Came across this: Braille Makes a Comeback

(To read the full article, you’d have to sign up for a free registration.)

But the part of interest was this:

Among some students, families, and educators, use of Braille was seen as a sort of failure, some advocates say. Among the visually impaired, about 90 percent are believed to have some functional vision. Students chose — or were pushed — to use their vision to read because it was seen as a more “normal” option.

“But that’s not the belief of Frederic K. Shroeder, a research professor at the Interwork Institute at San Diego State University who focuses on vocational rehabilitation. Mr. Schroeder also served in the US Department of Education as the head of Rehabilitation Services Administration during the Clinton administration.

“I’ve talked to parents who have pushed for Braille, and they are told, ‘Why are you going to make your child more handicapped that he really is?’” Mr. Schroeder said.

He also notes that although many blind children have residual vision, there’s no guarantee it will be stable enough to allow them to use it to read throughout their lifetimes. Mr. Schroeder, a officer with the National Federation of the Blind, began losing his sight at age 7. He did not become completely blind until he was in his late teens, which is when he taught himself Braile.

“The default, in my mind, ought to be Braille,” he said. “How exactly have you harmed a child by teaching them Braille?”

Wow, sound familiar at all?

Why is that, given a choice between giving children access to something they need or making parents/society more “comfortable,” all too often the fears and prejudices of parents and society as a whole are pandered to?

So a week or two ago I signed up with www.yourmail.com which is a free service that intercepts your voice mails, transcribes them, and emails them to you. You can still retrieve them from your voicemail as usual, but you can opt to get a copy in the email or even have it texted to your cellphone.

I don’t get many voice calls, of course, but my mom (! she should know better ) left a message on my phone this morning and it emailed me the transcript

Hi BEG it’s mom want to know if you’re gonna be able to come for lunch or later today um we’re gonna. Have lunch around uh 1130 noon so it’s kinda getting close here. But i’ll check the email again and see if you got my message hope things are going well. Love you bye.

WHEEE!

I can take control of my own voicemail instead of just deleting them! Now I just need to find someone to help me set up the customized greeting messages. This is fun!

There’s a fair furor at present over DBC, the details of which I hardly need to recount. But I came across this, and it has got me thinking:

The deep division between the subgroups reflects the contrasting core values of deafness. For the oral deaf and users of c.i. people, being able to hear is of utter importance, reflecting the value of the hearing society. For the Deaf Community, it’s totally the opposite as the deafness trait is the most cherished culture for the majority of Deaf people. (from Deaf Community: Cultural Values and Double Standards)

And yet once again, I feel like I fall through the cracks. Technically, I suppose I am oral deaf; however I do not promote this as the sole method of teaching deaf children. This is how I was taught, it was not a choice and my mother did not have full information, only deaf education professionals and doctors who all cautioned her to make sure I never learned sign language because then I would surely never be properly educated. She fought for my admission to public schools several years before mainstreaming was opened up, informally put together what would be called IEP’s today with my teachers and so on.

But being able to hear is not of utter importance to me, nor has it ever been. I think of it like a car — damn useful in many ways, but not central to me or who I am. And I’m not sure hearing OR deaf people quite understand this. Most hearing people take for granted a supposed desperation among deaf people to comprehend music, listen to sound. I don’t give a flying fuck. I care about communication; if I could do so across the board without sound, I’d do so. And in fact I’ve been online since 1986 and have taken full advantage of emails, newsgroups, mailing lists, IM’s, chatrooms and so on, where I finally had equal footing; in many cases better footing because I’m a good writer. Apart from that particular issue, I don’t care about sound. I don’t care about hearing birds chirp in the morning, or Mozart’s last symphony or whatever. I find them pointless.

At the same time, all too many deaf people equally assume that because I wear hearing aids and do speak, I must find sound of utmost importance. Of all the people I would think would actually understand, this really disappoints me. Hearies are surrounded by sound, they grow up with it, they respond to it emotionally, it is a central sensory input for them, it makes sense to me they would overestimate its importance to me. But fellow deaf people? Oh, please.

For many deaf people, the use of hearing aids or even cochlear implants is taken as a de facto sign of colonization. Look, I understand colonization and I will tell you right now that hearing aids and CI are incidental to that. You want to know what colonization of deaf people is? DEPRIVING US OF SIGN LANGUAGE. Isolating us. Judging us continually and solely against a hearing standard.

Yes, I was colonized. I didn’t get sign language. I didn’t even meet another deaf person until I was an adult. I’ve been criticized for “not trying hard enough” when I fail to understand something someone said. And yes, I am learning sign language, and am fairly proficient given that I’ve been working on it for a year or so and have few people to practice with (non of them native signers). I have no doubts whatsoever that had I been exposed to sign language as a child, I would be equally fluent in sign language and as skilled in using the tools I have now (hearing aids, etc).

Deaf children are like any other children in one important respect: they want to communicate. How, exactly, they communicate, is up to the adults around them, and in my view there should be no deprivation of any form available to the deaf child for communication. Children will use what they are able to use. This means they should be no more deprived of the opportunity to learn lipreading, try hearing aids out, etc., than they should be deprived of sign language.

I was needlessly deprived of sign language. That is the colonization, the injustice I rail at. I have no particular issues with being exposed to oral methods of education for deaf children, only that it was the only method given to me, with the implication that that was all there was.

Anyway, there’s many more shades of gray besides the black vs. white of Oral deaf vs Deaf. It’s why I call myself deaf, never Deaf, nor indeed oral deaf.

Wow!

For quite some time, CSPAN1 and CSPAN2 have offered live streaming of the televised portions of congressional activity. They’re captioned on TV, but of course on the Internet not so much. So in following political stuff, I’ve had to scramble around for transcripts and such since my job precludes me from watching on a real TV (besides, you still can’t go back and reference this stuff as easily this way anyway).

But the online CSPAN has been busily reorganizing their archives and now it’s very easy to find things, including transcripts for all their segments!

As an example here (well the Peru bill isn’t of general interest, I admit) take a look: UNITED STATES PERU TRADE PROMOTION AGREEMENT IMPLEMENTATION ACT. Video clips on the right, transcript on the left. Plus look at the calendar in the upper left corner, you can go back and find discussions on specific days. You can search by bill or by who spoke.

SWEET!

I had my hair cut today. A fairly pedestrian activity, I suppose: washing the hair, snipping and clipping it, applying ridiculous amounts of mousse and blow drying the final product. I do all this in silence, of course, since once my hair’s washed it’s too wet for the hearing aids. The place that I go to regularly seems to understand this, though I haven’t really explained it.

But what fascinates me about this place is that it’s run by I think expat Iranians. They chatter and talk among themselves in Farsi. Watching the transition between talking in English with me, imperfectly, to smooth fluency in their own language, fascinates me. The rhythm and patterning suddenly become confident and smooth, the lips don’t struggle around foreign sounds.

I think of this because I also saw this when getting pedicure last weekend (my annual birthday pedicure, I hasten to add); only this time the place my mother likes to go is owned and run by a Vietnamese family. But the same thing happens there — talking and chattering among themselves, a small community within a community.

Body language always fascinates me. I see the same thing when I watch groups of people talking in English. A smoothness, back and forth, an easy comfortableness and familiarity. Shared jokes, shared activities, all forming a web around the group of people. Doesn’t matter that I can’t understand it, doesn’t matter the language, the pattern’s there for anyone to see.

When I watch at the deaf meets, with flying hands back and forth, I see the same patterns, the same body language of shared communication. But this time, this time. This time, I think, I could someday participate in that.

Good heavens:

With New Device, Police Shake, Rattle and Roll

Meet the Rumbler.

The high-tech blaster is being used along with the traditional siren. It is aimed at grabbing people’s attention and getting them to make room for officers responding to emergencies, helping police navigate through traffic faster and safer. People can feel it from about 200 feet away.

The problem is apparently that hearing people don’t pay attention to the sirens…

“The basic idea is we become more insulated in our vehicles with stereos, iPods and telephones,” Morgan said. “We thought it would be helpful if there was something else along with the traditional siren that would reach a different level of awareness.”

Dunno about y’all, but I have no trouble noticing sirens and pulling over. They’ve got those really cool visual cues: Flashing lights! Which you can see! Who would have thought!

Oh, sorry, I think my snark’s showing. Still I’d be curious to see how this feels up close. One thought I do have: 200 feet is not much distance. You need to pull over before that when you see lights behind you, in order to clear the way.

I came across this article over the summer and was immediately struck by the obvious parallels: So let’s just go back to segregation, then. I thought many of the things she had to say about the issues black children face in schools is very much like what deaf children face in schools. In particular, this caught my eye:

My decision to stay in the gifted program branded me a sellout, because I didn’t do what the other kids had done. I was accused of “trying to be white” and worse. I had no black friends until late middle school. Some of the white kids were friendly, but it was a superficial kind of thing — there were certain things we just couldn’t talk about, and there was some inherent objectification that came with being “the black friend”. I got a lot of “Can I touch your hair?” and “Wow, I didn’t realize black people like to read!” Even for the handful who might’ve become true friends, their parents weren’t all that happy when they brought me home (to be fair, neither was my mother, when I brought white friends home). So while I did well in middle and high school, I often wonder how much better I could’ve done if I hadn’t been a treated like a freakish aberration.

Oh, boy. Can I ever relate. As can, I suspect, most oral deaf whether or not they’d admit it.

But the comment that really hit me, and I think it’s the crux of why I am so adamant that, whatever educational option is chosen for deaf children that they not be isolated from other deaf children and by extension from signing, is this one:

Kids in immersion have no real clue how to be black; they’ve been whacked with a societal interpretation of blackness as “bad”, but they’re not yet sure how to counter that interpretation. So they cobble together their own definition of blackness, drawing on what they know and what society tells them about themselves. If they’ve been exposed to positive knowledge about their culture, they embrace positive manifestations as the norm. But when they’re bombarded with stereotypes and negativity about their culture, they end up embracing that as their standard.

How often have we seen ourselves internalize these lowered expectations on the part of so many teachers of the deaf? How long have we struggled against this kind of thing from both within and without? I have seen incredibly smart and dynamic deaf people reveal complete insecurities with their English, for example. I’ve blamed myself over and over again for communication failures in my life. The list goes on.

I think there’s some very interesting parallels and I think the book she mentions here, Beverly Tatum’s Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? would have direct relevance and insights for many minority groups, including the deaf.

Here’s a meme floating around that I spotted:

20 Years Ago, I…
Started graduate school. (Oi!) Had my first serious relationship (really, just bounced around more informally as an undergrad — was more interested in school). Also became completely financially independent from my parents (who paid rent and tuition during undergrad, something which I will be forever grateful for, and something I hope I can help my nephews with in the future). Travelled to Europe for the first time.

15 Years Ago, I…
Got my heart-dog, the smartest and most loyal dog in the world. Also purchased my first house (really a condo) with my then-husband whom I’d married the year before.

10 Years Ago, I…
Was about a year or so into my first serious long term job — after grad school and a few fits and starts, was settling down in this job. Purchased our first real house with backyard and everything.

5 Years Ago, I…
Had lost my job the year before (just before 9/11) and divorced the hubby before that…! I was trying to settle into a new job with an absolutely psychopathic [at the time] boss. This was a rather difficult time since so much changed. Started travelling again, went to Spain.

2 Years Ago, I…
Spent my birthday in Rome, going thru the Vatican! I also lost my heart-dog

1 Year Ago, I…
Lost my second dog. Started up gardening, and DYI projects around the house for maintenance (ouch) and personal enjoyment (finally got rid of all those white walls!)

So far this year, I’ve…
Learned sign language! I’ve gradually started cooking again as well, something I used to do in grad school. I’ve also been involved in Project 365, where you take a picture a day for a year. I’m closing in on the end of it, and may just continue it for fun.

Yesterday, I…
Had a ridiculously long day, leaving the house at 7:30 and not getting back until 10:30. That’s am then pm.

Today, I…
Started dog sitting a friend’s dog. This dog is seriously bouncy.

Tomorrow, I’ll…
Get to take a class from a teacher world-renowned in his art.

Hello, hello! Seems I took something of a summer vacation! I’ve had that happen from time to time on my blogs. I think I sort of step back and recharge my batteries. I’ve been busy of course, what with work and extracurricular activities. Interestingly, while I have not been specifically practicing my signing, I have been going to local deaf meets at least once or twice a month and someone always comments that I’m improving rapidly. I think I do the same thing with language: I go through this explicit learning stage and then sit back and let it all bubble and froth. The best part is that I do have a friend who knows sign language whom I see fairly regularly and while we just chitchat, I know from learning other languages that it’s this type of practice that establishes concrete building blocks.

Now I’m off to read the ECA articles

Weehaaaaaa!!!!