves. But it doesn’t make sense to wait until a deaf kid turns 18, since you’ve got to form those neural connections early.
And so we have this situation, where deaf adults sometimes say that they wouldn’t have wanted to have such an implant, but hearing adults invariably say they would have.
But this anti-CI movement is a temporary phenomenon, eventually the Deaf adults who were subjected to substandard oralist-only education will be a minority.
The main thing is to emphasize to hearing parents of deaf children that CIs aren’t a cure for deafness. They can help, but panicky hearing parents often oversell themselves on the effectiveness of CI. They can’t imagine going through the effort of learning to sign, of having a disabled kid. And so they pretend that CI will make the problem go away. But that just isn’t the reality of CI.
[QUOTE=emilyforce]
My limited, outdated, barely remembered HO question: aren’t implants potentially detrimental to your quality of life in some cases? If you don’t adapt well to them? Sort of like surgically induced tinnitus?
[/QUOTE]
I had the surgery an year ago. It worked well in terms of receiving sound, but my brain has not been able to push past a stumbling block and actually understand human voices. I don’t care about cat purrings and honks and crap, I want to understand the hearing world. In a world with a wide range of sounds, the human voice is an amazingly small part of it, and it takes a lot of training to be able to understand it. And it just isn’t going to happen after a certain age.
There have been small side effects, the biggest of which was that they forced my TMJ mouth open to insert the tube which really messed the TMJ up (but entirely my mistake, I should’ve known what they were trying to get at when they asked about fake teeth etc). It’s been useless for what I wanted, but overall, no regrets, because at least I know I tried.
Nearly all the children I have heard of who were implanted as babies, have led fairly normal life as children and cannot really be called deaf in their own right. (If you can watch TV without captions, and talk on the phone without assistance, that’s pretty much a cure in my world.) I advocate very, very strongly for parents of deaf children to implant their children, as young as possible.
I see a lot of technophobia regarding the implants. SP took his deaf daughter and made her undeaf using technology. Cochlear implant get a ringing endorsement from Vint Cerf, and that’s good enough for me.
(His wife got two implants, and after not being able to hear at all prior, she promptly ordered as many books on tape as she could. The guy on the phone at the books-on-tape place was a little confused.)
Thanks, Subway Prophet. I’m not sure what I could add to what the other folks in this thread have already said so excellently – dre2xl, Roosh, and Lemur866.
Pretty much everything they’ve said.
Communication is what makes up society (Tower of Babel, anyone?), and by default deaf people are isolated from that. It’s always going to be an eternal battle for us to get included in day to day interactions that hearing people don’t even consider, like trying to place an order with your local SBUX sixteen year old barista with a five-deep line behind you. So we get bitter and cynical about it.
I’m slammed here at work, so I can’t take time to respond more at length, but I’ll definitely try to later on if I can swing it.
To WhyNot, fair question, but you might as well ask why my parents didn’t raise us kids bilingual in Indonesian and English so that we could communicate with the side of the family that stayed in country.
[QUOTE=Half Man Half Wit]
Oh, I wouldn’t worry, they’ve got a rather blurred notion of culture anyway.
[/QUOTE]
Hah! You’ll regret that remark when we Nearsighted people realize our plan to take over the world and enslave you. We need someone to help us find our glasses when we don’t remember where we put them, or when the cat batted them off the nightstand, y’know.
[rhetorical question] Just what the heck is it about homo sapiens that make us crave persecution, to the extent that if we aren’t persecuted, we invent persecution, or take our ancestors’ persecution as applying to us? :rolleyes:[/rq] Deaf Culture isn’t unique in this, mind, just the most recent example in my awareness.
[/QUOTE]
Actually, based on the experiences of my ASL teachers, it isn’t imagined persecution - it is/was real. To answer your earlier question - no, their parents never learned how to sign, the parents made motions to get basic essentials across - but they didn’t bother to learn their kids’ language and just didn’t really communicate with their children.
Also, given how closely language is tied to identity, I can understand how when someone’s language has been devalued for so long and only finally gotten recognition as something more than primitive - hearing “no, it’s still less than. Use ours instead” is a more little insulting.
