Mocking Hearing Inpaired

[ShockMe]

To be quite shocked that after a member of the public had posted that they had found a hearing aid and hoped to re-unite it with it's owner.. Our local school's SEN teacher commented 'Pardon?'

I get the language aspect, but I don't get the sometimes near hostile reaction of the BSL / Deaf to CI users...

Ah yes.
I know.
There's a lot if trials and research into bionic eye implants at the moment and I've yet to hear a blind or visually impaired person say it is wrong or would be against Blind community to have one. I think most visually impaired people would be delighted by anything that can help.
a blind person is just as isolated as a deaf person and faces many of the same barriers.

I think that being blind is as isolating as being deaf, but in different ways.
Whilst it is clearly going to be harder for a deaf person to learn to read, it is perfectly possible most of the time, so they shouldn't be restricted to BSL as their only form of communication.

I think I can explain the divide.
Deaf people who never had the option of cochlear implants learned to live their life to the fullest and some created a community of BSL users. Within that community, they are not disabled. Deafness is normal and everyone is on an equal footing. They feel that their deafness is an intrinsic part of their being and they don't feel 'broken'. They have accepted themselves for who they are and do not want to be fixed.
They don't want to have to fix themselves in order to be accepted within the wider hearing community and if the wider community think that they need to be fixed, then they reject the wider community.

Then some of them take the decision that they do want to be able to hear and they take the 'cure' of a cochlear implant. Someone doing that is seen to reject this deaf community, implying that everyone remaining within it is broken.

Even worse is when a parent has a deaf child. The 'Deaf' community says that the parent should love and embrace their child for who they are and not try to 'fix' them because they are not broken. If they 'fix' them with a cochlear implant, then they have rejected them for not being perfect, so they will offer no support to them.

So you end up with a divide between those who have accepted and embraced deafness, and those who have been deemed to reject it, despite the fact that it is perfectly possible to accept the deafness but still seek a cure.

It's the cure/don't cure divide. I have seen similar divides in other disabilities, but none quite as severe as in deafness. Autism can be pretty bad but it's not quite as clear cut.

I hope that makes some sense!

candycane there is a divide in the visual impaired community but it is nowhere near as bad.
I have seen parents being jumped on when they post in a VI group asking about how they can cure their child and explaining how awful life will be for their child if they can't be cured as they won't be able to do x, y, z etc

I can understand that people get defensive if they are told that what their limitations are, that's enough to get anyone's back up, but I often get the feeling that CI's are seen as the work of the devil!

CIs seem a lot more accepted than when they first came out - possibly partly because they are very good but not total cures to deafness, probably also because Deaf people now mostly know someone with one who is still involved with the Deaf community. (partly going by that recent BBC doc, 'Life and Deaf')

There's a saying that blindness cuts you off from things, deafness cuts you off from people, which IME seems to be true - blind people I've known at work and college manage to network and socialise and do all the 'extra' stuff associated with their work fine, whereas anyone with hearing loss struggles to get any support with anything beyond what's clearly necessary to do the job (if that...)

I hope deafness is starting to get taken seriously, with Keep the Noise Down campaigns etc - last year for the first time I mentioned to colleagues I was going to have to leave the pub if people voted to stay in the very loud one, and the guy whose party it was said "Oh, that settles it, we're going to the quiet pub over the road". I cried and he couldn't understand why. He couldn't believe that was the first time in 20 years of work that colleagues had agreed to ensure I could hear. Now if only we could clone him...

I think that most people on this thread (not all) don't understand what BSL is. Proper sign languages, like BSL or ASL (as opposed to Signed English or other copies of spoken language) are complete, natural, fully operational languages. They are capable of expressing any thought, concept or emotion. They are capable of poetry, science, philosophy. They operate in a way that is NOTHING like speech. The grammar is kinetic and spatial. Sentence structure is an utterly different concept.

So for a BSL user to learn English is not at all like a Spanish speaker learning English. The language is so utterly different that it is very unlikely for anyone other than a hearing child of Deaf parents to be fluent in both a spoken and a signed language.

Also, most BSL users are profoundly deaf. This makes it extremely hard to learn a spoken/written language. To understand this, you need to understand how language acquisition works. You learn a language (to fluency) by immersion - constantly hearing/seeing it spoken/Signed in context. That's how you pick up the full conceptual, metaphorical range of language (rather than just learning the names for things and being able to link them together in simple ways).

I'm not sure it's possible to learn written English to a fluent level without access to spoken English. There is just not any link between BSL and written English.

I am not a BSL user - as a deafblind person it would be pointless for me to learn now. However I understand a fair bit about the language, and I understand why BSL users stick together. It must be exhausting and frustrating to try and communicate in any other way. Imagine if you were suddenly dropped into a community of mind-readers, who all communicated in a way that you could not access at all. You'd want to stick with any speaking-language users you found!

I do understand why BSL users stick together, but I don't like the way they treat people who do opt for CI

And whilst I accept that it is harder for deaf people to learn written language, it is perfectly possible for them to, and I see it as so crucial to their future lives that it must be a priority for deaf children from a young age. Parents need to be supported to help that process.

Can I just say, CI are not a cure in the same hearing aids are not a cure. A CI will hopefully improve the range of sounds that the brain can process by implanting an artificial cochlear will will send impulses to the auditory nerve but this is in no way anything like actual hearing.
Also CI and hearing aids (which amplify the frequencies that the deaf person can't hear) are run on batteries, are usually not worn at night and can't be worn in the shower/bath, occasionally break and malfunction.
I do t have CI but use the most powerful digital hearing aids. Which are better than the analogue ones I grew up with but only slightly better.
I still can't hear many things and I can't process voices without lip reading as well. I still need subtitles on the tv. And background noise is very difficult to process.
As a deafblind person losing my sight is devastating because I rely on it so much because of my deafness.
One could say, I don't have the luxury of not trying to maximise my hearing.
As a blind person I know many many people who are VI and know nobody who would reject anything which could improve their vision.

Absolutely agree Candy. I've had over half a dozen operations on one of my eyes to save it and improve my vision. Before that I was on a fast track to being VI. With one ear that can hear virtually nothing in the speaking tones range (only indistinct buzzing), losing more hearing as I age, and constant tinnitus, losing my vision as well was terrifying as I couldn't lipread as well any more.

Thankfully for now I only need the one hearing aid and am still working on my vision (starting work on my other eye soon), but for all the complications I've had I'm still going to work on improving my sight when I know it can be saved and I don't know anyone that would say I'm wrong for doing that.

ExSIL did explain that CIs make everything sound 'robotic' and monotonic. So whilst she could hear things more clearly, she knew from her days with HA the tones of our voices etc. I think she was torn between the tones of speech and hearing the actual words. And she said birds sound fucking weird through CIs, I think the words she used were 'they beep'.

Whilst it is clearly going to be harder for a deaf person to learn to read, it is perfectly possible most of the time, so they shouldn't be restricted to BSL as their only form of communication.

That simply isn't true. The average reading age for a deaf/Deaf person is 9 years.

That includes people on here who can obviously read and write at an adult level.

BravoHopeful Has explained that these are languages. One way I have heard it described is 'try to learn to write in Japanese without hearing the language' It works well because Japanese uses kanji, katakana and hiragana - three different writing systems often all three are used in one sentence.

You cannot 'sound out' words if you are deaf. Phonics are useless and you are learning something with words in the' wrong' order, words that do not exist in BSL, sentence structure that is 'wrong'.

Interestingly deaf children can often spell words using a manual alphabet such as place names but if you ask them to write the same down they may not be able to spell it because they do not see it as the same thing.

My husband is hearing impaired, he finds these jokes tiresome rather than offensive. But I get that if it was a child and the teacher has made that predictable "joke " it wouldn't be so funny.

The average reading age for a deaf/Deaf person is 9 years.
It is harder, but possible. I fully appreciate the reasons why it is harder. What I said is that it IS possible so should be a priority. If the education that older people were given as a child was inadequate, that will make it incredibly difficult for them to improve their reading skills now. It would be interesting to know what the different reading ages are by age group. I suspect that children are getting a better quality of education now than children in years gone by. I was talking more about children than adults. I appreciate that it would be very hard for an adult to learn to read.

It is harder, but possible. I fully appreciate the reasons why it is harder. What I said is that it IS possible so should be a priority.

What a great idea, imagine all those teachers of the deaf and deaf schools not thinking about teaching children to read and write.

It's amazing it has not been a priority before. Perhaps you should send a letter to your nearest deaf school to tell them about it. You could also tell them your magic method to teach deaf children to read.

From what I have seen there is a massive expectation of underachievement for deaf children.

A friend was told upon looking around a potential school for her profoundly deaf DD, that she would "cope". I cannot feasibly imagine any parent of a hearing child being told by a potential school that their child would cope , as a reason to send their child there.

Some parents also seem to underestimate just how intensively young deaf children need SALT and the fact that just because it is offered to you once a week, it doesn't mean that it's enough.

sashh the sarcasm is not helpful.
I said that I suspect that the education provided to deaf children these days in much better than in years gone by. I did not suggest that no-one had thought to bother teaching them.

I am very aware that specialist schools have changed a lot over recent decades. Go back a generation or two, and disabled children were very often receiving an extremely poor education because they were never expected to achieve very much in life.

My parents looked at sending me to a blind school but were horrified at the lack of ambition they had for their students. They weren't challenging the children to learn in the way that mainstream schools did. They had an extremely limited curriculum with the only hope of employment being as a piano tuner. No student had ever gone onto University. I'm pretty sure that had my parents sent me down that route, my reading age would be pretty low.

The secondary school I went to had a large number of disabled children who attended for selected lessons. These were bright kids who should have been sitting the same exams as everyone else, but because of their poor education in special schools, they were only able to take a couple of subjects.

Having spent time in various special schools in the last few years, I have been very impressed at how much things have changed and how the kids in these schools are getting a much more rounded and challenging education.

I said that I suspect that the education provided to deaf children these days in much better than in years gone by. I did not suggest that no-one had thought to bother teaching them.

One major difference is the use of BSL in the classroom.

Deaf education used to be based on teaching children to speak and read/write. Now they are actually taught subjects so they know what they want to write about.

Access to education is not just through written work.

My sarcasm might not help but you were showing how ignorant (in the dictionary sense) you are of deaf education and access to subjects.