Linda Bove: The Librarian

  

inda Bove was born on 1945, to two Deaf parents.  She grew up learning to speak ASL, and attended the New Jersey school for the Deaf.  After graduating, she attended Gallaudet University where she studied Library Science and performed in plays for fun.  One summer, she attended a program set up by the National Theater for the Deaf, and decided to join their company after graduating from Gallaudet instead of becoming a librarian as she had previously planned to.  She met a man named Ed Waterstreet who was also a member of the National Theater for the Deaf company and they were married in 1970. 

When the National Theater for the Deaf was asked to do some work for Sesame Street, Linda was excited to join them, and when Sesame Street decided they wanted to create a position for her, she was thrilled.  Linda became Linda the Librarian to millions of children around the United States.  She was able to show hearing people a positive portrayal of a proud Deaf woman who was capable of anything.  She also taught American Sign Language to children through the show, and published several books designed for teaching ASL to kids.  Her role as Linda the Librarian lasted from 1971 – 2003, and brought Linda the distinction of holding the longest roll of any Deaf person in the entertainment industry. 

In between her work on Sesame Street, Linda also appeared on the soap opera Search for Tomorrow, and on Happy Days.  She also understudied the roll of Sarah Norman in Children of a Lesser God.  In 1991, Linda and her husband founded Deaf West Theater in Los Angeles.  Deaf West puts on plays and musicals, performed simultaneously in ASL and spoken English.  They won several awards for their adaption of Big River, and premiered the first revival of Pippin since the 1970’s at the Mark Taper Forum in 2008. 

Today Linda continues to perform on the stage, sometimes with her husband Ed.  She is also a big supporter of an organization called the Non Traditional Casting Project, which encourages the casting of minorities and people with perceived disabilities.  Through her work in spreading the knowledge of sign into mainstream communities, and also by providing a positive roll for deaf children everywhere, Linda has been a great ambassador for Deaf Culture.

More Book Reviews…

ay!! My computer is fixed now, and I have internet access and everything!!  I thought I would use this exciting opportunity to review some of the books I just finished reading, so here they are.  It’s so nice to be able to post things when I want to…

The Wild Boy of Aveyron by Harlan Lane “A-” - The subject of feral children has always interested me, and Harlan Lane’s account of Victor is fascinating.  Lane also explores the life of Victor’s teacher, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, and the lasting legacy he left in the study of language acquisition and learning in general.  The only drawback: I was left wondering what really happened to Victor when he grew up.  Lane only mentions it very (very) briefly. 

A Mighty Change: An Anthology of Deaf American Writing 1814-1864 edited by Christopher Krentz “B” – Although it’s sometimes sad to read the things the deaf people included in this book write about their “unfortunate condition”, there is an unmistakeable veign of early Deaf Pride running through the work as well.  The diary entries of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet were my favorite works included, but everything in here is great and gives a really interesting picture of what life for Deaf people was like before Oralism swept the nation.

My Computer Broke…

I have to say, it really sucks to have a broken computer.  It makes doing my homework a pain in the butt, as I have to go borrow someone else’s computer any time I want to do anything.  Right now I’ve comandeered my husband’s laptop for the evening, but he needs to take it to work in the day time.  I’ve been relying on my mom’s computer and my grandmother’s printer to be able to turn things in to my teachers.  Kudos to them for sharing their electronic memory and their printer cartriges.    Hopefully I’ll have a regular post ready within the next few days.  The power supply on my regular computer should be fixed any day now…  I’m really looking forward to it!!

September

I just found out the other day that September is Deaf Awareness month.  It’s exciting that there’s a whole month dedicated to learning more about deafness.  In honor of that, I’m going to jot down a few things that several of my Deaf teachers have said happen frequently to them that they consider extremely rude, or think people are nuts for doing.

First of all, there are two polite ways of getting a deaf person’s attention.  If they are accross the room from you, you can wave your hand at them, or ask someone near them to tap them on the shoulder.  If they are near you, you can feel free to tap them on the shoulder yourself, by using one finger and tapping two or three times.   Don’t wave your hand in front of someone’s face, don’t ever throw things to get someone’s attention, and don’t tap someone’s arm incessantly until they turn around.  Let’s face it, you wouldn’t like it if someone tried to get your attention those ways, so don’t do it to others and they’ll appreciate it a lot!

If two people are signing to each other and there’s no way arround them except by going through their conversation, it’s OK to do so.  Just walk right on through as quickly as possible, and if you know the sign for excuse me, you can go ahead and sign it.  If not that’s OK too, just try to be as quick as possible.  If you try to go underneath their signing hands, people will look at you as if you’re nuts.  Not only that, but you’ve disturbed their conversation because they’re looking at you and thinking ‘what the hell?’ instead of briefly pausing to let you through, then resuming their conversation naturally. 

If you’re meeting a deaf person and you don’t know ASL, follow a few simple guidelines and your communication will be easier.  First, always look at them straight foreward, and don’t let your eyes wander like they would in a hearing conversation.  Don’t try to enunciate… it distorts your mouth shapes and makes it harder for a deaf person to lip read than if you were speaking naturally.  Let them use paper and pencil, or whatever you have lying around to write with and on, and admit if you don’t understand something.  It will save you lots of embarrasment later if you just admit you don’t know what they’re talking about, rather than agree to something you aren’t OK with or look like a fool by saying yes to something that isn’t a yes or no question.

So there you go… several simple things that will keep you from looking rude or completely nuts in the presence of deaf people.  Happy Deaf Awareness month!!

Alexander Graham Bell: Friend or Foe?

  

t happens with every American icon, the fathers of progress, the day you realize that they weren’t perfect, that they had troubles in life too.  Some of them you also realize weren’t exactly good people either.  Walt Disney hired a lot of women specifically so he could pay them less, Henry Ford was anti-Semitic, and Alexander Graham Bell was heavily into Eugenics, to name a few.  I grew up hearing about all the wonderful things Alexander Graham Bell did for society, and it can’t be denied that he was a brilliant inventor who gave us the Telephone, among other things.  He looks like such a benevolent friend in his old black and white photos, his eyes twinkling, his bushy beard lying Santa-like on his collar with his smiling family surrounding him.  Add all this up with the fact that he started a Deaf school and you start to think he was a truly great man who was a wonderful advocate for the Deaf, however  the reality lies burried deeper in the facade of his perfect-on-paper existence.  Most Deaf people today think of Alexander Graham Bell as the less evil, American version of Hitler who decimated the cultural advances of Deaf people for decades.  So, which version is true?  A little of both.

At first glance, Alec (as his family called him) looks like he should be a great Deaf advocate.  Alec’s mother was deaf, and this made a huge impression on him.  He would sit near her when they had company and fingerspell to her so she knew what was going on, and he started his experiments in sound after he realized that she could feel the vibrations of his speech when he talked into her forehead.  Speech and sound was also the family business: Alec’s uncles and father were all Elocutionists, and his father had invented Bell’s Visible Speech, a set of phonetic characters by which it was thought that Deaf people would be able to learn to speak quickly and easily.  The family toured Europe, America, and Canada promoting Bell’s Visible Speech, which was later found to not work very well.  Still, Alec capitalized on his family’s association with Deaf people and founded a Deaf school in Boston which focused only on the Oral method.  He took private pupils as well and married one of them, Mabel Hubbard, with whom he had 2 gorgeous little girls, both hearing.  A well known figure in the Deaf community, Alec even had a book dedicated to him by Helen Keller.  Doesn’t he seem like the perfect Deaf advocate?

The truth is a little more complicated.  In reality, Alec’s mother was a woman who couldn’t admit to being deaf.  She insisted on being called Hard of Hearing, carried around an ear trumpet, and painstakingly learned to play a piano she couldn’t hear in denial of her deafness. This unfortunate attitude probably colored Alec’s perspective of deaf ideas, making him think that all deaf people felt badly about being that way and wanted to be hearing, a false idea still perpetuated today.  By insisting on using the oral method only in his school Alec created a situation in which the Deaf were as isolated from each other as they were from the hearing world.  He would sometimes have children’s hands tied behind their backs for hours if they continued to communicate in the only way they knew how, by signing.  Worse still, his foray into Eugenics produced a heap of debilitating ideas about Deafness that are still in widespread use 100 years later.  Alec railed against America letting in “undesirable foreigners” to procreate with the perfect American race, and insisted that English be made the national language, even at the expense of Sign Language which he claimed was not a real language anyway.  Though Alec didn’t promote forced sterilization himself, he belonged to plenty of organizations that did.  Instead, he  advocated for Deaf people being kept completely apart from one another.  He reasoned that if they could never meet, they would never marry, and would not have Deaf children.  The myth that most Deaf people have Deaf children is another one of the misconceptions still being refuted today.  I always feel a little melancholy for Alec’s deaf wife Mabel.  She must have lived a completely solitary existence, ensconced in her hearing family, denying her deafness.  Alec’s invention of the Telephone only made things worse for Deaf people.  He suddenly had an enormous pulpit of fame and influence from which to shout his damaging ideas, and he made sure to do it.  His ideas ushered in an era in which sign language was almost lost, Deaf people were isolated from each other, and many were denied employment. 

If you asked Alexander Graham Bell if he was a friend or a foe, undoubtedly he would have said friend.  He thought that he was providing deaf people with an important opportunity to be more like hearing people, even though it was something they didn’t want.  I’m sure he also would argue that his Eugenic ideas, if not popular, were at least creating a stronger human race.  While his intentions may have been harmless, there is no denying the damage he did to deaf equality for more than 100 years.  The ideas that deaf people can be easily taught to speak, that they almost always have deaf children, that they don’t want to be deaf, and that American Sign Language isn’t really a language, are all myths that were started by Bell and are still believed by a vast amount of hearing people.  The myths he perpetuated and the quest he started to keep deaf people from each other clearly place Alexander Graham Bell in the foe category.  I personally think deaf people are right to abhor everything Bell stands for, and I think if more hearing people knew about the negative impact he had on deaf society, they would abhor that too.  Perhaps being raised in the family business of Elocution made it inevitable that Bell would be on the wrong side of the issue.  It’s sad he couldn’t put aside his preconceived notions and listen to the deaf community all around him.

School!

 guess you could finally say I’m an Interpreting student this week.  Yay!!  I’m only taking 2 of the 6 classes I was hoping to add, but that’s 2 more classes than I had last week.  Trying to add classes, though, was the worst thing ever.  Basically I stood in the back of classrooms for two hours with twenty other people who all wanted to add as well.  The teachers would say “Oh, I’ll talk to adds after class”, so we would all stand there with desperate looks on our faces, clutching our paperwork and praying that we’d be at the front of the add line, but the sinking feeling in our stomachs telling us we weren’t.  The day I was the person who was supposed to be next just as they cut off the class was the day I went home and cried.  That much rejection is hard to stomach, even when you know it isn’t personal.  I’m back to my cheery self this week, and I’m able to pick out the good things I experienced last week among the awfulness.

I really love my department.  The admissions staff and anyone who is supposed to be there to help students is awful and incredibly rude, but the ASL department is friendly and funny… just wonderful.  All of the teachers are Deaf and conducted major portions of their classes (if not all of it) in ASL, and I felt for the first time like I was a hearing girl in a completely Deaf world, not a hearing girl in a temporarily Deaf environment.  It was fun.  I’m also proud because I got all of the jokes and understood completely what everyone was saying, which makes me think my ASL skills are improving a little bit.  I’m in classes with people who are advanced interpreting students now, and I can also see how far I have to go.  It makes me believe that it’s possible to get that amazingly fluent though. 

I’m excited to be there, excited to call myself an interpreting student (no matter how far I have to go), and excited to be back in school working towards a degree.  I feel like I’m accomplishing something, and I’m happy that it’s something I like doing.  I’ll be doing a lot of work this year too, writing papers on 4 Deaf Events and 3 papers on doing different Deaf For The Day experiences.  I’m excited to do those.  Deaf For The Day is something I haven’t done yet, and I wonder how all my reading will prepare me for the experience of trying to communicate without talking.  I’ve heard that people are rude, but I guess I’ll be finding out for sure soon.  I’m hoping I’ll become less self concious about making a fool out of myself when proabably I won’t.  We’ll see.  I think it will be an exciting semester…

School?

 was hoping to be able to be an official ASL Interpreting student by now, but no such luck.  California State budget cuts have made my life incredibly difficult right now.  I started at a new school this semester, because the old one had ASL classes, but not an interpreting program.  My registration date dropped dramatically because of this and all the classes that I wanted to take were completely full by the time I was allowed to ask for them.  Boo!!

I go to a Community College in California, and the beauty of the Community Colleges is that they accept everyone… no matter what your past school performance was or whether you’ve even completed high school, they will let you take classes.  The other beautiful part (and the reason I’m going) is that they only charge $26 per credit.  The bad part about all of this is that every class is usually jam-packed full.  That was before the California State Budget  crisis.  This semester the Community Colleges are offering 1/3 less classes and a vast population of students haven’t been able to register the regular way.  Me being one of them. 

I’ve tried to be pro-active.  I e-mailed all my professors and asked them to add me if they have space, and several of them wrote me nice but non-commital e-mails back.  School starts Monday, so keep your fingers crossed for me.  I’ve gone a little crazy this summer, not being in school, and I hope I don’t have to suffer through another semester of that.   I shake my fist at the dysfunctional state constitution.

Laura C. Redden Searing: Newspaper Woman

Thank God he gave the unto us

To free us from our woe

And put the key into thy hand

One hundred years ago

  

aura Catherine Redden was born in 1839 in Somerset County, Maryland.  Her family soon moved to Missouri, where Laura contracted Meningitis at the age of 11 and became deaf from the medicine used to treat her illness.  Laura’s family decided to send her to the Missouri School for the Deaf so she could continue her education, as she could no longer attend the school she had been going to.  After she graduated, she was offered a teaching position at the school but declined.  Instead, she started publishing poems and was offered a position as editor for a St. Louis religious paper named the Presbyterian.  She was only 19.  Soon, she was writing for the St. Louis Republican as well.  It was at the Republican that she started using her pen name, Howard Glyndon.  It was no secret that this name was fake, as her real name frequently appeared underneath in small letters.  At that time, many women wrote under male pseudonyms as women were expected to marry, raise a family, and dedicate their lives to the home.  Using a pen name meant that they could be taken seriously in the literary world.  Laura used this pen name for the rest of her writing career.

When the American Civil War broke out in 1860, Laura was sent by the St. Louis Republican to cover the war in Washington DC.  She was strongly pro-Union, and wrote lots of patriotic poetry that was published in the papers in addition to her more serious articles.  During this time, she interviewed President Lincoln and became personal friends of both Lincoln and General Grant, among other influential people in Washington.  Laura also toured the battlefields with General Grant, a place in which women usually weren’t allowed.  Her first book of poems, Idylls of Battle, was published during this time as well as the book Notable Men in The House of Representatives.

In 1865, Laura traveled to Europe to study languages.  She continued to write stories about France and Italy for the Republican, and also started writing for the New York Times,  and the New York Sun, as well as several well know magazines such as Harpers.  She also collected information for the US Government on the silkworm and orange trades in Europe.  Laura met Michael Brennan, an artist, in Italy.  They quickly fell in love and became engaged, but they were never to be married.  Michael died of an aneurysm shortly after Laura returned to New York.

Upon her return, Laura enrolled herself in the Clark Institution to study speech and lip reading.  After a 2 year course, she then studied under Alexander Graham Bell for a year.  She gained the ability to speak, but she never really learned how to lip read  consistently.  Although the process had only been partially successful for her, Laura felt very strongly that lip reading and speech were very important, and used her ability as a writer to advocate the teaching of speech and lip reading in all schools for the Deaf.  Even though Laura placed great importance on Oralism, she also clearly believed in the benefits of Sign Language, as shown in her poem signed at the dedication of a statue of Gallaudet in 1889 on the Gallaudet University campus.

After a tour of Cuba, New Orleans, and the American West, Laura returned to New York and married Edward Searing, a prominent attorney, in 1876.  They had one daughter named Elsa in 1880.  Unfortunately, Laura’s marriage and her health both suffered in New York.  She and Elsa moved to Santa Cruz, California, without Edward, and several years afterward the two divorced.  Elsa soon grew up and got married herself, to another lawyer named John McGinn.  Laura decided to live with her daughter’s family, first in Fairbanks, Alaska, then in San Mateo, California.  Laura loved being near her two grandchildren, John Jr. and Laura, and wrote a lot of poetry about Santa Cruz and California in general during these years.  She died in Elsa’s house in 1923 and is buried in Colima, California. 

Laura C. Redden Searing was a woman full of courage.  She didn’t let the stereotypes of the age dictate what she could and couldn’t accomplish, both as a woman and as a Deaf woman.  She has left a lasting contribution to the world with her beautiful poetry, her insightful articles, and the knowledge that anyone can achieve greatness by ignoring negative expectations. 

 

Sides

y Dad became an Administrator the other day, that dirty word of the Deaf community.  He got a new job in charge of Special Education for his district, including several children currently attending the local Deaf School.  It’s been a little odd for me, because our experiences with Deaf people have been so different.  Sometimes I feel like we’re on opposing sides, because all of my experiences have been so positive and all of his have been so negative. 

“Hey, do Deaf people shake hands?  Or is it some sort of a Culture thing that they don’t?”  He asked me one day at lunch.

“I don’t know,” I replied.  “Why?”

“I had a meeting at the Deaf school today, and when I was done speaking, everyone came up to shake my hand except the Deaf people who were there.  I just wondered if it was some sort of a thing.”  He told me.

I knew instantly what had happened.  My Dad was just another in a long line of Administrators knowing nothing about Deaf Culture to them.  In their eyes he was the enemy, of the same breed that tried to take Sign Language away from them 100 years ago.  It wouldn’t have mattered what he said.  They would already have made their minds up about him.

“That’s funny.”  I said to him non-commitally.  I didn’t want to tell him that they hated his guts on sight.  I didn’t want my Dad to hate them too.  I thought if he didn’t know how much they automatically disliked him, then he could be nice without strain… and then maybe the cycle of “them” vs. “us” could be broken. 

I needn’t have tried.  The Deaf at the school had no problems at all in showing my Dad just how much they disliked him.  They made it abundantly clear several times how they really felt, and they were not tactful about it at all.  The dislike for everything the other group stands for now flows in both directions. 

I haven’t really known what to do about this.  My Dad and I don’t fight about it or anything, but at the same time I feel as though my love affair with ASL has placed us on the opposite side of each other.  I consider the behavior of the Deaf school further proof that Deaf people are just like hearing people:  they have their jackasses and their hard heads just like they have their friendly welcomers and their comedians… just like hearing people do.  My Dad’s only experiences with Deaf people have been with the jackasses and hard heads, and that’s sadly all he can see.  It’s impossible to blame him for hating to have to deal with that.  At the same time, I wish with all my heart that he had better experiences. 

My experinces have been so amazing.  Deaf people have been incredibly welcoming to me and so patient with my limited ability to sign.  They’ve been inclusive, and hanging out with them makes me feel vibrant and full of life.  I love the jokes and the games and the festival atmosphere that surrounds even the simplest Deaf Event.  The culture is amazing, too, and I can’t believe I’ve lived my whole life without knowing who Laurent Clerc or Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet were.  Learning American Sign Language has been such a life changing experience for me. 

I don’t know what to tell my Dad.  In some ways, I’d like to tell him how neat Deaf Culture really is.  I’d like to talk with him about the issues in Deaf education that I’ve been reading about and show him that, in the whole picture, most of it is really great.  I wish I could do that without taking a side, without standing against my Dad on the side of Deafness.  Because in truth, I’m on his side too.

Student Handbook and Calendar

 went to Orientation at my school yesterday.  I was extremely cranky that they made transfer students attend, and even more cranky when I realized that I had to sit through two hours of information I already knew.  At least the counselor leading it was entertaining.   They gave us a bunch of cool stuff, too.  One of those neat little booklets is labeled “Student Handbook and Calendar”.  Inside, it includes a number of useful things, like a list of commonly misspelled words, the periodic table of elements, and a map of the human skeleton.  It also has a little segment on ASL.  I thought the things they chose to include were quite hilarious. 

Of course the manual alphabet is there, and there is also useful information about eye contact, signing space, and time indicators.  They also include the signs for “Mother” and “Father”, because I’m going to need those two signs desperately when trying to communicate with Deaf people… or not really.  In truth, wouldn’t “Name” and “Nice to meet you” be better?  I use those two every time I meet someone new, and it would be spreading politeness.  Another thing I didn’t like was their information on classifiers is all wrong.  They tell me that the classifier for “car” really means “3 cars”.  I’d like to smack a y-handshape to my chin to them for that, because they’re definitely wrong. 

I would also like to quote the “What is ASL” segment from the handbook.  They try to be diplomatic and give a short history of ASL, but a history without Laurent Clerc and Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet is horribly ridden with holes at best, and this comes off as just really confusing:

Throughout history, the Deaf have been persecuted for being different.  For centuries the Deaf struggled to form a visual language, and even then they were not always allowed to use it.  This has changed in the recent past.  In the 1800s, American schools were developed to allow the Deaf to pursue and education and participate in society.  One important figure in this effort, Edward Gallaudet, became principal of a Washington, DC, school for the Deaf, now know as Gallaudet University.  In the 1950s, William Stokoe was hired by Gallaudet University to teach English Literature, and by teaching the Deaf, he discovered and proved that ASL is its own language.  In 1960 he published American Sign Language Structure, and in 1965 the Dictionary of American Sign Language.  His work has been important in restoring and affirming the existence of Deaf Culture.  Today, ASL is the fourth most commonly used language in the United States and Canada. 

This paragraph makes it sound like Deaf people pulled ASL out of their nether regions, and suddenly everyone started using it.  I would even go so far as to say it accidentally perpetuates the myths that ASL is universal and based on pantomime.  Well… at least they’re trying, right? (sigh)

I may sound judgemental about this whole little ASL segment, but really I’m just laughing.  I feel like this isn’t so bad that it’s insulting or damaging in some way, I just feel like their mistakes are so hopelessly silly.  Ah the bastardizations that arise when people have little idea what they’re talking about…