The message reads: "Some things have to change regarding your behavior + attitude. You are 16-17 yrs old and act 11-12. If you want to stay in this class you'll have to change a few behaviors."
It was WRITTEN on an overhead projector by my high school electronics teacher, Mr. Grady, at Maryland School for the Deaf. He couldn't sign worth anything so conversed with us students mostly by writing. Well, duhhh!! If you cannot communicate with your students, then your students are going to have "behavior and attitude" problems.
No student should have to endure a teacher who cannot effectively communicate with the class. A belated congratulations to the students at Mississippi SD for standing up for what they believe in and refusing to accept teachers who could not sign with them! They represent GENERATIONS of deaf students who have had to endure substandard communication access.
[For those who must know about the picture above, I took it in 1983 or 1984 with a photography class camera. Obviously I still needed to learn about things like 'focus' and 'contrast'!]
3 comments:
What a story you got to share with all of us! Many thanks!
I went tp the same school that you was years later, and I had a science teacher who couldn't sign on the first day of school. We retreated to writing on the blackboard for communication, and it was awful! Her first question for us was Why Study Science, and we responded in ASLhe became frightened and told the principal that we showed her our finger. Well, we didn't.
That remind me of my old teachers at Deaf school. Overhead projectors should not be use in classroom because hearing teachers would not use signing in classroom often. Notice Deaf teachers dont alway use overhead projectors, they use ASL to teach students. Deaf teachers stand up and sign alot more than Hearing teachers writing on overhead projectors and let students copy from what teachers wrote.
It is so sad and frustrating to read about these kinds of things happening even today. I'm glad to know that the Mississippi students have been getting some media attention for this.
I thought that it might interest some of you, though, to know that things are often far worse in many other countries. (NOT in all countries. The United States is NOT always the lead in everything, though many American snobs think they are. But compared to MOST countries, MOST deaf people here are still better off.)
For example, there are schools in many developing countries where teachers communicate primarily by writing on the blackboard, just like in some schools here. HOWEVER, education is so lousy in many (NOT all, but many) schools in other countries that most of the students can't read. So, really, there is no communication at all.
For more information on this and what's being done about it, see
http://www.deafconnection.org
I don't work there, but I do like what they do.
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