EDSS 531

Journal #5

Human beings are expert at the art of self-delusion, and I am no exception.  So when I walk into a room and I think I ‘know’ the 40 or so kids staring back at me, I could be completely mistaken.  Still, it was surprising, the more I became familiar with my students last semester, how much I recognized in them the personality traits of people I know and have known.  That’s great, because it gives me a ground on which to relate to them, but it is also in a way pointless, in that my relationship to my students is different than my relationship to anyone else I’ve ever known.  I have a purpose with these kids that I don’t have with anyone else. Actually, two purposes.  One is to somehow implant in them the Science Content Standards for Public Schools.  The other is to somehow support and nourish their growth into adulthood and their expression of themselves.  They seem anxious to do both, and it seems that the most important thing they want from me is to let them.  It’s important to remember that I teach an elective and all my students have made a conscious decision to be in my class, but with that in mind, far as I can tell, the best thing I can give them is to encourage and appreciate their efforts to succeed.  Since they do want to succeed, I find that if I can keep myself open, they’ll let me know what they need from me, or at least they’ll try to.

That said, there has been one group of students that I’ve been unable to relate to.  There are two or three in each class.   These are the silent ones.  They are always Hispanic.  They never speak except when spoken to.  When I try to engage them they answer in single syllables and show little or no emotion (at least not that I can read).  And they don’t get good grades.  I think, if they were succeeding academically, I wouldn’t care so much that I can’t communicate with them, but they aren’t so I find myself feeling frustrated and helpless.  To me, these kids stick out.  I notice them because they are so un-noticeable.  At first, I thought poorly of them and figured they didn’t care and were just marking time.  But I don’t think that’s it.  As I say, I am at a loss as to how to approach these kids.

Which leads me to get on my soapbox for a while, and I’m grateful to Brianna for tweeting this website yesterday and reminding me of it.  I believe that THE most underserved population in America is the deaf community.  Have you ever had the alarm go off while you were leaving a store because the checker hadn’t properly deactivated the security tag on your new dress?  If you were deaf, you wouldn’t hear that alarm. You wouldn’t hear the checker calling to you.  You wouldn’t know anything at all was amiss until the loss prevention man tackled you in the parking lot.  Security systems, disaster systems and schools are all geared to the hearing.  Deaf students have a dropout rate approaching 45%.  It is estimated that up to 50% of parents of deaf children never learn to sign, leaving their children without access to language itself until they reach school age.  The developmental deficit those children begin with is almost incomprehensible.  So that’s the most negative reaction I’ve had so far.