Essay on Laurent Clerc

According to Deaf Person of the Month (DeafPeople.com), Mark Drolsbaugh grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, just four blocks away from Pennsylvania School for the Deaf’s old Mt. Airy campus. He is a writer, essayist and advocate. His life changed dramatically as we can see through Deaf

Nora Groce, in “Everyone here spoke sign language: Hereditary deafness on Martha’s Vineyard,” explains that she discovered that the deaf population on Martha’s Vineyard was about .006% higher than the total American deaf population. She comments “In the nineteenth century, and presumably earlier, one American in every 5,728 was born deaf, but on the Vineyard the figure was one in every 155,” (Groce, 1985, p. 111). She describes how this usually creates many problems, the main one being that it can inhibit their “ability to communicate” which can cause them to become socially isolated (Groce,1985, p. 112). Groce was aware that unlike on Martha’s Vineyard, most hearing people do not know sign language making every part of life involving communication extremely difficult for the deaf and hearing impaired. Fortunately

The schools built began to shun sign language, focusing on oral education. A conference brought the decision that oral based education was more effective than manual education. Despite the diminishment we see in education during the 1900’s, we see huge strides for Deaf advocacy from both Deaf people side by side with hearing people. The first home run was performed by Deaf ballplayer William Hoy. The first hearing aid is developed. William Taft protects Deaf people’s rights to federal jobs in 1909. WWI along with WW2 provided jobs for Deaf people. The first African American graduate from Gallaudet College, Ida Wynette Gray Hampton. Captions are established 1958. In 1960, ASL was beginning to be recognized as a language. The first cochlear implant device constructed. Ending a time of Educational decline, Congress claims that oral education a “dismal

“You have to be deaf to understand the deaf”’ is a deaf poem by Willard Madsen, and he was written at 1971’s. He was a professor of journalism and former Associate Professor of Sign Language at Gallaudet University. He was born from Peabody, Kansas in 1930s. He lost his hearing to scarlet fever when he was two age. He attended public junior high school before he transferring to Kansas school for the Deaf at Olathe. He went on to study at Gallaudet. He graduating in 1952s with a degree in the education. He do taught at the Louisiana school for the Deaf for five years after, he received a master’s degree from Louisiana State University. After he joined to Gallaudet faculty in 1957s, and he taught at gallaudet for 39 years when he have retirement at 1996s. His career was spent to teaching journalism and english to preparatory students. He was a founding member of American Sign language Teachers Association, which provided certification for sign teachers across the country. He wrote two text book for sign language but, he was well known as a poets in both American Sign Language and English. Classics of Deaf cultures are “You have to be deaf to Understand” and “NO!”.

He realized that his younger siblings would not play with her because she was “different”. Gallaudet wanted to communicate with her. He wrote the word “hat” in the dirt, in hopes she would understand, and she did. He was determined to find a better way to communicate with her because writing in the dirt was not most efficient. He met with Alice’s father, Dr. Mason Cogswell, who offered to pay Gallaudet’s travel expenses to Europe in hope that he could learn a way to communicate with Alice while he was there. While in Europe, he first lived with the Braidwood family, who owned several deaf schools. Their style of teaching was known as the oral way. The oral way of teaching is to teach the deaf students to speak and read lips, but Gallaudet did not like that style. He then met Abbe Sicard, who was the director of The Institute Royal Des Sourds-Mutes in Paris, France. He signed up to attend this school and found he loved their way of teaching, which was the way of sign language. Unfortunately, after a year, he realized he did not have enough money to attend any longer. He asked one of the students, Laurent Clerc, to join him on the journey back to the United States, and Clerc agreed. Over time, Clerc taught Gallaudet, further, how to sign, and Gallaudet taught Clerc, further, how to speak English. In April of 1817, the first school for the deaf was opened by Gallaudet and

Deaf children are entitled to know that they are heirs to an amazing culture, not a pitiful defect. In order to follow through on that obligation, one of the best things I feel we can do is try to educate other hearing people about the realities of American Sign Language and Deaf culture. Language is one of the most critical aspects of most cultures, and one which sets deafness aside from other defects such as blindness, physical disability, or illness. Sign language is not universal, nor does it always correspond to the spoken language in the same country. For example American Sign Language is native to the United States and Canada. Deaf Canadians might use English, French, or both as a written language. But deaf people in Great Britain, while they may write in English, use a completely different sign language. (nad.org)

In 1861, George Veditz was born of hearing and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, USA by his two German immigrant parents. By the age of five he was already fluent in two languages, English and German. However, when he was just eight years old, Veditz lost his hearing to scarlet fever. Fortunately, he was taught sign language by a private tutor, and had decided to attend Maryland School for the Deaf. After his graduation, he went to National Deaf-Mute College, which later became known as Gallaudet University, to become a teacher (Cadeaf.org). Years passed and in 1904, he became the president of the National Association of the Deaf (NAD). There, he laid his legacy toward his most prominent accomplishment, the Preservation of Sign Language. With the help of film technology, Veditz also become a well-known Teller to the Deaf community and has made significant contributions to Deaf literature

Throughout the novel we learn about Laurent Clerc’s life, and what it is like to go to St. Jacques. Along the way, the school’s director returns from exile, a young boy who can hear but cannot speak comes to the school, and Pierrot is dismissed from the school due to his age. Clerc then graduates, and is asked to be a part of the teaching staff at St. Jacques. He works at the school for about ten years, but by around

In this school they wanted for all the children to be oral by the time that they got to kindergarten and be ready for regular academics. (148) this was there second time with professionals that had their ideas of what a deaf child should be able to do. Lynn started school with a teacher named Ms. Taylor that began to teach the children so that they could recognize what they needed to be successful later on in their schooling. Dr. Barrington, a psychologist, taught a class to the parents of deaf children on how to read to them so that they understand. (175) this is where the Spradleys’ learned that the more they read to Lynn the better she would understand them and be able to lip read what they were saying. Lynn also went to the Starr school that they wanted to keep as an Oral school, so she had to learn to speak. (207) When going to a PTA Meeting for the school, this is when Louise and Tom saw a deaf couple signing to each other. This is when they met with Bill and Kim that taught them that Lynn could learn to sign and that it would be a good thing for them to learn also. In the first week Lynn could sign thirteen words that she had already knew and just did not have anything to go along with the word.

Benjamin James Bahan who was born by Deaf parents in New Jersey was very passionate about American Sign Language and Deaf Literature. As a child he attended Marie Katzenbach School for the Deaf in West Trenton, New Jersey as well as Gallaudet University where he is now a professor and chair of American Sign Language and Deaf Studies. Upon returning to Gallaudet University as a professor and chairs person in 1996 he went to The Salk Institute in La Jolla where he researched American Sign Language linguistics and acquisitions as well as receiving his masters degree in Deaf Education and helped operate the Deaf Studies Program in the School of Education at Boston University. Lucky for Ben, while attending Boston University he met his wonderful wife who was not only Deaf but had Deaf parents just like him.

Mark Drolsbaugh’s autobiography, Deaf Again goes through his life journey as a deaf individual who tries to find his Deaf identity in the hearing world. Mark was born as a hearing person, but as he got older he gradually started to lose his hearing which made it difficult for him to fit in as “normal child.” When Mark was in kindergarten, he started to feel lost with his classmates and heard less and less. After this incident, his grandfather took him to numerous doctors to find a solution for his hearing loss, but there wasn’t any resolution. Despite the fact having deaf parents who knew sign language, Mark was never encouraged by his parents nor grandparents to communicate in sign language, they were told by doctors that signing would interfere

The technique that Clerc taught was by the use of his hands, which he communicated with French sign language, blended with a bit of signs used by students in the United States. To Gallaudet the language was a inspiration which he called it, “Highly poetical,” but to Clerc and many of the deaf people, the using of sign was natural and useful. This was a result of a created acculturated nonverbal language known as American Sign Language (ASL). As new schools for the deaf spread west and south, American sign language also evolved as well in the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois. By the year of 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed a law constituting the first college in the world for deaf students called Gallaudet University and all these schools used sign as a curriculum.

The Book I decided to read is called “Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf”. In this book the author Oliver Sacks basically focuses on Deaf history and the community of the deaf developed toward linguistic self-sufficiency. Sacks is a Professor of Neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He became interested in the problem of how deaf children acquire language after reviewing a book by Harlan Lane. The book was titled “When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf”. This book was first published in 1984 and was published again in 1989. Before reading Harlan’s book Sacks did not know any sign language. The book encouraged him to begin studying sign language. Sacks became extremely interested on how the deaf learn to communicate with the ability of sound being nonexistent. He wanted to know what this process may tell us about the nature of language. Seeing Voices is made up of three chapters, the history of the deaf, a discussion of language and the brain, and an evaluation of the problems behind the student strike that occurred at Gallaudet University, in March of 1988.

In 1880 there was an international conference of deaf educators. There were 164 members (142 of which were either British or Italian) representing eight different countries and were champions of both oral and manual methods. On one side was Alexander Graham Bell and his colleagues from around Europe supporting the oral methods and on the other side was Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet

The technique that Clerc taught was by the use of his hands, which he communicated with French sign language, blended with a bit of signs used by students in the United States. To Gallaudet the language was a inspiration which he called it, “Highly poetical” (Weta and Florentine films/Hott productions Inc., 2007), but to Clerc and many of the deaf people, the using of sign was natural and useful. This was a result of a created acculturated nonverbal language known as American Sign Language (ASL). As new schools for the deaf spread west and south, American sign language also evolved as well in the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois. By the year of 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed a law constituting the first college in the world for deaf students called Gallaudet University and all these schools used sign as a curriculum (Weta and Florentine