Teachers at school for the deaf not fluent in sign language
Categories: Development, Education
Inspired by deaf students at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., 20 deaf students from the Mississippi School for the Deaf walked out of their classes over not being able to communicate with teachers.Turns out that four of the 26 teachers at the school are not proficient in sign language, an odd situation if I've ever heard of one. This has caused problems in classes, with some students stepping up to the plate to interpret for students and the teacher.
The article was not clear if the the method of communication in these classrooms was lip reading or sign language. (If anyone has knowledge about this, please do explain.)
How can this be acceptable in a school? That's like a teacher at any other non-deaf public school showing up and not having a strong command of the English language. Why is it okay for these students, who go to a public school, not to have teachers that are able to communicate with them?
I have a feeling that if this happened at any other school, there would be an outrage. How can these students, who already have trouble communicating with the hearing public, expect to learn if have of the instruction time is spent trying to decipher what the teacher is saying?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Meredith 12-13-2006 @ 10:03AM
Although I sympathize with the students who certainly deserve a teacher who can communicate, I took a basic computer course years ago at a local university. My instructor had such a thick Indian accent that I was unable to decipher half of what he was saying. I ended up getting a "C" because I didn't understand him.
I think it is probably more common that we would like to think.
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Trisha 12-13-2006 @ 10:30AM
Same situation as meredith for me.
I had a college math teacher with a strong Chinese accent, understanding what he was saying was very difficult, adding to the fact that the math was hard too. It's common, not because there are a lack of standards, just because of language barriers. That can happen in verbal languages and sign.
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Ginny 12-13-2006 @ 1:57PM
Rachel - LOVE the "Sign language" in the picture.
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Amy 12-13-2006 @ 2:16PM
I've got you all beat - I had a math prof in college (IU-Bloomington) who was Eastern European and color blind. This would have been ok, except that he did his notes on the overhead in COLOR - so you'd be sitting there, and looking at your notebook, and he'd say, "Eef you look at zee purple box, heere..." and eef you managed to understand that, you'd look up from your notes and there was NO PURPLE BOX. Argh!
I had an F when the drop/add deadline came around, so I dropped it. Ultimately I switched universities, so I was able to avoid the course. At the second university, I had a 3.8 average and was on the Dean's List every semester... So, I'm pretty sure that *I* wasn't the problem.
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Lil Liberal 12-13-2006 @ 2:51PM
This is sadly common. There is a shortage of teachers that are fluent in sign language--or that even KNOW sign language. When I attended a school for the Deaf for a year as a teenager, most of the aids and teachers were bumbling idiots with sign language and left a lot of the kids horribly frustrated and unable to learn or even communicate.
We're not talking an accent, people. We're talking teachers that can speak 20 words of the language. People that resort to spelling out 75% of what they're saying. People that use the wrong words. People with ZERO grammatical understanding of the language, and virtually no vocabulary.
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Christine 12-13-2006 @ 3:03PM
That stuff is all fine and dandy... but this is a school specifically FOR the deaf... how can you propose in essance "sucks to be them" when they are there specifically to have their needs be met??
Craziness. Maybe Im misinterpretting... Bleh.
An accent is much different than just not knowing the language....
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Keri 12-13-2006 @ 3:46PM
And we all wonder why deaf kids graduate high school reading on the 3rd grade level. It's NOT because of ASL; it's because of hearing teachers being incompetent in ASL.
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Lil Liberal 12-13-2006 @ 4:07PM
::echoes what Keri said::
Learning ASL early and fluently is MORE conducive to learning English than being denied language while your parents fumble through speech therapy and surgical implants.
When I was going to the school for the deaf for the year that I was there, I was bussed in from an hour and a half away. One of the kids on my bus was this little boy- I'm not sure how old he was. He was FULL of energy and intelligence but had NO way to communicate because his parents had wasted all his early years trying to "fix" him, rather than ensuring that he had early exposure to language during the critical development years. He was full of anger and isolation. He was in the 5-9 year old range, and had a very limited vocabulary in ASL and zero spoken vocabulary. It's all fine and dandy to try to fix something that you think is broken, but in the meantime learn a @#$@# language to allow you to communicate with the child in a way that the child understands. Because if the "grand fix" that you're scheming up doesn't work, you are DENYING YOUR CHILD ACCESS TO LANGUAGE during the important formative years. It's Russian roulette.
I hope that the poor kid was able to pick up enough ASL at school to make his life turn out okay. But I have to wonder how these kids are learning a language when so many of the teachers DO NOT speak ASL. When the schools teach 'English' but do not teach a formal class in ASL and the grammar/structure/vocabulary of ASL. I mean- all hearing schools teach English class, no?
The education available for deaf kids in this country is worse than dismal, and ASL is constantly blamed for "poor grasp of English" in kids. So they're denied early exposure to a fully accessible language, forced to speak a language that will never fully be theirs, and then their hearing loss is blamed for any limitations in their ability to communicate.
IT MAKES ME FURIOUS.
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Heather 12-13-2006 @ 11:38PM
My daughter had a math teacher from South Asia and no one could understand him, He spoke way to fast and had a very thick accent. Her grades dropped and she didn't learn anything. He did treat the kids differently depending on where they were from. The kids who were from his area of the world were better able to understand him so of course thier grades were better.
Being able to comunicate is essential. I see it my job. I do help desk over the phone and some of the other techs not able to comunicate. The accents are very very thick and we constantly get customers complaining " they couldn't understand the last guy" . It isn't discrimination it is comman sense. If you can't be understood you shouldn't be working that feild. Who hires teachers for deaf school who don't know sign launguage?
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