California School for the Deaf

I started working at California School for the Deaf back in the 1960s. Most of the kids didn't know American Sign Language (ASL) when they first came to CSD. In fact they didn't know any language at all unless they had deaf parents and were consequently several years behind in learning other things. Since human minds are programmed to learn language in infancy and early childhood, it's much harder for children to learn any language by the time they start elementary school.

I was one of the first two counselors allowed to work with younger students in the lower school who knew ASL. Before that the teachers had punished the little kids, even those from deaf families, for signing because they thought if the kids couldn't sign they would try harder to learn to talk and lipread. Teachers would peek through the classroom blinds in the afternoon and watch the staff on the playground. If they saw counselors signing to the little kids they would get them in trouble. Those teachers were furious when the school hired me and the other counselor who could sign and let us teach the kids to use Sign Language.

Students with any hearing at all were required to wear hearing aids, even though those were pretty much useless for most of them. If the children had any residual hearing it was seldom in the speech range, so amplifying the sounds they could hear didn't help with communication.

The hearing aids consisted of heavy devices much larger than a modern cellphone which were worn in a harness on the chest and connected to ear molds by wires. Even hard-of-hearing kids hated those hearing aids and the students often tried to hide or break them.

The California School for the Deaf was similar to all the other residential schools for deaf or hearing impaired children in the USA at that time, and almost all deaf children were educated in similar institutions.

Of course people have learned a lot in the last 40 years, and I'm happy to say the education of deaf children has improved a lot since then.

Signing My Life Away

In High School and college I had very little to do with Special Needs, but in my senior year of college I met some deaf teens at a church event, got an alphabet card from them, and taught myself to fingerspell.

After graduating I became a social worker, met, and got engaged to a young man. Social work wasn't my forte, so I went back to school to become a pastoral counselor.

My fiance knew I was interested in Linguistics and had some experience with people who had special needs, so he introduced me to his best friend, who was a Sign Language Interpreter.

To make a long story short, I married my fiance's best friend.

Actually that sounds much more interesting than the way it actually happened.

Charlie, the best friend, taught me American Sign Language, I dropped out of Seminary and went to work in the dormitories at California School for the Deaf. Both Charlie and I knew deaf kids whose parents didn't want them, so I suggested adopting deaf children. My boyfriend said he didn't want to have any children so I broke up with him. By then Charlie and I were sharing the responsibility of interpreting church services in Sign Language and had become good friends, but we didn't become romantically involved until several years later.

After marrying, we raised three deaf foster sons, but were unable to adopt any of them for various reasons, and we also had one birth daughter. Our careers changed over time but, because we still consider the boys as part of our family, Sign Language is still an important part of my life.

Marin Society for Crippled Children

When I was in high school I spent two summers volunteering in a recreation program for kids with disabilities run by the Marin Society for Crippled Children. One year it was held at Arequipa, which had formerly been a sanitarium for women with tuberculosis, and the other year the program was held at a school.

Most of the children attending had some sort of physical disability that required the use of crutches or wheelchairs. Some had become crippled (Yes, I know that term isn't considered acceptable now, but it was then) as a result of the polio epidemic that had killed my father. But there were two children who didn't fit in with the others because their disabilities were different and the second summer I spent most of my time with them.

One little boy did use a wheelchair, but he was also blind and had such severe brain injuries he could barely communicate. His condition was caused by falling out of a moving car when the door swung open. That was before seat belts existed.

The other little boy was physically active and deaf. He was obviously extremely smart. He loved to watch the TV show, Zorro and had learned to communicate with the gestures Zorro's mute servant used in the show. He was able to tell us almost anything he wanted, and to understand the gestures I and the other volunteers used with him. He was interested in nature and would ask us about the bugs and birds, but we couldn't communicate all he wanted to know.

At that time the Oral Method was still used in schools and deaf kids were forbidden to use gestures at all because it was thought that would motivate them to talk and read lips. At the end of the summer when the boy's parents found out he had been using gestures to communicate with us he was forbidden ever to watch Zorro again.

Years later I met someone who had worked with that boy when he was older and learned that he had been considered mentally retarded (another term no longer used) by the school district. If only he had been permitted to learn and communicate using American Sign Language he would probably have done well in school.

Harris Communications

A friend of mine is having some hearing problems and, because of my decades of experience, I was able to direct her to a good resource. I'm not getting anything for doing this and I don't normally pitch products or businesses on my blogs, but I'll make an exception and mention that one here because others might also find the information helpful. The company sells all kinds of equipment, books, CDs, etc. to help people dealing with hearing loss, raising children who have that kind of condition, or just wanting to learn American Sign Language. The material varies in quality because they handle nearly every related product there is, but a lot of it is excellent. They have a hardcopy catalogue that only comes out once in a while so they don't flood mailboxes, and also an online one. The URL is http://harriscomm.com.

e-SP?

Unlike many states, California doesn't have a video relay service for hearing impaired people. Instead California Relay Service operators interpret spoken words to TDD messages and vice versa.

My husband normally uses Skype to communicate with our deaf (foster)son, but recently there was a problem with that. Our son could send video messages through Skype, but couldn't receive them, so my husband was using Relay for his part of the conversation and watching the replies in ASL on his computer. The operator didn't say anything she shouldn't have, but her tone of voice revealed she thought something very strange was going on when my husband kept talking with occasional pauses but there was never a reply from the TDD. When he asked our son to show him something and said he could see it, her voice became even more tense.

Finally, out of sympathy for the poor operator, my husband explained he was watching the replies on his computer screen and neither hallucinating nor using ESP to get them. The woman sounded greatly relieved when she thanked him for explaining.

I laughed when I heard about that conversation, but a hundred, or maybe even fifty years ago if people had known we normally watch each other from hundreds of miles away they would have been amazed. We've certainly come a long way.

The Deaf Community

Some people loose their hearing and always miss the richness of sounds in their lives. But most who were born deaf or who lost their hearing at an early age don't consider themselves disabled. While it would be convenient to be able to communicate with other people without an interpreter, they think if only everyone would learn Sign Language there would be no disadvantage at all to being deaf. In fact many of them have told me they're glad they don't have to hear noises like the ones that make hearing people flinch and cover their ears. The Deaf Community has its own culture and, like other cultural groups, its own manners and customs. The primary art form is storytelling, and one of the worst insults you can give deaf people is to say you feel sorry for them. For many years children in schools for the deaf were punished for using signs or gestures to communicate, and linguists defined language as spoken method of communication so Sign Language wasn't considered a "real" language. That's why deaf people are very possessive about their language, and resent things like hearing people teaching their children "Baby Signs" that are not real Sign Language. (Nobody would make up sounds and call them "Baby Spanish" or "Baby Chinese.") Our educational system now includes information about the deaf culture in American Sign Language classes, just as information about other cultures is included in other language classes. It's a beautiful language and I hope more and more people will continue to learn it. But please, if you are one of them, show respect for the native speakers and their culture.

Accidental ASL

Fifty years ago few hearing people knew American Sign Language unless they had deaf family members. Since then the linguists redefined 'language' so it doesn't have to be "spoken," and now thousands of people are taking ASL classes in college. Others are getting DVDs and trying to the learn that language over the internet and lots of hearing people are becoming fluent. That means something that wasn't a problem in the past can be one now.

Public Speakers often use gestures that mean things in Sign Language that may disturb or offend people in their audiences. Speakers who use those signs usually do so repeatedly. I'll try to describe the gestures and tell what they mean without using offensive language.

Holding both hands above the waist with palms up and fingers separated and slightly curved, then pulling the hands down refers to body parts used for nursing babies.

Holding hands below the waist with palms facing each other and the tips of the thumbs and fingers touching those on the opposite hand is very similar to the sign for female reproductive body parts.

People who understand either sign will be distracted from what speakers are saying if they see them.

Why Me?

Since this blog will be about special needs it might be helpful for readers to know why I'm interested in that topic.

As a child I suffered from severe chronic asthma and was hospitalized and put on oxygen several times. I was also sent to a convalescent home for a while, where I met lots of kids with various disabilities. In high school I spent two summers volunteering at a day camp program run by the Marin Society for Crippled Children and Adults. After graduating from college I learned American Sign Language, worked in the Dormitories at California School for the Deaf for nine years, and married the interpreter who had taught me ASL. We raised three Deaf foster sons who had assorted special needs in addition to our birth daughter after I had developed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (yes, it is a real disease) and chronic neck and back pain due to car accidents. I also taught in many Special Education classes as a substitute teacher and was a Sign Language interpreter in several churches.