Texting is revolutionizing the way in which the deaf communicate. I had worked in a school for the deaf for several years in the not too distant past and was surprised that it hadn’t occurred to me about texting when I read a story about it today. The children I worked with were mostly under eight years old, so their written communications was still developing anyway.
Where the deaf were once limited to primarily communicating only with those who knew sign language, in the last 20 years cochlear implants have changed the landscape of communication for the deaf. There was once a culture clash between the deaf who reasoned that they weren’t broken, and therefore didn’t need to be fixed, with those who wanted to be part of the hearing world and chose cochlear implants. That too is changing as it has been proven that children who are implanted as babies, when trained properly, can often be educated in a regular classroom by first grade.
The school I worked for was called Clarke School for the Deaf and is one of the most well-respected in the country. After nearly 150 years, they recently changed the name to Clarke Schools for Hearing and Speech which is more befitting. The main campus is in Northampton, Massachusetts, right next door to Smith College, with satellites up and down the east coast. I worked at the Jacksonville campus.
Teaching the deaf to listen and hear was an awesome process to watch. No sign language was allowed at the school. Their job was to teach the children how to listen with their cochlear implants, or hearing aids, and then speak coherently and correctly. One day a group of college speech therapists was in observing, and it was obvious they were required to use sign language when addressing each other even though they weren’t deaf. The kids at the school looked as them as if they were aliens and kept asking, “What are they doing with their hands?”
I wasn’t a teacher, but rather a fundraiser hired to help raise funds for a new school. The first day a teacher of the older kids who were theoretically about first and second graders, invited me into her classroom across the hall to help out with a learning exercise for the children. I was to stand in front of the class and they were supposed to figure who I was by asking questions. At one point I told them I was hired to help them build a new school. They all stared silently. ( I would later learn that deaf children understand things literally.) So the teacher asked them how they thought I was going to do that – by digging the hole? And so it went. Oddly, all the teachers at the school were called by their first names, so when I left the classroom I pointed to my office and told them to be sure to say hi to me when they walked by, and that my name was Cam Brown.
From that day forward, I was referred to by the kids as CamBrown, all one word. “Hi CamBrown, hi CamBrown” and on and on as they filed out to recess. It baffled the parents because they referred to me the same way at home. I found it endearing.
At our annual gala, Miss America 1995 Heather Whitestone McCallum was the guest of honor. If you remember, Heather is deaf, but could talk very clearly and even performed a ballet that won her the crown. Her Mother Warrior taught her to talk when she was growing up and was dumbfounded and distraught when Heather demanded in 8th grade to go to a school like Clarke. There she flourished in speech and academics, as well as socially. An expert lip reader, she didn’t use sign language and didn’t feel she needed a cochlear implant. Until she had a child. She said her son hurt himself in the backyard one day and she didn’t know it because she couldn’t hear him cry. That’s when the Mother Warrior in her kicked in and she decided she wanted to be part of the hearing world of her new family. She addressed primarily the parents with deaf children that night at the gala and filled their hearts with hope and determination. And the knowledge that it takes a Mother Warrior to raise a deaf child.
Learning to hear with a cochlear implant is a lot of work. Those who have had prior hearing, such as Rush Limbaugh, say the sound is similar to the voice of Mickey Mouse. He had no trouble because he knew how to interpret the different sounds. But when you’ve never heard the knock of a door, how do you know what it is? Heather Whitestone tells a story of being in the family van and becoming unnerved by an incessant sound, until her husband finally realized it was the sound of her sons in the back seat sniffling.
So texting is an awesome tool for the deaf. They can do things just like others – call their children in to supper with a text, tell their teenager to turn off the light and go to bed, find out where their husband is in the mall, and communicate with the hearing world without skipping a beat. And in a pinch, if the lady at the hamburger counter can’t understand them, it’s a portable communicator. Type it in and hold it up for her to read.
Last year I interviewed Bruce Maddern, MD, a physician who was instrumental in getting the cochlear implant program started in Jacksonville about 20 years ago. He said that because cochlear implants were still a deaf culture hot button, he gathered all the community players together at his house for a dinner party. And it was at that dinner party that he realized, among the hearing and the deaf, he was the only person at the table who couldn’t communicate with everyone because he did not know sign language. He said that rocked his world in understanding how the deaf feel.
Who knew that the past-time that drives many parents nuts would be another magnificent tool in the toolbox for the deaf?