deaf school experience thoughts
Various comments on my first couple of weeks doing some English classes at the school for the deaf. Just self-introduction stuff so far really, with the junior high school kids. They are cheerful and pleasant to be with so far; junior high schoolers share general characteristics regardless of whether or not they can hear. A wide range of academic ability, hearing ability, speech, etc.
The school is the prefectural school for the deaf, not to be confused with the municipal school for the deaf. Actually, I think having both of them may be unique in the country; I wonder why they don't merge. Possibly because, in the past, the municipal school was known for being more open to the use of sign language than was then standard; like most places, Japan used to have an emphasis on oral education. Now, though, the prefectural school (and most public schools for the deaf in Japan, I think*) uses what it calls total communication, meaning that students learn both sign and speech, and while they are encouraged to use their voices, the first priority is communication by whatever method works. (They also use this confusing thing called cued speech, hand-gestures to supplement lip-reading sort of, which doesn't seem to exist outside deaf schools.)
The teachers know at least some sign. The hearing teachers I've seen use their voices, the blackboard/overhead projector, and supplementary sign. There are at least a couple of deaf teachers; I sat in on a young deaf woman teaching a Japanese (for native speakers) class, in which she spoke and signed. Several of the kids have cochlear implants, which do not seem to be the destructive force to the deaf community that they were feared to be, since the kids are still attending schools for the deaf...? Don't know enough about that to get into it.
I am, they tell me, the first foreign teacher ever. Sheesh. So I spoke and used my beginner's sign and wrote English and katakana (phonetic Japanese letters) and Japanese all over the blackboard, and the kids helped each other, and it all worked out somehow so far. (I would never use katakana in a lesson for hearing kids, but here it seems only fair to give them a hint of the sounds that confusing English spelling represents, since they don't have the aural model to follow.) The hardest part for me is figuring out how to react helpfully to the kids whose speech I can't understand at all. Some speak very clearly, others are (to me) entirely unintelligible, and I'm not sure how to get better at understanding them.
Pronunciation is, as with hearing Japanese kids, kind of a bugbear. Consonants aren't so bad--lips tight shut for a final M, biting your tongue for the th sound, and so on, and unlike hearing kids they're used to thinking about what they do with their mouths. How to teach vowels that don't exist in Japanese, though, man, you got me. I'm also torn about what to do when I speak English to them--expecting them to read lips in English seems like an unfair extra layer of difficulty, but if I speak English while signing, then they can watch the signs without having to understand the English at all. Reading/writing, no problem, but where does the balance fall?
Hopefully I will manage some follow-up posts about individual kids, but right now it's as much as I can do to keep names and faces straight, having only had one class with each group. Yuji who's a subway geek (I brought him a map of the NYC one), three Yukis and two Daikis, shy Aya with gorgeous long hair, Mayako whose family's Korean, the two eighth-grade boys who couldn't stop elbowing each other in excitement...
Some of the more academically gifted ninth-graders will probably go on to hearing high schools, I'm told. It strikes me that this has to be one of the most terrifying things they'll ever do in their lives. Going from a small school where they've known their ten or fifteen yearmates literally from babyhood (the deaf school's programs start before age one**), where everyone is deaf and deafness is taken for granted, where even the hearing teachers know some sign and are used to communicating with deaf people, to a large hearing high school where they don't know anybody, they may be the only deaf student, and most of the students and teachers will never have met a deaf person--wow. That's bravery. And most of them make it work too.
Well, instead of rambling on about this I should go and look up the signs for "snow," "apples," and "rainy season." More later, I hope.
*Almost all schools for the deaf in Japan are public, usually one per prefecture. The only exception I know of is the Japan Oral School for the Deaf, which is a private Christian school in Tokyo, founded by the parents of Ambassador Edwin Reischauer, and as its name suggests strictly oral. They cheat, though--their admissions page suggests that they encourage applications from hard-of-hearing kids rather than the profoundly deaf, and being a private school they are not required to accept deaf kids with multiple disabilities either. Not that it's a bad thing to have that environment, just that I don't think it's appropriate to make as if it's the best form of deaf education while only trying it out on the kids it's most likely to work with.
**The baby/toddler programs involve the children playing together with supervision from staff and mothers; it means the kids get early intervention for speech, hearing and sign, and young mothers can learn general childcare stuff, talk to their peers, learn to sign, and get a handle on having a deaf child. I've seen a lot of hearing young women coming in and out, signing and speaking to their toddlers. My only quibble is what happens to working mothers, single mothers especially, and where all the fathers are.
The school is the prefectural school for the deaf, not to be confused with the municipal school for the deaf. Actually, I think having both of them may be unique in the country; I wonder why they don't merge. Possibly because, in the past, the municipal school was known for being more open to the use of sign language than was then standard; like most places, Japan used to have an emphasis on oral education. Now, though, the prefectural school (and most public schools for the deaf in Japan, I think*) uses what it calls total communication, meaning that students learn both sign and speech, and while they are encouraged to use their voices, the first priority is communication by whatever method works. (They also use this confusing thing called cued speech, hand-gestures to supplement lip-reading sort of, which doesn't seem to exist outside deaf schools.)
The teachers know at least some sign. The hearing teachers I've seen use their voices, the blackboard/overhead projector, and supplementary sign. There are at least a couple of deaf teachers; I sat in on a young deaf woman teaching a Japanese (for native speakers) class, in which she spoke and signed. Several of the kids have cochlear implants, which do not seem to be the destructive force to the deaf community that they were feared to be, since the kids are still attending schools for the deaf...? Don't know enough about that to get into it.
I am, they tell me, the first foreign teacher ever. Sheesh. So I spoke and used my beginner's sign and wrote English and katakana (phonetic Japanese letters) and Japanese all over the blackboard, and the kids helped each other, and it all worked out somehow so far. (I would never use katakana in a lesson for hearing kids, but here it seems only fair to give them a hint of the sounds that confusing English spelling represents, since they don't have the aural model to follow.) The hardest part for me is figuring out how to react helpfully to the kids whose speech I can't understand at all. Some speak very clearly, others are (to me) entirely unintelligible, and I'm not sure how to get better at understanding them.
Pronunciation is, as with hearing Japanese kids, kind of a bugbear. Consonants aren't so bad--lips tight shut for a final M, biting your tongue for the th sound, and so on, and unlike hearing kids they're used to thinking about what they do with their mouths. How to teach vowels that don't exist in Japanese, though, man, you got me. I'm also torn about what to do when I speak English to them--expecting them to read lips in English seems like an unfair extra layer of difficulty, but if I speak English while signing, then they can watch the signs without having to understand the English at all. Reading/writing, no problem, but where does the balance fall?
Hopefully I will manage some follow-up posts about individual kids, but right now it's as much as I can do to keep names and faces straight, having only had one class with each group. Yuji who's a subway geek (I brought him a map of the NYC one), three Yukis and two Daikis, shy Aya with gorgeous long hair, Mayako whose family's Korean, the two eighth-grade boys who couldn't stop elbowing each other in excitement...
Some of the more academically gifted ninth-graders will probably go on to hearing high schools, I'm told. It strikes me that this has to be one of the most terrifying things they'll ever do in their lives. Going from a small school where they've known their ten or fifteen yearmates literally from babyhood (the deaf school's programs start before age one**), where everyone is deaf and deafness is taken for granted, where even the hearing teachers know some sign and are used to communicating with deaf people, to a large hearing high school where they don't know anybody, they may be the only deaf student, and most of the students and teachers will never have met a deaf person--wow. That's bravery. And most of them make it work too.
Well, instead of rambling on about this I should go and look up the signs for "snow," "apples," and "rainy season." More later, I hope.
*Almost all schools for the deaf in Japan are public, usually one per prefecture. The only exception I know of is the Japan Oral School for the Deaf, which is a private Christian school in Tokyo, founded by the parents of Ambassador Edwin Reischauer, and as its name suggests strictly oral. They cheat, though--their admissions page suggests that they encourage applications from hard-of-hearing kids rather than the profoundly deaf, and being a private school they are not required to accept deaf kids with multiple disabilities either. Not that it's a bad thing to have that environment, just that I don't think it's appropriate to make as if it's the best form of deaf education while only trying it out on the kids it's most likely to work with.
**The baby/toddler programs involve the children playing together with supervision from staff and mothers; it means the kids get early intervention for speech, hearing and sign, and young mothers can learn general childcare stuff, talk to their peers, learn to sign, and get a handle on having a deaf child. I've seen a lot of hearing young women coming in and out, signing and speaking to their toddlers. My only quibble is what happens to working mothers, single mothers especially, and where all the fathers are.