I paused my Instagram and Facebook accounts. I was sick about Mark Zuckerberg. So now WordPress is my only connection to the virtual community.
I LOVE school!
I won’t write much. Need to do a lesson plan! Fall Leaf Monoprints!
Category: Asl
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Me as an educator! -
The further I get away from my daughters daily struggles with school, from my constant trying to make things “work” and the more time that goes by since I let “go” of that daily struggle and pain my daughter experienced, I can see how my daughter and I have been damaged by this experience. It feels like breaking up from a bad relationship. One that you think will get better. Long emails trying to explain things that in the end your partner will never understand. There was one relationship my daughter had that was toxic from the start. This person was my daughter’s interpreter. Not only did my daughter start Kindergarten with an extremely limited knowledge of American Sign Language from day one her and her interpreter bumped heads. It was never a positive experience, I kept trying, encouraging my daughter to try harder to watch her interpreter. But that was torture because they did not get along well. A year and a half my daughter had to go through that. I have been under immense pressure to make it work. I’ve tried so hard and so has my daughter.
Today, five days after our IEP I feel a freedom from that pressure to make my daughter use the FM system, listen, watch her interpreter, stay on-line, we are free from that now. At first the feeling of freedom was welcome and felt good, but now it is becoming sad. Today there is a DHH virtual field trip with my daughters DHH peer group. This field trip is inaccessible to my daughter. Even on the e-mail from the DHH teacher it says:
“Students will get to “visit” the goats and sheep in the barnyard at the start of our field trip on Friday. They will then transition to the chickens. Throughout the field trip they will encourage students to ask questions and make observations, using a lot of the observation questions.”My daughter can’t hear on the computer and there hasn’t been any ASL instruction on the language that will be used during the presentation. Plus no one will be using ASL and my daughter won’t watch her current interpreter, or should I say previous? That’s why she can’t ask questions and make observations or be part of the whole experience. She could do all those things in person with direct communication in a quiet environment. Or she could be taught and use ASL. She doesn’t want to go at all and these are her peers. But her DHH Peers don’t know ASL. She is cut off from her DHH peers now that she is unable to use her FM system on the computer. This makes me so sad, all these years I have put so much energy in creating a solid peer group with our DHH peers. I put all my energy and reliance on our DHH itinerant teachers and now my daughter is even isolated from the one group that she’s supposed to be part of.
I start feeling very discouraged and like this problem is so massive how can it be fixed and when will my daughter be in school again?
I watched a webinar this morning CSDF put on through their deaf education program. It was “Academic Outcomes among Deaf Children with Hearing Parents”. My daughter is living through this in an extreme way. She is isolated from all of her education ties. I even got a call from the school today asking why my daughter was absent for three days. Do you think my daughter could be out of school for a long time? Is this happening because she wasn’t taught ASL in the first place? Why didn’t anyone ever listen to me? This was my gut feeling all along. And now when we say its actually causing harm, this mainstreaming we’re dumped and ignored. A little girl suffers more. No one wants to be out of school for weeks.
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If you walked in my house, now, you might think we are living in an alternate universe. It’s dark, corners claimed by forts, everything quiet but your typing, a kids show on u-tube, and sniffling. Constant sniffling. Sick kids in corners with computers. Parent types thru this pandemic. Writes letters and closer to a law suit than she’s ever been. An equal rights law suit of behalf of her deaf daughter.
I realized the Pandemic doesn’t give public institutions the right to not do the right thing. I’ve been so open and public about my deaf daughters experience, I was able to change her from HH to Deaf. I’ve learned legally it’s very important to make sure hearing status is correct inside the system. There’s enough research now to prove my daughter has been traumatized by being in the mainstream system. Nothing of my homeschool gen ed schools fault. The nature of a mainstream classroom is not suitable for my daughter to be in. It’s too loud, inefficient teacher-student ratio. Trauma happened in many ways. My daughter suffered extreme sadness and so did I.
But today is a new day. My daughter and I have decided she will suffer no more. We are changing everything that causes trauma. I know that sounds dramatic, and someday I hope I can really write about the specifics because they are ingrained in the system. Someday my daughter can explain it to you herself.
It’s a messed up system though. Financially I’ve invested so much money in Deaf Education Consulting Fees, Legal, plus years of writing e-mails, taking ASL classes, fighting for an interpreter and sign language. Always trying to COLLABORATE and COOPERATE! and in the meanwhile let my daughter suffer, encouraging her to try their way, I just felt guilty about thinking school district experts didn’t know what they were doing. Or sometimes I felt like I didn’t want to cost them money because of how scary public education budget cut backs have been. And plus I want to volunteer again at school and teach and work near where I live. I was scared I would get banned. Kicked out of school again. And I LOVE my schools and teachers! Just because we need to add more for deaf students doesn’t mean what they have going for hearing students is not good. It’s fantastic in my opinion.
Dirty Laundry Blog by Jennifer Hynes 