Someone typed “do Deaf people learn ASL faster?” in the google search and my post came out on the first page. Thought I’d repost this for Deafread.com to pick it up.

I’m assuming that the person who typed that search wanted to know if Deaf people actually learn ASL faster than hearing people.

In some ways, yeah, I do think that deaf people learn the language faster since they rely only on their eyes to learn. However, they need to be in a place where ASL is the predominant language where everyone is signing so it gives off a strong stimulation. Gallaudet University is a very good example of this. I know a few hearing students whose ASL fluency was ok, not great till they go into Gallaudet University and a year later, I see them again and their ASL sky-rocket, almost as good as next deaf person.

Personally, it would be so cool if deaf schools or any schools require teachers to have at least two years of internship or enrollment at Gallaudet University as part of the qualifications to apply for a teacher position. This ensures that teachers will be fluent in ASL and in turn, kids would benefit from their ASL competency.

I remember when I came to the United States for the first time when I was adopted. I landed in the O’Hare airport and my deaf parents were anxiously waiting to hug their first and only child. Of course, I was clueless as to why they were excited with big smiles and tears in their eyes. I was bewildered why they were acting like that and for looking directly at me. Like why were they waving hands at me, not others? as I had no idea who they were? No one “told” me that I was going to meet my parents, way out of my home country.

So they squeezed me hard after our distance finally closed and gave me a snoopy doll. I was still puzzled by all of this till my dad started signing to my mom. Pow! I don’t know how to describe it but it was like a light turned on in the dark room and you could see everything. I was only three years old and knew nothing about ASL but I felt like I can understand what my dad was signing. Maybe it’s not so about him using ASL but the fact he didn’t use his mouth and used his hands instead. Maybe it told me that he was deaf….like me. All the nervousness and apprehension I had went away after leaving my orphanage for the first time, getting on the plane for the first time, and meeting two complete strangers for the first time. Our deafness and ASL made all of those feelings disappeared. We made a connection. We didn’t need to share same blood.

On the way home from the airport, which was about four hours drive, my mom brought a children’s book and she was ready to teach me signs right there in the car. My first education happened in a car! We were sitting in the backseat, with my dad on my left and my mom on the right. My uncle was doing the driving. My parents showed me how to sign those pictures in the book like animals, trees, etc. My mom said by the time we got home, we had finished the whole book and I’d learn all the signs from the book. After one week, I had learned enough signs that we were signing normally as if we were together since I was born. One week was all it took from being complete strangers to a happy family.

Imagine if my parents tried to teach me how to speak or learn oralism? I couldn’t imagine.

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Saw this on the Digg website. I like the article so much that I have to post here.

In what language do deaf people think?

Dear Cecil:

In what language do deaf people think? I think in English, because that’s what I speak. But since deaf people cannot hear, they can’t learn how to speak a language. Nevertheless, they must think in some language. Would they think in English if they use sign language and read English? How would they do that if they’ve never heard the words they are signing or reading pronounced? Or maybe they just see words in their head, instead of hearing themselves? –Cathy, Malvern, Pennsylvania

I’m not going to post the entire article but to highlight some paragraphs.

The profoundly, prelingually deaf can and do acquire language; it’s just gestural rather than verbal. The sign language most commonly used in the U.S. is American Sign Language, sometimes called Ameslan or just Sign. Those not conversant in Sign may suppose that it’s an invented form of communication like Esperanto or Morse code. It’s not. It’s an independent natural language, evolved by ordinary people and transmitted culturally from one generation to the next. It bears no relationship to English and in some ways is more similar to Chinese–a single highly inflected gesture can convey an entire word or phrase.

Wow, who would have thought that our ASL is more similar to Chinese than English!

Sign equips native users with the ability to manipulate symbols, grasp abstractions, and actively acquire and process knowledge–in short, to think, in the full human sense of the term. Nonetheless, “oralists” have long insisted that the best way to educate the deaf is to teach them spoken language, sometimes going so far as to suppress signing. Sacks and many deaf folk think this has been a disaster for deaf people.

It’s our turn to suppress the oralists!

The answer to your question is now obvious. In what language do the profoundly deaf think? Why, in Sign (or the local equivalent), assuming they were fortunate enough to have learned it in infancy. The hearing can have only a general idea what this is like–the gulf between spoken and visual language is far greater than that between, say, English and Russian.

Yet hearing students keep thinking it’s easier to learn ASL than Russian in their high school foreign language requirement. Just because ASL doesn’t have a written form doesn’t mean it’s easy to learn ASL!

I remember one time when I was working for the Nestle Beverage Company in Jacksonville, IL after my senior year in high school. I had two managers and they wanted to learn ASL. One manager was the head of the factory and with his job, he would travel to many countries to do business and meetings, so he knew quite some languages, so he thought it should be easy to learn ASL, being that it’s right on the tip of our fingers instead of our tongue. The other manager was a short friendly guy from Texas with a great sense of humor. He was responsible for internal operations and didn’t travel elsewhere as much as the other manager did. So, suffice to say that he didn’t know another language but English.

Everyday during lunch or office breaks, I’d say hi to both managers and try to strike up a conversation to help teach them some ASL. Ofc, first with ASL fingerspelling, then gradually moving on to learn different signs and build up a vocabulary base. Toward the end of my internship, which manager ends up learning the most? It was the Texan. And the other manager? he was still struggling with sign alphabets. The Texan learned so much that we were able to converse smoothly with a minimal stoppage for interpretations (which sign is that? that kind of question). His sense of humor probably helped as much, for we would always make jokes and laugh.

I learned from this experience as much as they learned ASL and it leads me to believe that people who rely on audio so much—I think that’s called an audiophile?—-that they’re unable to grasp the concept of the language being visual instead of audible. Like the article above, the gulf between ASL and English is greater than English and Russian.

Something interesting happened. I have a program that keeps track of my web statistics and one of them is a search keyword that tells me what people enter and leads them to my blog. There’s a whole bunch of different keywords but one keyword caught my attention.

Google Search: Gallaudet Bison Logo

Click the link above. You’ll see that my blog comes out first at the top on Google. What? Are you serious? my blog is the most relevant for that search? more relevant than any Gallaudet’s webpage? Boy, Gallaudet ought hire a professional web consultant to help bring more traffic to their website and indexes every page. I think I did read somewhere that Gallaudet has paid a lot of money to redesign their front page.

Since people were trying to find a logo for Gallaudet, I feel bad that I let them down as I didn’t put up a logo so here’s one here!

In the last post, I’ve pointed out that if the Board of Trustees decided to force JFK to resign, they’d have to pay her 2 million dollars as her lawyers cleverly advised her to put in the contract. Well, the Protest may have already cost Gallaudet more than 2 millions; however, it’s currently hypothetical right now. Here’s why.

First, I’d like to say something about how I felt last night and I would imagine this is how most people feel where such an event has put them to make gasps, cover their mouths with their hands and finally hit them hard and they started to weep. When something like that happens, you know it’s bad.

We just all witnessed something that’s never happened in the 142 years at Gallaudet University and something that’s never happened during the 1988 DPN Protest either, 135 incredibly brave students were arrested.

The emotions just blew to all time high—a sky high—and everyone went into an unbelievable disbelief and was utterly shocked. It was one of those rare moments when everything stopped for a min and we were transfixed on our computer screens, incessantly clicking on the reload button for the latest news from deafread.com, only to find out that we weren’t the only ones clicking down our mouses to death, millions others have done the same thing, which sent the server to crash, had to settle with next two or three servers till our senses and million others finally got what’s really going on.

It wasn’t so about the arrests that broke our hearts; it went much more than that. The place we all have come to know Gallaudet University, the uniqueness around the campus, the sense of belonging that all deaf people feel is gone or rather, destroyed. It feels like Gallaudet University is no longer unique from other places where it is the only large-scale place that ASL is not a minority language there.

Seeing those arrests gave me scary flashbacks what would become of Gallaudet University in the future not so far away from now. It will have interpreters in classrooms, just like every other college and deaf students will no longer see the reason to attend Gallaudet University anymore. ASL will not be a mandatory thing to learn or enforced for the sake of communication standard. Then, Congress will begin to see the same thing, decide to cut off the funding, and tell these students that they can just go home to their local colleges and to give them with ADA laws pamphlets to remind them that they have the right to get an interpreter. Gallaudet University is either closed or re-named to perhaps I.K. Jordan University and its mascot animal will be the Lobsters.

Okay, there I’ve said it, perhaps too extreme in tastes or in ASL, “far-out!” or get the heck out of here! But believe me, this is what most of us fear. All right, let’s ease a bit down on the drama side and explain what the hell I was talking about Gallaudet Protest that may have already cost them more than two million dollars. Well, it’s time to think mathematically.

So, 135 students were arrested. I.K. Jordan and JFK have their names locked on the list. They will be meeting over some lobster bisque soup leftovers from their recent super-fancy dinner. They will discuss if those students should be expelled. And if they were to be expelled from the university, that will cost them a lot of money, my friend. Take a look at this chart from Gallaudet University’s website on tuitions and fees.

The estimated total tuition for a whole semester is $10,735 for an undergraduate student. About $500 more for a graduate student. I’ll just use the UG student figures. Assuming they are expelled and will not return next semester, 135 students times $10,735 is a whopping $1,449,225. Not too far away from 2 million dollars to “buy out” Jane Fernandes. I think many of them are freshmen or second-year students, so they would have come back next year, so I’ll take 100. 100 times $10,735 times 2 (for two semesters) comes to $2,147,000. So, a potential total loss is $3,596,225.

Remember, this is all based on the assumption that I.K. Jordan and Fernandes decide to expel them out of campus. Now, is it worth it? so much for J.K Fernandes and so little for the students.

Think about it, the Board of Trustees.

That’s the amount of dollars the Board of Trustees have agreed to pay if they asked her to resign. Obviously, it’s going to take a lot to convince the BoTs to see if it’s worth two million dollars to replace her. Or the FSSA (facuty, staff, students and alumni) finds a way to come up with that amount of money and they can say “Look, we have two million dollars. Please step down.” but that’s just me and my radical thinking. I got this information from where else? Ridorlive.com. Look below about Jane’s contract.

This post isn’t going to be of a Pulitizer’s prize material but a curious observation and opinion by a person who was once a Gallaudet student during his first year of college in 1999 and has been following the protest closely.

The volcano has erupted once again. The protest first started in last May when students were unhappy with the selection of the next University president in Jane K. Fernandes and felt that the presidential search process was unfair and flawed. They also felt that JKF was pampered by I. King Jordan as they both hold a close friendship and JKF has risen all the way from her first job as a Vice President of the Laurent Clerc National Center (which is ironic, that I will explain a moment later), then became a Provost and now she is set to be the next President.

Students feel that with the close relationship between Jordan and she, Jordan would still have some voice/input/control in the future Gallaudet decision-making and isn’t completely out of the picture, basically leaving the current administration intact without going through a big change that would leave him behind the ship. It isn’t very hard to see this because last weekend, two Gallaudet buildings were already named after him and his wife. Perhaps Jordan felt that he deserved some kind of a special party (how does a lobster bisque soup sound to you?) and two buildings being honored after him and his wife for all his hard work, fund-raising skills and one deaf quote that has made him famous, “Deaf people can do anything but hear.” This only enables students to disagree further from him and his administration, feeling that there is an oppression and a suspected fiscal management—-a corruption at play. Gallaudet probably would need more than ten professional CPAs or positions equivalent of IRS agents to audit every cent that has come into the university. Something is sure to find there.

Now, back to the protest, it seems that the protest has caught on a wild fire when someone had an idea of locking out the HMB building where most classes and professors’ classes are. This is strategic because it doesn’t require as many people as it would need to block the whole campus. As in most other protests, they are like a fire or a car engine; all they need is a spark to get them going. Gallaudet students got that spark when DSP decided to get physical with students as one DSP officer tried to choke a student after students kept standing in his way. This was caught on the video. Another DSP officer used a mace spray in an attempt to “shoo” them away out of the HMB building. How did the Administration respond? The public office released a statement that no such accidents occurred and no one was hurt. They probably weren’t aware that those two incidents were actually caught on the videos. So, this only added more to the fire. Now, the Gallaudet Protest has found their momentum, with more people now convinced that there is something that needs to be done about the administration, starting with JKF’s resignation.

To really understand the whole protest, it isn’t as complicated as it sounds. There is a conflict in the philosophy between JKF (and IKJ too) and the FSSA. JKF has announced that in her future plans, she has a goal to include all communication modes from ASL to cued speech to pure oral. She even supports the idea of having an oral interpreter in a classroom if there are some oral students who have no knowledge of ASL and wouldn’t understand what a deaf professor may be signing. JKF sees a problem that with the declining number in unique deaf students who attend deaf schools like myself and my parents, there would be less enrollment numbers to Gallaudet. To help boost the number, she feels that she’d need to welcome ALL kinds of students who have some hearing loss or all of it regardless of what communication mode they use. Gallaudet will give them the accessibility they need when they get to the campus, making it more mainstreamed than it is now.

It may sound good and may help with the enrollment numbers but that’s not what Gallaudet is about. The founder of Gallaudet University, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, went on a ship to Europe to seek what would be the best possible education for the deaf people and in that, he discovered sign language and he personally brought Laurent Clerc, a deaf educator, to America to teach sign language to the deaf. He had to convince Clerc to come with him and there is a rumor that Gallaudet’s first deaf pupil, Alice Cosworth, was the reason why Clerc came, in which they eventually did get married.

With a language that all deaf people can understand, they began to communicate their thoughts better, thus, education is possible. However, the sign language, now known as American Sign Language (ASL), have been going through so much oppression that black slaves or Jews would be embarrassed to hear. For the longest time, hearing people thought ASL was not a language and that it’s equivalent to apes making some funny gestures and in the Milan conference back in 1880, it was decided that ASL must be banned and only oral method shall be taught. As a result, Deaf teachers lost their jobs and ASL almost became extinct but who was there to save the language? None other than Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and the college he founded.

Jane K. Fernandes was a former Vice President at the Laurent Clerc National Center. Instead of promoting or encouraging ASL to be the primary language all across the campus, she does not expect a high level of fluency from each faculty, staff, or a student. Now, she is selected to be the next President and her vision is to welcome all communication modes and expects that such accessibility is to be met. In short, she does not consider ASL to be a requirement to be a student or to work at the university. A good example would be in order to apply to colleges, you’d need to write a strong good essay in English, right? At Gallaudet University, you don’t have to be. There is no specific ASL screening test for faculty, staff and students. Basically, it is possible to waltz through the university with a little knowledge of ASL. FSSA doesn’t want that. They want to see ASL to be as natural as other languages and not to take a backseat to other languages. It seems that the real problem still lies between us and hearing people that they still treat ASL as secondary language and do not want to appoint a person who is deaf-centric and use ASL solely without resorting to what they always want to see—a deaf person who can talk.

This is precisely why FSSA does not want her to be the next leader for the deaf. ASL is like oxygen; we can’t live without it.

UNITY FOR GALLAUDET!

*disclaimer - all of the above was written with speculation and does not claim to be factual or accurate.

Recently last weekend, I was hanging out with two guys who went and graduated from Gallaudet Univ. All of us have a job under the government so we were chatting how much we are ditching work, finding ways to get a nap, and have two hours long of lunch.

While I thought I was doing it bad, my friend said he ditched work at 2 pm last friday, went to Gallaudet to play basketball scrimmage at 3 pm till 5 pm. “What the heck, it’s Friday,’ he said.

We’re having a usual guy talk, the topic inevitably came up, sex and girls. So, we’re talking about girls and since I didn’t graduate from Gallaudet, they talked about girls they knew at Gallaudet.

You know, when someone couldn’t remember a certain person, he would try to explain what that person looks like, like how she has this big ugly mole under her nose or she has a large rack of boobs…you wouldn’t believe how much details we were able to get into, like her legs are like cankles (calves + ankles together), or the differences in every girl. But one thing stood out. It went like this:

Boy #1: “I’ve having an eye on this girl who plays on the volleyball team.”
Boy #2: “Yeah? who’s she.”

Boy #1: ” [name withdrawn for a reason of privacy.]”
Boy #2: “Oh, I don’t recognize the name, what does she look like?”

Boy #1: “Oh, you seen this girl before! She’s like this pretty tall girl, can smack the hell out of the ball, tanned, has fine long legs.”
Boy #2: “Uh-huh, still doesn’t ring a bell.”

Boy #1: “You still dunno who? she used to have sex with this [name of guy], I feel sorry for this guy cuz she said her dildo is better than his dick but he’s lucky cuz she’s open-minded and let another girl sleep by his arms in the bed. You remmy now?”
Boy #2: “Ohh yeah, that’s her? yeah, she’s a fine-looking girl. You digging her?”

I’m not responsible for any accuracy in this conversation but my point is that you can actually remember people by who they did with and some personal stuffs. I wonder if that’s common… to remember people like that. Or that’s just us, the guys.

Only in Gally…, Posted via Sidekick II by natech.

Two deafies talking to each other thru window.