My Teaching Philosophy

         

          Born Deaf to Deaf parents in the Netherlands, we moved to the United States in 1963 when I was ten years old.  It was a great time and place to be because we were living in Maryland—about 12 miles from Gallaudet University, the world’s only liberal arts university for the Deaf in Washington, D.C.  We were also acutely aware of the work of Professor William C. Stokoe of Gallaudet University who published the first Dictionary of American Sign Language based on Linguistic Principles in 1965.  Deaf culture has since become a unique subset of America and most of Canada.

I want to bring to my students that joy and excitement of learning as much American Sign Language (ASL) as possible through which they can understand, intellectually and emotionally, that ASL belongs, along with Gebarentaal (Dutch Sign Language (DSL) into which I was born), British Sign Language (BSL) and Langue des Signes Francias (LSF), to the so-called “visual-gestural” group of languages.  I want all my students to understand that their presence in my classroom is the consequence of those learning experiences so that they are better prepared to use ASL once they leave the classroom.  My goal is to show that the study of ASL is a creative process based upon the analysis of linguistic/cultural evidence which results in a conversation between ASL and its users.  With my help, therefore, students begin to engage in their own creative conversation with myself, with the Deaf community, and with each other.  Finally, since ASL did not just come into being, but has had a long and interesting development, it is crucial that ASL be presented within a multicultural framework.

          I believe that not only in ASL but in all areas students should have the opportunity to reach their full potential as informed and knowledgeable young men and women.  As they have chosen to learn about my language and my culture, I will use all methods at hand to assist them in their search for learning and knowledge.  If it were English or math, I would do the same.  In every class, like in every landing in Homer’s Odyssey, we are challenged to overcome the unknown.  I have always had a joy of learning something novel—something mind-blowing, and I want my student to enjoy the same.  By the end, what the students have gained from the learning journey shall furnish their home.

          In summary, then, I am very committed to providing a learning environment that is both safe and rigorous, one that empowers both student and instructor in pursuing ASL.  I devise various assessment strategies that allow me to fairly assess student’s ASL regardless of the student’s learning styles.  Above all, I treat my students with the utmost respect and create an environment where students feel safe to learn.

Dylan Quick's Matchbox

 

Pain is represented as something we can perceive

in the sense in which we perceive a matchbox.

Ludwig Wittgenstein,

Philosophical Investigation,

1953

I tried to have a word of explanation about how the pain at Texas Community College should be expressed and examined. I struggled long and hard in deciding how to write this blog. Not only did I want to present, as best my knowledge of being Deaf could tell, why it really happened. This blog is not as an exciting and rewarding reading, but I wanted the blog itself to be a reflection—a challenge I did some deep thinking.

First, Dylan Quick, 20, is deaf and has cochlear implants (CI). Secondly, Quick stabbed 14 students at TCC. Thirdly, the police reported that Quick had begun a wickedly inventive fabulist journey about stabbing as many people as possible at age 8.

I didn’t have to understand, I just knew. When I was young and impressionable then, I talked to my parents who are also Deaf, and they kind of looked at me as if “one doesn’t have this kind of experience, he's foolish.” That’s the kind of thing that we the Deaf (please notice that the uppercase D represents us collectively) say that we know that Quick’s being Deaf is quickly viewed as irrelevant. We don’t believe it, we know it.

One of my ASL students asked me about yesterday’s stabbing incident at Texas Community College so I needed to do a quick, in-class research by pulling up some online articles on Dylan Quick—how social media describes the incident. The police announced that Quick thought a lot about killing people since he was young.

The students were shocked and wondered why the parents didn’t notice his deviance. As the instructor, I tried very hard to account for it.

I told them that no children by the age of seven, who can hear, have a normal speech. They begin to learn to read and speak in school where their grammar teachers would remind them of how to “intone” a little for punctuations—period, comma, colon, semicolon, exclamation mark, question mark, quotation mark, and the like.

CI is manufactured to pick up only sounds, not these intonations. Deaf children with CI are unable to filter out local noises—cars running by, footsteps tapping down the hall, and even some body noises—to listen to these punctuations. Their speech becomes “funny” or “impaired” or “monotonous,” and this is quickly noticed by their hearing counterparts.

Now my cynicism says, “Well, now, you know, Deaf children with CI can ‘listen and speak.’” For me, CI is simple an annoyance of the deep reluctance. It doesn’t take away from the fact that deafness, whether total or only partial, implies a different channel—Sight—through which information, knowledge and communication are conveyed. For the Deaf, our eyes, not our ears, take in everything and then process it to our brain—a different way of thinking.

As for the parents of Quick, they are clearly the victims of a big, huge, enormous CI hoax to believe that Quick can hear. Every morning they might have checked whether Quick was on with CI. Yes, that was it! I know they were not communicating with Quick, they were training Quick "to listen and speak." Unbeknown to them, Quick remains essentially Deaf and has completely different needs. It’s sad that, in our society—our culture, we cannot accept being Deaf better than we can the CI hoax.

Quick must have started out open and spontaneous as a Deaf baby. Yes, but his parents very quickly learned that, due to his being Deaf, he was not to be so open. Fast forward to Quick’s enrollment in Texas Community College where he finally learned to be kind of pseudo-sophisticate and became a Wittgenstein matchbox that was open, and 14 of his college mates got stabbed. It could have been worst but Quick got arrested. Isn’t that painful?

Moral: Deaf children need to live their lives like a painting that is being painted without external interference. They are the painter and they are also the painting. Let Deaf children paint themselves.

CNS

:-)