[lit-ideas] Re: amazing employment application questions
- From: John Wager <john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2006 22:34:36 -0500
Andy wrote:
I sometimes wonder about this. I've muted my television while not
using captions and tried lip reading what's going on on the screen. I
can't understand a thing. Even with training, a reader/listener can
only understand one person at a time that they can see, and many
sounds are similar even if the speaker is careful about shaping the
words with his mouth. There's a book called What's That Pig Outdoors,
by Henry Kisor, a journalist who was deafened at a very young age, but
after he learned to speak. He (his family) rejected ESL and used
oralism to fit him into a hearing world. He writes about how
difficult it was to go through the educational system and life in
general being unable to hear. He married a hearing girl. The title
of his book refers to one of problems of lip reading, the "what's that
pig outdoors" is what he heard when his father said something that had
nothing to do with pigs or outdoors. (The way I find a use for things
is to throw them out. I threw out my paper on the book when I threw
out my notebooks. I therefore can't tell you what his father really
said. But, I don't have the clutter, so the trade off is worth it.)
At any rate, your student really does sound like someone who rejected
her deafness and tried to fit into a hearing world, probably with
great loss to herself. I wonder if it's because her family didn't
want to be bothered learning ESL, I'm just speculating.
She could sign and read sign language just fine. She tried using a sign
interpreter, but the interpreter had NO background whatsoever in
philosophy, and the student had already taken a few classes, so the
issue was that the signer was not able to convey terms in philosophy
that the student could lip-read just fine, but that would take way too
long and be misleading when translated into ASLAN. I thought of the
student as tri-lingual, not someone who rejected anything.
(I know Henry Kisor a bit; I took over his old Word Processor Bulletin
Board when he was no longer interested in running it. This was a LONG
time ago, before the internet! Back in those days, there were maybe
1500 local Chicago area computer bulletin boards that one dialed into
directly. Until very recently (the last year or so) the "listserv"
interface was actually slower than the old "text based" bulletin board
message system. I could thumb through dozens of messages with a quick
click, and they would go by instantly. I remember when "GUI" systems
like Windows 3.1 or OS/2 Warp came out and slowed things down
drastically; there was no way to really read messages like I used to.
But now, after 15 years, we're back to about where we were then, in
terms of speed.)
--
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"Never attribute to malice that which can be
explained by incompetence and ignorance."
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John Wager john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx
Lisle, IL, USA
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