Dylan Quick's Matchbox

Pain is represented as something we can perceive

in the sense in which we perceive a matchbox.

Ludwig Wittgenstein,

Philosophical Investigation,

1953

I tried to have a word of explanation about how the pain at Texas Community College should be expressed and examined. I struggled long and hard in deciding how to write this blog. Not only did I want to present, as best my knowledge of being Deaf could tell, why it really happened. This blog is not as an exciting and rewarding reading, but I wanted the blog itself to be a reflection—a challenge I did some deep thinking.

First, Dylan Quick, 20, is deaf and has cochlear implants (CI). Secondly, Quick stabbed 14 students at TCC. Thirdly, the police reported that Quick had begun a wickedly inventive fabulist journey about stabbing as many people as possible at age 8.

I didn’t have to understand, I just knew. When I was young and impressionable then, I talked to my parents who are also Deaf, and they kind of looked at me as if “one doesn’t have this kind of experience, he's foolish.” That’s the kind of thing that we the Deaf (please notice that the uppercase D represents us collectively) say that we know that Quick’s being Deaf is quickly viewed as irrelevant. We don’t believe it, we know it.

One of my ASL students asked me about yesterday’s stabbing incident at Texas Community College so I needed to do a quick, in-class research by pulling up some online articles on Dylan Quick—how social media describes the incident. The police announced that Quick thought a lot about killing people since he was young.

The students were shocked and wondered why the parents didn’t notice his deviance. As the instructor, I tried very hard to account for it.

I told them that no children by the age of seven, who can hear, have a normal speech. They begin to learn to read and speak in school where their grammar teachers would remind them of how to “intone” a little for punctuations—period, comma, colon, semicolon, exclamation mark, question mark, quotation mark, and the like.

CI is manufactured to pick up only sounds, not these intonations. Deaf children with CI are unable to filter out local noises—cars running by, footsteps tapping down the hall, and even some body noises—to listen to these punctuations. Their speech becomes “funny” or “impaired” or “monotonous,” and this is quickly noticed by their hearing counterparts.

Now my cynicism says, “Well, now, you know, Deaf children with CI can ‘listen and speak.’” For me, CI is simple an annoyance of the deep reluctance. It doesn’t take away from the fact that deafness, whether total or only partial, implies a different channel—Sight—through which information, knowledge and communication are conveyed. For the Deaf, our eyes, not our ears, take in everything and then process it to our brain—a different way of thinking.

As for the parents of Quick, they are clearly the victims of a big, huge, enormous CI hoax to believe that Quick can hear. Every morning they might have checked whether Quick was on with CI. Yes, that was it! I know they were not communicating with Quick, they were training Quick "to listen and speak." Unbeknown to them, Quick remains essentially Deaf and has completely different needs. It’s sad that, in our society—our culture, we cannot accept being Deaf better than we can the CI hoax.

Quick must have started out open and spontaneous as a Deaf baby. Yes, but his parents very quickly learned that, due to his being Deaf, he was not to be so open. Fast forward to Quick’s enrollment in Texas Community College where he finally learned to be kind of pseudo-sophisticate and became a Wittgenstein matchbox that was open, and 14 of his college mates got stabbed. It could have been worst but Quick got arrested. Isn’t that painful?

Moral: Deaf children need to live their lives like a painting that is being painted without external interference. They are the painter and they are also the painting. Let them paint themselves.

CNS

:-)

EAR-CLOSE: Language Bastardization at Gallaudet University

The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

 --Ludwig Wittgenstein

About 2,400 years ago, in Athens, Greece, Aristotle enrolled in Plato's Academy where he must have read and critiqued Socrates in one of Plato's earliest books, Cratylus, which is about naming in language. Plato has Socrates question whether signs by the Deaf be equated to spoken words. Aristotle disputed that by arguing that an incapacity of a deaf person to repeat the same words implies imbecility. Aristotle had irrevocably launched an era of language bigotry against deaf people and sign language.

Fast forward to a recent celebration that commemorated the 25th anniversary of the 1988 Deaf President Now Demonstration at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., where the fraternity of deaf presidents were on a panel, carefully orchestrated to talk about their academic leadership. On the videotape, it shows that these presidents are basically Aristotelian because they sign "EAR-CLOSE," so glossed in uppercase terms when they are talking about deaf people. What do they exactly mean? If a sense of hearing is lacking, how can speaking be an intellectual activity, including intonation—changing pitches in sentence utterances—when no one can lipread it and no amplification and cochlear implants are engineered to pick it up.

In American Sign Language (ASL), being deaf is the raison d'être—the human right. In the surface structure of ASL, the sign DEAF can be linguistically examined to an articulatory bundle, consisting of the hold-movement model, HMH. The first hold consists of the pointing finger to EAR and the second hold is the pointing finger to LIP. Aristotelians, on the other hand, who believe that it is essential that deaf people can speak a language other than ASL came up with the change of sign by replacing the second hold--LIP sign--with the sign CLOSE, before it appears on the surface structure. This is language bastardization; it is an implicit discrimination against deaf people with intelligible speech.

In the lexicon of ASL, deafness, whether total or only partial, implies a different channel—Sight—through which information, knowledge, and communication are conveyed. ASL is a sight-oriented language. To paraphrase Ludwig Wittgenstein, bastardizing my language means bastardizing my world.

 

Carl Schroeder, M.Ed.

Mid-Term Essay/Video Exam

You will have one week to complete the mid-term exam. Due no longer than Thursday, February 14th.

Directions: Do the 3-minute video of topic-signing for the picture of Mer-People. Write an essay discussing what you've seen in your video by identifying what you've applied from learning ASL.

Revised Lecture Notes: Deaf Hate Speech

Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings,

whatever our nationality, place of residence, sex,

national or ethnic origin, religion, language, or

any other status. We are all equally entitled

to our human rights without discrimination.

These rights are all interrelated,

interdependent and indivisible.

—www.ohchr.org

When you lose your language,…

you exclude yourself from your past.

—Johan Van Hoorde, 1998,

Let Dutch Die?

Ignorance often leads to hate speech. People who are ignorant of the language and culture of the deaf think we shouldn’t care about American Sign Language (ASL). There is a widely held and popular—but nonetheless misconceived—belief that deaf children can be made “to listen and talk,” and that this anti-signing oppression is not a tragedy at all. The following are discriminatory language statements quoted from various institutes.

Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center:

CID (Central Institute for the Deaf) is a school where children who are deaf and hard of hearing learn to listen, talk and read without using sign language.

DePaul School for Hearing and Speech:

We teach children from birth to age 14 to listen, to speak and to learn without using sign language.

Memphis Oral School for the Deaf:

…NO SIGN LANGUAGE is used, instead using speech and language therapies and audiological services in conjunction with our preschool classes to help profoundly deaf and hard-of-hearing children ages birth to six years old.

St. Joseph Institute for the Deaf:

Individual sessions with deaf education therapists, who specialize in early intervention, help you understand the emotional and educational effects of your child’s hearing loss and teach you strategies to help your child develop spoken language without sign language through the auditory-oral method.

Tucker-Maxon School:

Students with hearing loss do not use sign language; instead, with the help of assistive technologies and trained professionals, they listen, talk and learn like their typical hearing peers.

These above illustrative examples are contemporary. Deaf hate speech begins with language intimidation and intolerance, both of which are not considered distinct in any substantial way from other acts of prejudice and discrimination against the Deaf. It is important to keep in mind that deaf hate speech has a long historical lineage. The contemporary dynamics of sign-language-hate-motivated prejudice and discrimination have their origins in historical conditions.

About 2,400 years ago, in ancient Greece, Aristotle, in his attempt to refute Socrates’ question, in Plato’s Cratylus (Reeve, 1998: 67), whether signs by the mutes be equal with spoken words, asserted that an inability of deaf people to repeat the same sounds implies that they are senseless and worthless of human intelligence. As expressions of deaf hate, such acts of sign language intimidation, “involve the assertion of selves over others constituted as Other”(Goldberg, 1995: 270), where the self is thought to constitute an ability “to listen and talk.” Even with a normal hearing listening is always probable and talking may be just babbling.

The burning question then, when one tries to understand the dynamics of deaf hate speech, Why is it so easy for individuals and institutes to dismiss sign language? Is ASL a human right? Is being deaf also a human right? Will ASL die?

A document prepared by the International PEN Club’s Translations and Linguistic Rights Committee and the Escarre International Centre for Ethnic Minorities and Nations has presented and remarked:

The paradoxical situation is that languages will certainly die unless we do something; but, the reality is that they may also die even if we do something. Therefore, what do we do?

The top priority, it would appear, is to raise awareness to stop hate speech against the Deaf. Although ASL is at risk of being described in another language, it is plain from the above “no sign language” statements that ASL remains in the state of endangerment.

Many people are unaware of a language bigotry that needs to be dispelled, in order to foster the right climate for sign language maintenance. It has to do with teaching ASL to deaf children. There is a widespread belief, even in colleges and universities, that being deaf is an automatic qualification for being a good instructor. Another myth has to do with learning. Because ASL can be learned naturally, people readily assume that they can acquire ASL from the Internet.

All in all, it is by no means easy to help people see the consequences of negative attitudes towards ASL, or the consequence to eradicate ASL. To deny deaf children sign language is to exclude them from the history. Language denial and discrimination are therefore a social injustice.

Carl N. Schroeder, M.Ed.

The Mermaid Soap Opera

 

http://www.rnw.nl/english/node/876604

Giving Goma a voice, words not needed

Published on : 23 January 2013 - 10:30am | By RNW Africa Desk ((C) Gaïus Kowene)

More about: 

Meschack Kadima’s aim is to give voice to the voiceless. It’s a real challenge for the young illustrator in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, living in a society he feels is too repressed to speak out about the troubling political situation.
By Gaïus Kowene, Goma
Kadima uses a pencil, ordinary and coloured, to put his thoughts down on paper. The war and the suppression of freedom of expression it has brought with it supply plenty of artistic fodder. And, when Kadima saw two deaf people using sign language, he realised he could reach out to the world with his art. Inspired by how the deaf communicated without using spoken words, he decided to try and express the collective emotions of people around him.
“I noticed that here, in the east where all sorts of crimes are committed, there are many mute people who cannot express what they feel,” the artist explains, referring to those who are silenced for political reasons. “As their brother, I decided to speak on their behalf.” Kadima tries to do just that through his drawings, which he publishes on Facebook and occasionally makes on commission.
Africa’s heart
Among Kadima’s signature drawings is that of a man’s head, accented in the colours of the DRC flag. His face is filled in with pencil and a red stream flows down its left side.
“It’s the face of an injured Congolese man who cries every day,” says the Goma-based artist. “He fears that speaking the truth will get him killed. That’s why the truth is written on his face – so anyone who sees him knows what’s going on in his country.”
The face symbolises the DRC. The left eye crying blood represents those who have died in the east of the country. The other eye, crying normal tears, represents those who mourn in its western region.

• Drawing by Meschack Kadima
  © (C) Meschack Kadima - http://www.rnw.nl
• Drawing by Meschack Kadima
  © (C) Meschack Kadima - http://www.rnw.nl

• 
• 

In another drawing, Kadima addresses the underdevelopment of the continent as a whole. The young artist turns the map of Africa into the head of a woman. Her eyes closed, she is contemplative, if not downtrodden. She wears the Congolese flag as a headscarf.
About this piece, Kadima says: “The Bible says that he who finds a wife finds happiness. But if a man finds a woman who has been raped, he will never be happy. And Africa will continue to cry because the DRC is its heart. As long as Congolese women continue to be raped, the DRC and Africa will not prosper.”
Waking up
Despite his sombre drawings, the artist remains optimistic about his country’s future. “We are still hopeful that in 20 years, there will be some change. The Congolese people are waking up. If we become more socially conscious, there will be no more conflict and the DRC will become the world’s El Dorado in 20 years,” he predicts.
Kadima encourages his peers to work and, in so doing, to be patriotic. “We inherited a country in ruins from our grandparents,” he says. “It is up to us to rebuild it. Let’s step up; let’s love our country and work for it.”

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Today's Lecture: Deaf Hate Speech in Deaf Schools

Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings,

whatever our nationality, place of residence, sex,

national or ethnic origin, religion, language, or

any other status. We are all equally entitled

to our human rights without discrimination.

These rights are all interrelated,

interdependent and indivisible.

—www.ohchr.org

When you lose your language,…

you exclude yourself from your past.

—Johan Van Hoorde, 1998,

Let Dutch Die?

Ignorance often leads to hate speech. People who are ignorant of the language and culture of the deaf think we shouldn’t care about American Sign Language (ASL). There is a widely held and popular—but nonetheless misconceived—belief that deaf children can be made “to listen and talk,” and that this anti-signing oppression is not a tragedy at all. The following are discriminatory language statements quoted from various institutes.

Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center:

CID (Central Institute for the Deaf) is a school where children who are deaf and hard of hearing learn to listen, talk and read without using sign language.

DePaul School for Hearing and Speech:

We teach children from birth to age 14 to listen, to speak and to learn without using sign language.

Memphis Oral School for the Deaf:

…NO SIGN LANGUAGE is used, instead using speech and language therapies and audiological services in conjunction with our preschool classes to help profoundly deaf and hard-of-hearing children ages birth to six years old.

St. Joseph Institute for the Deaf:

Individual sessions with deaf education therapists, who specialize in early intervention, help you understand the emotional and educational effects of your child’s hearing loss and teach you strategies to help your child develop spoken language without sign language through the auditory-oral method.

Tucker-Maxon School:

Students with hearing loss do not use sign language; instead, with the help of assistive technologies and trained professionals, they listen, talk and learn like their typical hearing peers.

The burning question then, when one tries to understand the dynamics of deaf hate speech, Why is it so easy for individuals and institutes to dismiss sign language? Is ASL a human right? Is being deaf also a human right? Will ASL die?

A document prepared by the International PEN Club’s Translations and Linguistic Rights Committee and the Escarre International Centre for Ethnic Minorities and Nations has presented and remarked:

The paradoxical situation is that languages will certainly die unless we do something; but, the reality is that they may also die even if we do something. Therefore, what do we do?

The top priority, it would appear, is to raise awareness stop hate speech against the Deaf. Although ASL is at risk of being described in another language, it is plain from the above “no sign language” statements that ASL remains in the state of endangerment.

Many people are unaware of a language bigotry that needs to be dispelled, in order to foster the right climate for sign language maintenance. It has to do with teaching ASL to deaf children. There is a widespread belief, even in colleges and universities, that being deaf is an automatic qualification for being a good instructor. Another myth has to do with learning. Because ASLcan be learned naturally, people readily assume that they can acquire ASL from the Internet.

All in all, it is by no means easy to help people see the consequences of negative attitudes towards ASL, or the consequence to eradicate ASL. To deny deaf children sign language is to exclude them from the history. Language denial is therefore a social injustice.