Let There Be Light PLEASE!

FROM THE INTRODUCTION:
Do you hear well? If the answer is yes, as a person with normal hearing, chances are good you would avoid a deaf person if one were nearby you. Oftentimes, deaf people avoid the hearing. The primary reason is that neither group has the facility to talk easily and clearly with the other. Between the deaf and the hearing is a gorge of silence, wide and deep. In the dark vastness of this bottomless abyss is lost one of the tools of understanding and friendship: language. At best, discourse between the deaf and the hearing is awkward and faulty; at worst, it is impossible. The silence does not exist only in the ears of the deaf, but also on the lips of the hearing who muzzle themselves and shy from those who cannot hear. The resulting hush is not peaceful and calm and restful. On the contrary, the quiet becomes an agitated and unsettled separation devoid of the richness of relationship, a separation shored apart by a wedge of misunderstanding. Such need not be! I hope this writing will help to eliminate some of the controlling ignorance and provide some of the needed information to bridge the chasm between the hearing and the deaf.

One structural component of the bridge that spans the gulf of quiet, twixt deaf and hearing, is a strange character hanging in suspense: The Interpreter.

FROM CHAPTER 1:
If you can, try to imagine for a moment that you cant hear anything and that you never have heard anything. You are profoundly deaf and have been since your birth. You have never heard your moms voice or your dads voice. You have never heard the sound of rain in the autumn of the year or the crunch of snow packing under your walking feet in the winter. You have never heard the birds chirping in the spring or the surfs breaking or the crackling of fire in a fire pit at the beach in the summer.

You have never experienced the excitement or soothing calm brought on by music, for you have never heard music or a radio or a television or a movie. You have never heard anyone read you a story or tell you a joke. You have never heard laughter or sobbingor the screams of friends on a roller coaster. Youve never even heard the roller coaster.

You try to speak the English language, but you have never heard English (or any other language) spoken. And anyway English is, at best, a second language for yousecond after American Sign Language (ASL) and maybe third after an educational sign language you learned in school before you learned ASL. Youve never heard the sound of your own voice. You dont form sounds correctly. Most hearing people disregard your speechand you. Many conclude that you are mentally retarded and treat you so, even though your mind is sharp. You are perhaps formally educated and your sensory perceptions, other than hearing, are phenomenally sharp and astute. The extent of what you can see in your peripheral vision is astounding, and your ability to see background, its scope and detail, while focusing on foregroundperhaps understanding two sign language conversations at onceis unbelievable to a hearing person.

Also, youve experienced ignorance and the desire for an education. You sense strongly the importance of knowing what educated people know. But youve never heard anyone read a book to you. Youve never heard a lecture or a teaching tape. Youve never heard students kick around a topic in a discussion group. Youve never heard anyone ask a question in class, and youve never heard anyone answer one. Youve never heard anyone amen or right-on a point that touched the heart during a teaching.

You have never had a conversation with a teacher. No teacher knows your language, so you cant counsel with one or have a private talk with one unless you use an interpreterwho may be a stranger to you.

Perhaps you have attended a college that provides Special Services. That means you sit in the front row in class where the deaf must sit. You face an interpreter who converts speech and other sounds to hand movements and facial expressions by means of a beautiful, but conspicuous, sign language. Then a hearing teacher instructs hearing students in a foreign language (English). The teacher illustrates his lecture with examples from television news reports and other sources from the hearing world. He tells jokes using English puns and other plays on English words, and he flowers his talk with English idioms and figures of speech that do not translate clearly into your language. Because schools usually budget little for interpreter services, your interpreter may be inexpert or even inept and maladroit. There are no textbooks printed in American Sign, your native language.

Typically, the hearing teachers and students receive no information or education about the deaf persons language, culture, or life style. They have never heard of a deaf culture. For the most part they do not know how to communicate with you even through an interpreter. And while their desire is to include you, they dont know how. Many of them live with the myth that all deaf people read lips and that lipreading bridges the communication gap completely. In an effort to help, they overmouth words, exaggerate facial expressions, and yell.

Your justified and understandable conclusion is that college is not pleasant; its an apprehensive and frustrating ordeal.