Tag Archives: communication

Can I, a Deaf teacher, teach Hearing students?

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Posted by maxporter on December 15, 2011 – 4:09 PM
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In my new job, I am responsible for teaching young adults. Most of the work that they do is individually-directed, but my supervisor, volunteers, and I are around to teach students the subject matter – we teach them everything from basic addition to analyzing complex texts.

In my time at this job, I’m finding that I am really enjoying the social studies component and I am starting to think seriously about teaching in a classroom setting. I didn’t experience a teenagerhood nearly as difficult as what I see in most of my students every day, but it wasn’t an easy ride either because I was openly queer in a very conservative state, deaf, and easily bored by most typical high school classes. My parents helped keep me in school, but I was lucky enough to have wonderful, engaging teachers who made me want to come to class every day.

As a token of thanks to those teachers that helped me learn how to think critically, I want to do the same thing with high school students – teach them how to be better citizens in this transition to adulthood. I’m especially interested in teaching history and social studies because I feel like it’s misrepresented in a lot of high school classrooms and that myths are taught as if they were fact – for example, “Oh, yay, Christopher Columbus discovered America and learned that the Earth is round!” – no, that is not true for several reasons. Also, a lot of teachers present history as this incredibly boring subject that only a severely dull person would find interesting – that’s not true. I would definitely try to bring the drama of past events alive.

However, I’m starting to wonder if I can teach a classroom of hearing students.

First of all, I’m still learning how to work with groups. I have enough on my plate when I’m trying to work with three students individually at the same time. I’m getting better at multi-tasking every day, but I still can’t imagine what a classroom of thirty students would be like.

My second concern is how to maintain the respect of students. I’ve noticed students talking about me while I’m sitting right across from them, and although I told them not to do that, it was definitely a blow to my self-esteem. I also have students who refuse to talk to me – my theory is that they’re used to being low on the social ladder, but at least they have deaf people below them. So when a deaf person is actually more successful than they are, they become upset and defensive.

And finally, I wonder about how I’d be able to get the rumors. If I were a hearing teacher, I would use rumors to help with my instruction – if I hear students think that my class is boring, I’d change it. If I hear students talking about Occupy all the time, I’d do a class about that. Etc. But if I can’t hear students whispering amongst themselves, what then?

I am sure I will figure something out. Overall, I think I am able to keep most students’ respect – it’s only a few students who are nasty towards me; the majority are very respectful and understand that, just because I’m deaf, it doesn’t mean that I can’t teach them how to add fractions. I think that, given some time, I could become more comfortable in a classroom full of Hearing teenagers.

With that being said – is a teaching position at a Deaf institution in my future? Possibly, especially because the nearest one is only about half an hour’s drive away. Despite some of my misgivings about the changing composition of Deaf schools, I definitely think I could contribute to a Deaf institution – for example, I’m very academically successful even though I was born Deaf, so I think that I could be a good role model to students. And I am a total Deaf history geek, so I would be able to teach students about our history in addition to talking about mainstream history.

We will see. In the end, the biggest obstacle may not be communication – it may simply be that my personality is not super well-suited to teaching. At this point, I’d rather do one-on-one counseling to help people work their problems out than try to lasso a classroom full of 30 kids into doing the same thing. But who knows? People change all the time.

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A Little Mermaid: Retold

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Posted by maxporter on November 30, 2011 – 4:20 AM
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OK, so, since I’ve been posting some heavy shit on this blog lately, I figure I’ll tell you a little story to lighten things up a little around here.

So, I’m three years old and my family has taken me to see a Disney Little Mermaid play. At that point in time, the movie was so new that my parents hadn’t seen it yet & they didn’t know what it was about. They did, however, know that I was deaf and had learned how to communicate with me. So my dad translated the play.

As the play proceeded, my dad listened to it and realized that it was really quite screwed up. Wait a minute, he thought, So this play is about a girl who sells her soul to the devil and gives up her home/tail/voice for a man???

He continued to translate the play, hoping that it would get better and have some ultimate redeeming moral message – perhaps Ariel has a change of heart and decides that she values herself, for example?

But, nope. The play freakin’ ended with her exchanging wedding vows with that idiot of a landlubber. At this moment, my dad couldn’t hold back any longer – instead of translating the wedding vows, he told complicated story about Ariel dumping her husband and then getting a PhD in Marine Biology.

At the time, I could tell that he was just making it up – but I loved the story anyway.

To this day, I smile when I think about it. He didn’t stick to the Code of Conduct – but, hey, it was worth it.

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Introversion vs extraversion

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Posted by maxporter on August 23, 2011 – 11:58 PM
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A central part of many people’s personalities is whether they are an introvert or an extrovert. Over the years, I’ve found that my self-definition has shifted somewhat. That leads me to ask: am I an introvert or extrovert because I’m deaf and queer, or is it just the way I am?

For the longest time, I considered myself to be an introvert. But looking back, that was simply by default, not necessarily because I was naturally inclined to be an introvert. Because I was born deaf in a hearing world, I had to learn from an early age to entertain myself. Introverted activities like reading books were much more reliable than trying to keep up with my peers in a world where hearing kids were so thoughtless about communication. Since I had a way to entertain myself, I cared less about fitting in. So, for a lot of reasons, being an introvert was a good thing for me.

I carried those skills with me when I realized that I was queer. It gave me the confidence to come out at a young age: I already knew who I was and that I could rely on myself. I wasn’t really worried about the repercussions of coming out – and believe me, I faced a lot, including the prospect of being disowned – because I already didn’t fit in mainstream society.

Interestingly, I find that I’m more interested in extraverted things since I’ve come out. It sounds really trite, but I’ve gained a new perspective on life because I was able to more fully reveal aspects of myself that had previously been buried. Now that I’m more able to express myself, I’m able to form genuine connections with more people. That has led me to a lot of extraverted interests.

I have no idea if it’s just the way I am or if my deafness and queerness somehow influenced this aspect of my personality. These days, I honestly cannot pinpoint myself as either an introvert or an extrovert – I’m somewhere in between. I love to socialize, but in a world where people can be real assholes about communication, having the means to entertain myself is a really valuable skill. In the end, though I don’t really care what formed my personality – what matters is that I’m pretty content with it.

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“Can’t you just write everything down?”

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Posted by maxporter on August 5, 2011 – 12:02 AM
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Every now and then, I encounter somebody who expects me to carry a small notebook everywhere for the purpose of communicating with others. In their mind, it is simplest for d/Deaf people to communicate with others by writing things down. It’s a nice sentiment, but life isn’t that simple.

One thing that I’ve learned, living in this world, is that hearing people are a lot more complex than you’d think. Because hearing people hold so much power in this society, it was tempting as a kid to lump them all under this category of ‘hearing’ and to attribute them with supernatural abilities – like being able to speak to each other across state lines without a telephone.
But I learned early on that hearing people have a wide spectrum of abilities. A kid in my class had mirror-writing, my friend’s brother was dyslexic, my friends hated to read. Just because they were hearing and native speakers of English didn’t mean that they actually liked English. Not every hearing person is able to relate to written English; for some people, words on a page are meaningless jumbles.

This lesson was driven home when I lived in a major metropolitan area during college. I was functionally deaf because the sheer loudness of everyday life compelled me to give up my cochlear implant during my leisure time; I just didn’t want to hear traffic and horns honking and subways and yelling people all the time. I had forgotten how to live as a deaf person, so at first, I tried to get by with a pad and pen. But then I learned my childhood lesson again: not every hearing person relates to written English.
A lot of the time, when I tried to communicate with store clerks by writing to them, they didn’t understand what I was saying. Moreover, it wasn’t culturally acceptable in that city to communicate in that way – “speak English, damn it!” was the predominant attitude.

So, in the real world, especially one that is so audio-centric, it’s not realistic to expect that one can communicate with pen & paper all the time. I personally have found other ways to communicate, like learning society’s scripts (“Would you like fries with that?”) that I feel more comfortable with.

Another thing is – what if the d/Deaf person is uncomfortable with written English? I personally love English. But, as with hearing people, d/Deaf people have a wide range of aptitude with regards to English. The d/Deaf person may be dyslexic or simply not interested in English or something else.
In addition, some Deaf people are not native English speakers. I know plenty of Deaf people who regard English as this alien language that feels very uncomfortable; for them, compared with ASL, communicating in English is as awkward as trying to chop vegetables with a baseball bat.

I mean, if a d/Deaf person genuinely prefers to communicate by pen and paper – that’s great! Everyone should be able to communicate in whatever way they feel most comfortable with. But there’s a difference between recognizing that some individuals prefer that method of communication versus expecting every single person to adopt that method.

For the record: yes, I do carry around notebooks. But that’s because I enjoy writing in them. Simple as that.

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Learning Foreign Languages

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Posted by maxporter on May 18, 2011 – 12:02 AM
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For years, I’ve been wanting to learn a different language – preferably Spanish, because I live in an area with a large population of Spanish-speakers. I’d like to be able to read the local newspapers and to speak with my neighbors to understand everything that is going on in my larger community. Also, I want to work with at-risk LGBT youth, and, given where I live, I think it’s utterly naive to expect that all of them will feel comfortable talking to social workers in English. However, I’ve run into problems whenever I’ve tried to learn another spoken language.

Because I’ve always been mainstreamed, my teachers have approached the matter from a Hearing-centric perspective. To them, speaking and listening are among the most important aspects of learning a language, if not the most important. Of course, I completely disagree – after all, I didn’t need to hear to learn English.

I began to learn English when somebody gave me a book and I quickly devoured it. That book led to another, and another, and another, until I was reading at 8th grade level in 4th grade and college level in 8th grade. The fact that my parents used manual communication rather than straight-up oralism also helped, but I definitely am grateful for books. That’s why I don’t understand why on Earth hearing people put so much emphasis on speaking and listening exercises – why not just let us read and write? As a result, I became bitter for many years and thought of spoken languages as “Hearing people languages” until I realized that it’s illogical of me to not think of English in the same manner. That’s another post for another day, though.

Classrooms, in my opinion, also tend to be very sterile environments filled with stupid games. I would be a lot happier with a more immersive experience. For example, I learned ASL by going to Deaf camp and fending for myself. At first, I knew very basic signs like “thank you” and “please.” Staff members who knew manual communication translated for me during the first year. Then, after eight years of going to that camp every summer, I could carry on more complicated conversations in ASL.1 When all is said and done, I don’t care what this piece of grammar is called; I don’t care about the boot drawing that illustrates how to conjugate verbs; I don’t want to practice the most incredibly awkward conversations in the world. I just want to be thrown into the language and figure things out on my own.2

Sadly, queer issues got in way during the only time that I’ve ever come close to a language learning experience that would have been close to what I wanted. I took a Spanish course at the community college in my home state, and our teacher was a native Spanish speaker who had immigrated from a Spanish-speaking country – I forget which one. She was very big on contextualizing the language within the various Spanish-speaking cultures and wanted to work towards an English-free classroom.

I really liked the class and was looking forward to finishing it. But then, one day, my Spanish instructor was teaching us about pronouns. She pointed at everybody in the room and said either “el” or “ella.” Well, she pointed at me and said “ella” – at that point, I was an androgynous femmy twink. Then the entire class turned around to scrutinize me. All I could do was stammer. It didn’t matter that she was wrong when she read me as female; I was still too scared to go back to Spanish class because my home state is super homophobic and is extremely hostile towards androgynous people. I dropped out of the course with no explanation.3

Lately, I’ve been thinking about trying again. It’s true that I’ve run into a lot of problems in the past and that language education in the US is, in my opinion, awful. But that’s become a poor excuse for me to keep deferring my goals. When all is said and done, I want to learn Spanish for the reasons that I mentioned. I know I’ll probably have a terrible accent, but I’ve come to peace with that. As long as I can communicate with others without inadvertently saying something completely different, I’m okay with having an accent – I have one in English, too. What’s more important to me at this stage is learning how to read the local Latino paper and carrying on basic conversations with my neighbors; I can always improve my spoken Spanish later.

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  1. The problem is that I haven’t really communicated in ASL since I was 15, save for one year in 2009, so I’ve forgotten it. I’m confident that, if I had stayed immersed in the Deaf community, I would have continued to improve my grasp of the language. [↩]
  2. Incidentally, this applies to English, too – in fifth grade, we learned how to diagram sentences. I hated it. To this day, I couldn’t be arsed to tell you the difference between the subject and the object. All I care about is the fact that I know how to make sentences sound right; I don’t want to split hairs with terminology. [↩]
  3. Looking back, I could probably have handled the situation a lot better, but it was a really difficult summer for me in a lot of respects. [↩]
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Communicating Block

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Posted by maxporter on April 22, 2011 – 3:23 PM
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Recently, I’ve been having a bit of a writers’ block. Now, I’m not talking about having problems coming up with story ideas or anything like that – I don’t really care about writing stories anymore. The problem is that I’m having issues stringing together ideas in a way that is pleasing to read. To be honest, it’s a little scary.

I usually feel comfortable in my ability to put together words in the English language to create sentences that flow nicely. I enjoy written English and I usually am able to reflect that in my own writing. Even before I listened to music, my writing style had a pretty distinct cadence to it. But the loss of musicality in my writing is not what scares me. No, what scares me the most is the fact that this is usually the form of communication that I feel the most comfortable with.

A large part of being deaf is choosing how to communicate.1 When I want to communicate, I basically have four choices:

  • ASL. My ASL skills aren’t so great – I can understand my interpreters, but I often have to speak English to them in order to communicate with them. Besides, I don’t know any Deaf people around me who speak ASL. I feel that if I were immersed in a Deaf environment again, I’d pick it up again, no problem. But I don’t have access to that right now.
  • Spoken English. My spoken English is okay. When I was a child, my speech was so unclear that my own parents didn’t even understand what I was saying. After twelve years of speech therapy with one of the the most wonderful and amazing human beings to ever exist in the entire world, I attained a speaking style that was more or less understandable. But I haven’t been to speech therapy since I graduated high school in 2006 because I ended up with a terribly queerphobic speech therapist. That’s probably another story for another post. Since 2006, my voice has changed a lot and I have adopted certain speaking patterns – for instance, I don’t speak ‘proper’ English all the time whereas I used to care a lot more about grammar. (Today, I said, “I don’t got no change on me.” My fifteen-year-old self would have been appalled.) And I’ve taken to mumbling/whispering, which I know is a really bad habit, but I just don’t feel confident in my spoken English.
  • Manual Communication. I still feel extremely comfortable with MC. It isn’t a language – it’s simply a visual representation of English. But MC plus reading books is how I acquired language in the first place, and it’s still a tool that I feel very comfortable with. However, the problem is that nobody uses it. It’s an extremely rare form of communication. I can count the number of times on one hand that I have been around non-family members that use it. Hell, I’m not even giving you guys the real name of the tool because that’d make it too easy to identify me.
  • Written English. Written English – or, to be more specific, typed English, since my handwriting isn’t super awesome – has historically been the form of communication that I’ve felt most comfortable with. All throughout school, I never spoke in my classes. I simply let my essays speak for themselves rather than trying to participate in a class discussion. This is the largest reason that I felt most comfortable communicating with others online – I am kind of embarrassed to admit this today, but I went through a period in my life where I would communicate with people in the same house – the same room, even – by using instant messaging.2

I’m not sure why I’m having such a difficult time putting together words lately. But it’s really annoying to feel so stymied. I just don’t feel like I can communicate my ideas clearly right now.

Have you ever had a writers’ block, or felt tongue-tied, or felt otherwise inhibited in terms of communication? How did you deal with it?

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  1. Or having others make that choice for you. [↩]
  2. Unfortunately, most people put none of their personality in their written English and depended on their body language to convey their meaning, so it ended up being a trade-off. [↩]
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Planning Ahead

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Posted by maxporter on March 21, 2011 – 12:02 AM
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A large portion of my life as a deaf individual within a hearing world involves planning ahead. When I thought about it, I realized a central part of my college experience is that it requires a unique level of planning ahead that most people don’t have to worry about. For example, today I was telling someone that I can’t skip classes at the last minute because I have interpreters.

I feel that that requires a bit of explanation. First of all, I really like both of my interpreters this semester as human beings, and I know that they both commute a pretty long distance to get to my school. So, for one thing, I’d feel really shitty if they commuted such a long way and then found that I wasn’t there. I mean, come on.

Second of all, my school would get billed anyway if I didn’t show up. I once worked at my school’s disability center, so I got to see the numbers. Where I am, it costs between $40-$60 to hire an interpreter for an hour, and you have to pay for a minimum of two hours. That means I’d cost the school $80-$120 at a minimum. The interpreting agency requires that you must tell them a week in advance about cancellations if you want to avoid a bill.
Emergencies happen, of course, but it means that I can’t just skip class because it’s a beautiful day and I want to stay outside.

I’m a senior in college. Let’s get real here – I’m not gonna go to every single class. I mean, come on. So, in the end, what happens is that I skip a class sometimes to take a break from things. I always plan out my absence at least a week in advance. I email my access coordinator to say, “Hey, I can’t make it to class on [insert date],” then I do something productive with my time like taking a trip to see a friend. In the end, planning out my absences helps me feel that I got the most value out of skipping class.

Another example is that, lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future. I’m not yet ready for graduate school, though it’s a possibility, and I know for sure that I want to live in the mountains again – I grew up in the Rockies, so I fucking miss having mountains around me. But I don’t know if I want to live in Seattle, Portland, Montana, Northern California, Colorado, or… there’s so many choices, really! As a result, I’ve been tossing around the idea of bumming around on the West coast. Basically, I want to keep moving until I find a place that makes me say, “Hey, I could live here.”

Some of my very favorite people in the world have bummed around. So when I look at their bumming-around experiences, all of them basically go like this: “Save up some money, hop in my car, drive until I find a place to stop, get a temporary job or busk to get some extra cash, get out of there, do the whole thing again.” I realize it doesn’t sound great to everyone, but it sounds like a fun adventure to me.

The problem, though, is that I freeze up at the “getting a job” stage. I mean, when I think of bumming-around friendly jobs, I think of jobs that are temporary and have a high turnover rate. That, in turn, leads me to think of things like waitressing, retail, fast food, and working as a barista.

Here’s the problem, though: Many of those jobs involve communicating with the public, especially the ones that pay relatively higher. That’s what stops me. For instance, I imagine myself trying to take orders at a coffeeshop while the espresso machine grinds in the background. In my head, I end up asking the customer to repeat him or herself about ten million times, and the customer gets really upset and then my manager gets upset. It’s not a good scenario.

It’s not entirely about money, though I do admit I get anxious when I don’t have a steady stream of income and that it’s not exactly the best economy to go bumming about in. But you see, I’m not the type who can just live off of his savings forever – I have to feel like I’m giving back to society in some form. I have this strong desire to help others; it’s what propels me through life. When I can’t do something as simple as giving people their food because of the way that this society is structured, that bums me out sometimes.

But then, I remember: it’s simply a matter of planning ahead! Just like I have to plan in advance for something as simple as skipping a stupid core class, I just have to apply a little bit of thought to this “moving around until I find a place I want to live” idea. I could, for example, find a four-month internship with a stipend centered around helping homeless queer youth in Portland. Or I could become a ski instructor. Or I could actively seek out d/Deaf communities as a starting point and work from there. Or… well, I don’t know. It’s a story in progress. Stay tuned, guys.

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