This morning, when I picked up my newspaper, I saw this article on the front page, in which Jamie Foxx honored Michael Jackson, saying “Michael Jackson belongs to us, and we shared him with you”. My immediate thought was, “If Black people can say this about Michael Jackson, then what can we say about Deaf children?”
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One of my viewers, “Trying Hard to Understand” recently shared with me this Zen parable that I tell here in this vlog. Like the poem “If“, this parable has a good lesson in it for all of us in the Deaf community as well as on DeafRead.
While preparing for the DCARA V/Blog symposium next week, I thought of the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling. My mother had read the poem to me a long time ago, and in rereading it, I thought it has something that we can all learn from and think about in it. I have translated it into ASL for your enjoyment.
The full text of “If” by Rudyard Kipling here: http://www.swarthmore.edu/~apreset1/docs/if.html
Purple Communications is holding a contest for us to cast our vote for a person to be honored as a “Trailblazer of the Year”. Each nominee has chosen a charity that will receive $10,000. Watch the vlog to see who I’m voting for (and my second choice, if I were allowed to vote for more than one person) and why I support these people. To vote for yourselves, go to this link: Vote for “Trailblazer of the Year”
We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you this special report on the riot that happened at the DCARA V/Blog Symposium.
(Note: No v/bloggers were harmed during the production of this vlog)
(Editorial note: The opinions expressed in the vlog are fictional. The owners of DeafhoodDiscourses do not know the actual stances of the people named regarding the “tastes great!”/”less filling!” debate.)
Information about the DCARA V/Blog Symposium (Registration, Hotels, etc.)
Recently, a parent of a Deaf child informed me about her child’s school district’s attempts to recruit people to become interpreters for their school district. While it is true that there is a shortage of interpreters all around, this school’s approach is not going to serve their students well, for the reasons I outline in the vlog. (9.5 Min.)
Below are some of the requirements for becoming educational interpreters in the state of California.
I recently had the opportunity to go on my daughter’s end-of-the field trip to a bowling alley. It so happens that my daughter’s class has a girl with a CI in it, and that girl was in the group my daughter was bowling with, so I took the opportunity to observe how a kid with a CI can function in a public school setting. I share my observations with you in the vlog.
I’ve been in discussions with NACPAC, a Deaf person from a Deaf family who has a child with a CI. She sent me this description of the CI from the perspective of her child’s Speech-Language Pathologist, who also knows ASL. I have no problems with this description — it fits with everything I know about the CI. But one thing struck me while reading it — the CI child is ME! I tell you how that is in the vlog.
The picture above is me, circa 1969. If you look closely, you can see I’m wearing my hearing aids (old body aids) to the beach!
I just read this article in Newsweek in which an advocate for his group made some comments. I will show you the quotes, and you can try to guess whether he is talking about Deaf people or not. It was a very interesting article, and has some interesting observations and ideas for us to think about for ourselves.
I recently made a vlog that illustrated perfectly why oralism is a failure for so many Deaf people. However, the school for the Deaf asked me to remove the vlog in order to protect the confidentiality of the student and out of concerns for liability. While I did so, this got me to thinking about the ramifications of not being able to share the story about this student, and other stories like this, which I discuss in the vlog.
