Somewhat Silent

She sits on a hard metal chair welded to a desk. Unblinking. Her eyes are focused on the speaker with intensity. A topic is being discussed, but she doesn’t know what the topic is. The blackboard behind the speaker, her visual cue, remains empty. Smudged with chalk-dust that provides no information to her seeking eyes. The speaker’s lips answer a question, she catches part of the answer to a question she never heard. “Roosevelt something something 1858 something New York.” Roosevelt. Which Roosevelt? Rosevelt?. Did what? Mentally, she takes a note to figure out which Roosevelt was even alive in 1858, and what the event could possibly be. Another question rings out in the back of the classroom, she turns her head to catch the last word, and totally misses the answer as the teacher rattles it off at lightening speed.

It may not even be something about Roosevelt, it may be something about a foundation called Roosevelt, or about Eleanor Roosevelt, or Roosevelt Avenue, or it may be a word that looks like Roosevelt on the lips, but is not. The best that she can do is settle quickly on a guess, and hope that she is right. The research that she will do later depends on it.

The class is an hour long. She’ll be tested on it all later. The day lasts from 8AM to 3PM, class after class strung together with 5 minute breaks inbetween. When she gets home, instead of doing her homework or getting much-needed sleep, she’ll spend the time patching together the fragments of things her eyes caught, and trying to understand how they interrelate. She’ll read her class book, but always with the knowledge that the book only contains part of the information. She’ll go up on the internet, and hope that the fragments she caught were right. 1858? Or 1958? After a few hours she’ll know all the possible versions of the story and will pass out in exhaustion with the other five classes un-covered. She doesn’t know where to start for Geometry or Algebra, the names of theorems all missed as they’re not stored anywhere in her mental dictionary of context clues. Those are classes she’ll fail.

The next day she’ll walk in and sit through the same exact class again. Different information will be discussed, but to her it’s all the same. Darting her head around frantically to catch the snippets, refusing to blink until her eyes turn red and dry and start to tear up. Everyone will pass their homework to the head of the class, and the teacher will walk over to her desk to ask where the previous day’s homework is. Direct stimuli, her brain will snap to attention and her eyes will focus on the teacher’s lips. Every word will be understood and every question will be answered. The teacher will walk away shaking her head in disbelief. The student is a problem, obviously bright but unwilling to work.

In her mind, that last interaction is how lipreading is done. Everything is understood, it’s an absolute hearing replacement. Fully functional. Reality often doesn’t even begin to approach that.

One nice thing about being deaf: if I ever hear voices that I can understand, I’ll know I’ve gone schizophrenic, and it’ll be easy to ignore them. :p

So, the researcher on the project I posted about concerning the impact of the internet on deaf people came to see me this afternoon and was here for two hours. Very interesting it was too. Though some of it was repeating questions asked in the online survey (a UK three-university project), the interview gave me a chance to expand on answers, and her to ask some follow-up questions.

As an interviewer, the person (a postgraduate student) was extremely well-prepared, ultra-courteous and completely non-intrusive. So it was very relaxing and I was inclined to talk too much, as usual. The most thought-provoking questions? Certainly those about important friendships I would never have made otherwise (including two barely a mile away from where I live), about the international scope of online friendships, especially with other deafies, and, most provatively, a question about how my identity as a deaf person had changed or be conditioned by the internet. It suddenly struck me that it is largely thanks to the internet that I am “out” about being deaf in a way I never was before. I would do everything to hide my deafness and fake being a hearing person (not very convicingly, needless to say). The nature of the friendship and support that is here on the internet has changed all that. So the identity question produced some very positive reflection.

Things moved on to how the internet has affected my relationships with hearing people. Easy one that – revolutionized it. And not just because of email/chat/blogs etc., but also because there are resources to point hearing people at for what being deaf is like (somewhatsilent.com is a kinda good place to start, yes?) and so on.

There was lots more. I’m rather tired out by too-much-audio-information, but the student had a very clear, loud voice, and she was very easy to lipread. It was altogether a good afternoon

Just to let you all know..I’m not in Cleveland anymore and am in Burlington, Vermont….am a bit tired from moving and I think it’s better this way for me. I’ll still be on here as usual .

-Adam

This is kinda fun. There is a research project going on jointly with my own university (Sheffield. UK) and those of Leeds and Loughborough. The project is looking into deaf people and their use of the internet, and I filled in the online questionnaire a few weeks ago (a rather long questionnaire it was too…). Anyhow, it looked like a potentially interesting project so I said “yes” in the box that asked about whether I would be prepared to do a follow-up interview. Needless to say, I thought that would be the last I’d hear about it, but the other day I got a nice email from one of the researchers asking if she could come and interview me in depth. Today we fixed the date for next Friday. I’m rather pleased about this. I’ve got a lot of good things to say about how internet use has done things for the quality of my life – let alone the making of some lasting friendships with people I would otherwise never have encountered. I’ll post what happens after the interview. Have a great weekend everyone