PLE 3

I was so excited to see Trix Bruce again. I have seen her before at an Interpreting convention but this was much different. This time she was demonstrating her difficulties in the hearing world and it was amazing. Because of my experience in this class, I really focused on the difficulties she had growing up in school. I had a great advantage in knowing sign language because she is very artistic in her signing and it is poetic in sign language and I could appreciate that instead of just reading her slides. Some of the challenges she faced were things that I am going to witness as an interpreter and it really made me think just how hard it will be for some of my students. For example, she was in a group project and she had been emailing them all these great ideas and contributing to the group and the next day the group went up to the teacher and asked who she was. They had never socialized with her, had never spoken to her and had no idea who she was other than her name from the emails. She was never involved in groups at school because she couldn't understand or communicate with them. She was always stared at because of her hearing aids. I have heard many Deaf kids say that it makes them feel like a robot. Many people didn't know how to use a TTY with a deaf person so they would answer it, hear it was an interpreter and just hang up, never accept her calls. She was very light hearted about all of it though which impacted me in a big way. This is something that I hope I can use and encourage in future students. For example she said when she had an FM system which is basically headphones and the teacher had a microphone and she would play with the headphones because it did not work anyway. She joked about how people would yell if she couldn't hear them or slow down and exaggerate what they were saying as if that would help. She emphasized the lip reading problems about how most words look alike and things can be taken the wrong way often. As a kid, she hurt her wrist and she was supposed to rest it. But that is telling a child not to talk so that was impossible. She joked about so much of it but you could tell there was a lot of it that really was emotional and I am going to see so much of both in my future career. Being around so many different types of children and being so focused on one that is most likely going to be isolated this experience started me thinking of millions of ways that I could change that such as encouraging interactions with peers, and interpreting interactions with peers. It is usually really frustrating as an interpreter when 20 people a day come up to you and tell you to teach them sign language. Where do you want me to start? Do you want to know the whole language right now? I need to be interpreting for this child right now, not distracted. But maybe in the lower levels I could encourage the deaf student to help me teach their peers some signs. Also, help with motivation and ideas for joining groups etc.