Back in the Day

I remember back in the day... When primary education actually seemed to involve filling children's heads with knowledge, giving them a solid foundation on which to develop the skills needed to transition into a future beyond the walls of the institution; to enable them to step into society and be productive, willing and able to support themselves and their families; to allow them to grow and function within the community; to make them strong in body and mind and able to survive.

I'm only 35, but times sure have changed.

Four of my six children attend the very same public schools I did as a youth: The same elementary, middle, and high schools. Two of my children have been singled out, unable to walk those same halls of learning; and my husband and I were forced to make a choice:

Michigan School For The Deaf... or
The Hearing Impaired Program within the Saginaw County school district.

I know--and accept--that there are few Deaf families in our area. I know that this "lack of need" limits the choices available to us, but it bothers me how this directly impacts the outcome of my children's education. They are "different" than their siblings and essentially every other child in the community; in the eyes of the world beyond the walls of our home, my children are "broken" and need to be "fixed."

I want to close that gap and bring our worlds together. I want to eliminate the disparity in the "fairness" in dealing with Deaf children and Deaf adults. I know these are lofty goals and will take monumental effort to reach, but the situation my family faces is NOW, an immediate and pressing need. The "right" decision today could bring us one step closer to realizing those goals and ensuring my children's future in society, and I insisted on enrolling them in the local school program. A large part of this was due to their tender ages (our daughter age 4 at the time, now 6; and our son, currently age 3), but I admit that I wanted them "mainstreamed" into a society that has historically willfully and deliberately excluded "their kind." I wanted them to have a fighting chance at a decent education and a decent job. At the same time, I needed them to be able to embrace BOTH cultures (Deaf and Hearing) they are entitled to claim, rather than isolating them into a strictly deaf community at a Deaf school, where they are exposed only to other Deaf. This obviously poses problems with trying to open up another world to them--the Hearing world.

At the time, I felt it was the right decision. Although both children are profoundly Deaf, they (seem to be required to) use hearing aids while in the public school; neither child minds using them, so that was never really an issue. Our daughter had come from an environment where her Deafness was looked upon as only a disability, rather than a feature of her identity, and was not well educated in a language suitable for her abilities--American Sign Language. When she came to us at age 4, her communication level was years behind her chronological age and she had a long way to go to catch up to her Deaf peers, as she had only received language instruction for one year while in foster care prior to coming to us; the first 3 years of her life, she had basically none, biological mother refusing to accept her Deafness because she wanted the girl to be Hearing and not Deaf, and teaching her more than basic signs (food, eat, bed, etc.) would have been surrendering the battle--regardless of her daughter's best interests.

She loved school, loved her teacher, loved her classmates. Throughout pre-K and kindergarten, her day was split between "deaf" and "hearing" classes--exactly what I wanted. This year, however, she appears to be only in a "hearing" classroom. She said they don't always give her her hearing aids, eliminating any possibility of making use of her tiny bit of residual hearing, but she is upset because the teacher does not use ASL--my daughter's primary language--to communicate with her and she has no interpreter, so she is lost. She is upset, as are my husband and I, since this was not the program outlined to us when we enrolled her. Even at the age of 6, she recognizes the inappropriateness of this; and I, as a parent, have realized that not only is she not TRULY being mainstreamed into a hearing society as I desired, she is once again being willfully and deliberately excluded.

My husband has taken her to MSD and she is interested, so we would like to see if she can attend some of the MSD programs while still being a student at the other school and transition her gradually from one environment to the other. I imagine the answer will be "no," with the fucked up way inter-district applications are handled. We needed to get "permission" from our home district to allow her go to other school. Apparently since they live in one district and funding goes there, they have to "release" a student to reassign funding, or some stupid shit like that. I never really understood it, and the red tape is enough to piss any rational person off.

As for my "normal" children: The difference between what I learned in school and what they are learning today within those same walls is like black and white, disturbing on many levels.

In the 2nd grade, I was required to memorize and recite the multiplication tables through 12. My middle son still could not do this by the 5th grade, this exercise in and of itself deemed "unnecessary." In the same middle school he now attends, I was able to choose from many elective classes including band, art, computers, home economics (with actual cooking and sewing), drama class, wood shop, and drafting. Gym class involved actual exercise and sports like basketball, softball, football, and volleyball; we performed aerobics and gymnastics; and we made use of the school's top-notch indoor pool. I was offered advanced placement classes in history, math, social studies, English, science, and more. Now, the drafting room has been replaced by a "tech lab." The swimming pool has been closed for years. The theater and wood shop are only available to high school students. The art and home economics rooms have been divided into smaller classrooms and a teachers' lounge, those classes dropped from the curriculum. Gym class is no more.

Where I learned to cook and sew and paint in classes so many of us loved, now the students have no access and the classes and classrooms have been eliminated. Do children of today have no use for skills like cooking and sewing? No need to creatively express themselves on a canvas, with a mold of clay or fresh piece of lumber? No need to exercise their bodies as well as their minds?

Far more distressing, though is the quality of the CORE education my children are receiving in what is left of the curriculum, although this was already dubious in the latter days of my public school experience. My son, now in the 8th grade, cannot even tell me who President Taft was and identifies Kennedy only as "Ain't that the guy who got his head blown off?" He knows nothing of the rich geological history of our state outside of what I have taught him with jaunts to Keweenaw, Iron Mountain, Sault Ste. Marie, Porcupine Mountains, Fayette, and Pequaming. He has little to no knowledge of our own local history and assumed I was "pulling his leg" when describing the scheme to span Michigan's lower peninsula with a series of canals and the spectacular failure of that venture. So much history yet little more than a curiosity, hardly worthy of even a footnote, buried and forgotten.

I did attempt homeschooling once. I was forced to admit defeat when my son refused to do a lesson, telling me me "We don't have to do that in REGULAR school," after assigning 10 words from the dictionary to define and use in a sentence--an exercise we did weekly while I attended "regular school."

When conveying knowledge to my children, I feel it appropriate to turn every experience, every activity, into a learning experience--like taking them to places rich in history--a way to grow the mind and learn to look to the past while blazing the way into the future, and having a good time doing it. "The institution" only shoves them out in a quest to pass government-mandated standardized tests that teach nothing about preparing for the future and even less about learning from history, not just about it.