Actually thats not totally true. Yes, they have some athletic teams but KSD is such a small school they really only play other deaf schools, which makes for some LONG trips to other deaf schools in Missouri, Iowa, Arkansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, and even Minnesota. The only non-deaf schools they play are some small private schools.
Football
BasketballAs you can see they do very poorly against non-deaf schools.
Arkansas School For The Deaf
School mascot is the Leopard.
I did notice a couple seemed to have disabilities in other areas but most appeared quite normal. Judging by the large number of kids they had I think it was most of their high school aged students. The school only has about 123 students k-12+.
This page lists some of the student activities with Job Olympics being one of them (bottom of page).
I totally agree on the idea of their being some rule to keep out the ringers. But Job Olympics isnt exactly a tight run competitive organization with stiff rules. They seem more keen on large numbers than on dealing with rules on fairness and would rather rely on teams to regulate themselves. Like “we are only here for the fun”.
In case anyone has trouble understanding this, the reason is pretty simple. Deafness creates linguistic isolation. You can’t use spoken English or Chinese effortlessly, so deaf people use sign language. And this creates an isolated language, and the isolated language creates a community of people who use that language.
If we had a group of people who could only speak Croatian, and had some physiological problem that made it impossible for them to learn to speak English, and people who could only learn to speak Croatian were born every so often into English speaking families, then those Croatian speaking people would form a Croatian community with other Croatian speakers. Even if they could read and write English just fine, and were only unable to speak it or understand it.
This is why there’s a “Deaf Community”, but not a “Blind Community”. Yes, there are schools for the blind, and blind people understand the problems of other blind people, and blindness does create some isolation from written language and visual media. But a blind person can have a casual chat with a sighted person. Deafness is different, because it creates linguistic isolation. And sure, there are plenty of other disabilities that cause linguistic problems, but those disabilities make it just as hard for those people to communicate with each other as it does to communicate with everyone else.
So when Deaf people talk about how they want a deaf kid, or how they’re glad to be deaf, they just mean that they wan their kids to be part of the same community, and that they’re happy to be part of the community they’re actually part of.
QFT - my oldest sister is Deaf, and is very, very close to her friends. I would say closer to them than to most of her family.
I noticed that among some deaf people I used to be around. One woman, lets call her “Sue”, was deaf but it was because of a childhood illness so she was the only person in her family who was deaf. Another, lets call her “Ann” was from a deaf family. Her parents were deaf, so were 2 of her 3 kids. She said at family get togethers about half are deaf and half are not. Both were friends thru going to KSD together but were different because Sue married a hearing man and Ann did not because Ann was more tied to the deaf community. BTW, Olathe Kansas, home to KSD, has a very large deaf community. Many businesses cater to them with touch screens and interpreters.
Now add onto that most school districts will accommodate deafness their is less of a need for deaf kids to attend KSD yet its odd because those “outsider” kids are not accepted as well into the “deaf” world.
Their was one girl who was deaf but went to a regular high school and because of that, learned to lip read well and spoke clearly. Yet when her parents would take her to deaf-teen events out in Olathe the kids really shunned her because she couldnt sign as fast or understood the culture and ASL as much.
So yeah, the deaf community can be kind of hard sometimes. Also deaf workers can be difficult because sometimes they will pretend to not understand instructions.
But that’s all changing now with texting because now people do not need to actually speak to each other.
So no more needing to use TTY machines. No writing out notes. No needing interpreters.
And NOW, they have developed machines that can interpret sign language and convert it to text and send that! LINK
So I see in the future a breaking down of that tight deaf community.
Do you see that?
That is already happening to some extent to due normal high schools taking in deaf students, advancement of hearing aides. The use of cochlear implants for example can be a very controversial topic in the Deaf community.
Cochlear implants are “controversial” only because parents of a deaf child who opt to get a cochlear implant for their kid often have wildly unrealistic expectations. For some people it can give enough input that they can reliably understand speech in person or over the phone. For many others it can’t. Yes, you’ve got some auditory input, but if you can’t understand normal speech then you’re deaf.
Deafness isn’t just any old hearing loss. In practice it means hearing loss in such a way that you can’t reliably understand speech. It doesn’t matter that you can hear car alarms and trucks rumbling by or music or dog whistles, if you can’t understand someone if they’re talking to you with their back turned, then you’re deaf.
Point taken about technology, although it doesn’t replace the spoken word. I’ve been a lot more involved in my deaf nephew’s life once he got on facebook and started posting captioned videos and such. I can sign a little, but I can’t read sign fast enough to understand a normal signed conversation. But my nephew isn’t isolated from his parents at least–my brother is a Deaf Ed teacher and my sister in law is an interpreter. But lots of kids can barely communicate with their own parents. And at my brother’s school lots of his deaf kids come from spanish speaking households…so there’s a double whammy.
I am not deaf, and have no personal qualifications for judging how effective these implants are.
Of my deaf colleagues, one has an implant and finds it very helpful- but he still finds it necessary to sign and read lips, because the implant does NOT give him anything like perfect hearing.
The other colleague tried implants years ago, and hated them. It’s hard for a deaf person to explain how anything “sounds” when the implant first goes in, but apparently, the sounds CAN be jarring, unpleasant and even disturbing.
So, I can only surmise that implants are a good tool to have available, but are no panacea, even for the people who like them.
How difficult is it for someone deaf from birth to learn to ‘hear’ with Cochlear implants? Is it even possible?
When my nephew was around 2 years old, he was having difficulty learning to talk, eventually traced to ear problems. (They were fixed, and he hasn’t shut up in the 30+ years since then.) I know we were told that if that had not been found & treated early enough, he might have had severe problems learning to talk later – that the human brain is optimized to learn language as an infant, but that part of the brain atrophies or is used for other purposes later. (So that a toddler in a multi-lingual household can learn a 2nd language easily, while an adult needs much more effort to learn a second language.)
Was that an accurate statement, or is it dated medical info?
Okay, some people don’t want to get cochlear implants or don’t want them for their kids. But some people also like to opine on how nobody should get them.
That’s the basic gist. “Used for other purposes” is correct though, nothing atrophies, but later on it can’t readily be repurposed for what it was originally intended to.
The “problem” with cochlear implants is that they allow some people to hear speech, but it sounds robotic. Here’s one example, but I can’t say how accurate it is.
My sister lost her s*** when I mentioned the implants. She stopped wearing her hearing aids in 9th grade because she (and her friends) were convinced anyone wearing hearing aids was “just trying to be Hearing”, ang not accepting their Deafness.
My sister and her peers LOVE texting and social media, but there is still a disconnect. hard to explain except to say, it’s very similar to communicating with someone that learned English as a second language (even though they use ASL, based on English words). It can be difficult for people to understand their emails/texts if you have never spoken to a Deaf person before. I’ll see if I can find a good example and post it. I am very used to it, having grown up with her my whole life, but to an outsider, it reads very broken and disjointed.
I just had another thought about the games described by the OP.
Now, I wasn’t there and I don’t know exactly what the games entailed. I’m GUESSING that most of the students involved have serious mental or physical handicaps, and that their schools are designed to teach these kids basic independent living skills (hygiene, dressing themselves, simple cooking, et al.) and maybe some simple job skills.
So, a vacuuming contest might help prepare a kid with Down’s Syndrome to get a job as a janitor. A book shelving contest might help a girl with Cerebral Palsy learn to be a library aide. I get that. A block stacking contest might be good preparation for being a stock boy at a retail store.
But if I were an otherwise healthy, smart deaf kid, and I found that I’d been entered in contests like that, I’d be FURIOUS! I’d feel INSULTED! I’d be yelling, “THIS is all you think I’m capable of???”
Would otherwise “normal” deaf kids have willingly taken part in a contest for kids with serious learning disabilities? Or would they feel patronized and storm out?