At some point in time, whether it has already happened, or it will happen one day, you decide to be an ASL interpreter (or if you’re in another country, whatever your country’s signed language is) and you hopefully feel a spark of excitement. Perhaps you are a CODA, a child of Deaf adult(s), and the…
Category: Deaf-Centered Topics
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Stop saying you sign badly
I see this all the time, paired with looks of dejection or at best, an awkward sheepishness. I sign badly, sorry… My ASL is so awful… I forgot a lot… Sorry, I am slow… You don’t sign badly. I don’t care if you only know a few words. Apologizing to me is pointless and is…
Excuse me. Someone said you’re all learning ASL? Hi. Nice to meet you. Yes, I AM deaf. I just wanted to come over here and introduce myself, because you’ve all been sitting over here in this corner chatting in voices with each other instead of coming over to meet us. It’s okay, I understand. It’s not…
It almost seems dangerous to say that I love music, because not everyone will understand and I will be judged. While the majority of the Deaf Community will say they don’t enjoy music at all, there are plenty of us that do love music. Even when we cannot hear it. From hearing people who have…
I would love to be proven wrong, but deaf education, as a whole, seems to have fallen apart. Not swiftly, and not recently, but a decade or two or three ago, and it’s seemed like a dismal decline since then. I have some words to say on this topic, but I want to be clear…
Today in explaining the value of learning American Sign Language to hearing family members of deaf individuals, I used this imagery to give them a sense of what it means, to a deaf family member, when they make the effort: Imagine you see your family, not too far away from where you stand. There they…
I hadn’t planned to write about it, but I feel like I can’t be silent (pun may be intended, but my subconscious isn’t telling me) about this issue. Before I dive into what I hope will be a short post, let me preface this with a statement: I am not against cochlear implants. In fact,…