This is just another gripe about my in-laws being so noisy at night. My brother-in-law is really noisy by default, he grew up in a loud household and he doesn’t know how to close cabinets quietly, close doors quietly, etc. He also thinks it’s okay to talk to himself and sing to himself all the time, so he’ll blurt out all kinds of stuff to himself just walking around the house at night. He apparently never learned that doing the dishes makes noise, because he does them at 11pm sometimes. Bang clatter crash! And him and my sister-in-law have a habit of singing to each other…really loud…as if nobody else lived here. It just drives me crazy. They’re good kids, I like them fine, I think they’re great…but why do they hafta be so loud?!

I am working on my research project about accreditation. I think my thesis is going to be along the lines of “Despite the need for improvement in K-12 deaf education and despite the cultural differences between Gallaudet and other universities, we can retain our accreditation with MSCHE” etc. Something like that.

A letter from the President of Gallaudet University, Bob Davila:

I received a message today from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) letting me know that during their meeting today, the commissioners unanimously voted to remove Gallaudet from probation. As of today, Gallaudet is currently placed on warning which is the interim step institutions must go through prior to re-affirming full accreditation. While well deserved, this was a decision we didn’t expect until the spring of 2008. This decision reflects a community, including the Board of Trustees, faculty, teachers, staff, students, and alumni, that has come together and exceeded all expectations, internal and external. I will be sending you more details tomorrow, but wanted you to be the very first to know this wonderful news. I thank you for all of your hard work especially what each of you has contributed to a new and better Gallaudet.

Yay!

I’m still reading the “first 50 years” history of Gallaudet, and I find it interesting to note that the oral/manual debate has been going on there since 1868. When Edward Miner Gallaudet convened the first National Conference of Principals of Institutions for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, he didn’t send invitations to some of the schools that had recently been established, which were oral schools. Some saw this as a snub to the oral methods, but Gallaudet said it was simply because they didn’t have principals yet, they were still too new. He said that his school should “provide for the instruction of speech of all pupils until it plainly appears that success is unlikely to crown their efforts.” So even though it may have seemed that he was anti-oral, he was encouraging the use of oral/aural instruction until it was deemed a failure.

Apparently we register for spring classes at the end of October, so I looked for the schedule online. I found it, and I put together this possible schedule.

• HIS 112 - American History II - Honors section - Prof. Brune - 9:30-10:50 Tu/Th
• GSR 150 - Intro to Integrated Learning (Sex and Gender) - Prof. Dillehay - 10-11:50 M/W
• SOC 101 - Intro to Sociology - Prof. Kowalsky - 1-2:20 Tu/Th
• DST 101 - Intro to Deaf Studies - Prof. Dunn - 2:30-3:50 Tu/Th

There’s also a possibility of working HSL 690, Intro to Cued Speech, into my schedule, but the times haven’t been announced yet so I don’t know if I’ll get to do it. If not, I can put it off for another time. History and Sociology are both required for the Deaf Studies major, and as for DST 101…well, at the beginning of fall 2007 I was told that GSR 103 (which I’m taking now) would replace DST 101 and I wouldn’t have to take it, but I’m looking at the major requirements and I probably will have to after all. I wasn’t able to find a way into either of JKF’s sections, the schedules just clash with everything else…I think it would have been pretty interesting to have her as a teacher, though I’m not sure she should be teaching intro-level classes considering how controversial she is. (IKJ is coming back too but he’s teaching high-level Psych courses.)

This isn’t set in stone obviously, but I like the way it shapes up so far. Three classes on Tu/Th, one on M/W, and none on Fridays. That would leave room for plenty of working hours, which I haven’t gotten nearly enough of these past few weeks.

Gallaudet’s new curriculum requires that all incoming freshmen take a general studies class called GSR 103: American Sign Language and Deaf Studies. In this class, they teach about deaf history and culture, but there is also a heavy emphasis on learning formal ASL. They have explained repeatedly that even though we use ASL every day, we don’t know formal ASL, and that’s why the class is required.

A friend of mine, who is in a separate section from me, just said that she got low marks on her first two performance videos because she used English word order. I’ve seen her sign, of course, and she uses perfectly good PSE like many people here do. But no, the class is about formal ASL, and even though she was raised with English, she has to use ASL for the class.

That got me thinking…what about oral deaf people who prefer to stay that way? They may have come to Gallaudet because teachers wouldn’t keep talking while they write on the board, or because they were curious but not VERY curious, or even just because it was a good financial choice. (Deaf students don’t typically pay full tuition; the government awards scholarships and VR pays for some of it.) Should these students be forced to learn formal ASL? Is it enough to learn enough to get by? Doesn’t the ASL class assume you already have some knowledge? (The New Signers Program is something like three weeks in the summer…maybe not enough.) Hearing students here are entitled to voice interpreters if they can’t understand a teacher, so surely oral students are entitled to an oral interpreter to keep up in class.

Why do non-signers HAVE to learn formal ASL when they come here? What if they’re happy with their oral deaf identity? These aren’t real questions, I’m just musing, but it did come to mind.

Edit: I am just trying to play devil’s advocate. This is not necessarily my opinion, it’s just some pondering I did. I do a lot of thinking about deaf culture and the place of hearing people within it, but I don’t know everything.

I think my brain is fried. I have studied for about 10 hours probably. Six hours tonight and probably four last night, maybe a little more, I don’t know. This exam is going to be my bitch though. I can tell you anything you want to know about American history from about 1400 to 1790. Well, not anything, but anything on the study guides, which are what she’s doing the test from. But seriously man…I think my brain is going to explode sometime soon. I keep forgetting what I was going to say in this post. It feels like I’ve been interpreting for three hours straight or something…bleurgh wharck wharck foomp! At least I finished before midnight like I wanted to. And now Underclassman is on TV and I am watching it because I don’t have the energy, brain, or whatever is needed to change the channel.

I have a lot of reading to do this semester. This morning I finished reading Chapter 4 for history, so that was good. But then I looked at what I was supposed to read next for English class, and it was the “Kenya” section of Barack Obama’s book Dreams from My Father. Now, we already read the Origins section, the first part of the book. But the syllabus says that we’re now reading Kenya, so I e-mailed the teacher and confirmed that we’re supposed to skip the “Chicago” section in the middle. I’m not sure why skipping the middle section of an autobiography is a good idea, but since I have to read Kenya for Tuesday, I guess I’ll be doing that skip. It’s not as big a deal in something like a history textbook, where chapters are about specific time periods and you can go between them pretty easily. But an autobiography, that’s just weird.

Okay! I think I have resolved my computer problems and my classes. I wasn’t able to do much online the past couple of nights, because the whole SP2 mess really hosed things up. At one point my monitor decided to make itself “vertical” and I had to crane my head sideways to read anything! I got that fixed but then it refused to come out of VGA mode. All I wanted was to have things back the way they were before I tried to fiddle with SP2! Fortunately Dave Pietromonaco has written a wonderful solution for monitor problems that fixed me right up!

Today I attended the history class and I was kind of taken aback by how uninterested the students seemed. I was one of just a few that asked questions or contributed during the entire class. I happened to bump into ayala920 on my way out of class, and learned she was headed to the Honors section of the same class. She wasn’t surprised that I was unimpressed by the regular class, and told me what time the Honors section met - and it was at a time I could fit into my schedule! So this afternoon I spoke to the Honors program director and got permission to switch, and then sent my academic advisor an e-mail and she clicked the magic button. So now I’m in class with ayala920, to_be_in_snafu, and three other people - there’s just six of us in the class now! The books are nearly twice as expensive as the regular section, but I think I will enjoy it a lot more.

Goodbye deaf studies, hello history! No, not my major. But I’ve dropped DST 101 in lieu of HIS 111. The reason is that supposedly the GSR 103 class is going to replace the DST 101 class, so they might be considered equivalent, and I might not need it for the major. Time is money, and classes take time, so I spoke to my advisor today and switched into American History I. This is also required for the deaf studies major, so I have to take it eventually, and my advisor said that DST 101 is offered every semester, so I might as well take history now instead. When I went to the bookstore to check out the required books for the class, I was glad I hadn’t ended up in the Honors version - it requires four books compared to just one for the class I’m in! (Besides one honors class per semester is enough for now, and I already like my Honors English class.)

I am so frustrated with my computer, though. I managed to get SP2 installed, with the expectation that doing so would enable me to use the wifi at school, but now my computer is unbelievably slow. That’s probably why I rolled back the first time, heh. The power cord is also nearly dead, so I bought a replacement on eBay today. I really just want a new computer, but I can’t afford one. One with specs I like - XP Home, 1GB RAM, 80GB drive, and a DVD burner - is $584.50 using the discount program Gallaudet has with Dell. (I thought you couldn’t get XP with a Dell anymore; turns out you can - but you have to call them up to ask for it, you can’t get it online.) So it’s a lot, and I probably will keep fighting with my machine that is a few years old now.

Now I can finally talk about my past week of orientation. It’s been going pretty well - I can’t believe how much has happened! In the space of five days, I went from a normal member of honors to a grouch to a demoted “bridge to honors” student and back to being a full honors student. Whew!

I have also been mistaken for deaf almost constantly, and while it’s not a compliment anymore when somebody realizes I’m hearing, it’s still nice to realize that I don’t stick out like a sore thumb.

However I’ve also had an embarrassing moment that would only happen to a HUG student like me. I was in a makeup session of the ASL/Math assessment tests, and I was trying hard to concentrate. But an orientation session was also in there, and the leader was running late so the students were chatting and laughing…loudly. I got one of the test proctors to come over and asked if there was any way the other half of the room could be quieted down. I felt ridiculous asking such a thing in a deaf university, but I was trying to take a test, and I really couldn’t concentrate! They did quiet down and I was able to finish the test in peace…though I still completely bombed, hah! I didn’t even get what was going on, what the questions were, or
anything. Yikes!

I already have several of the books needed for my Deaf Studies and English classes, but there’s still a bunch more for my English class I have to buy.

I had a good experience relating to being a HUG student today. Yesterday I chatted with another HUG about whether it was culturally appropriate to participate in certain activities - I think somebody had been surprised that a hearing student could play sports for Gallaudet. Today we were sitting through class elections, and I turned to another HUG and said, “now this is the kind of thing I don’t think ’students like us’ can participate in.” Another girl behind her who knows us both said “no way! You guys can do anything, it doesn’t matter if you’re hearing.” Which is just way cool to hear, and I told her “thanks, that really makes me feel good!” I still am a little suspicious of whether it would REALLY be okay…it just feels like it would be taboo for a hearing person to be class president at a deaf college. But it’s great that at least somebody thinks it’s okay!

I am still kind of shell shocked when I browse Facebook and see all these people graduated high school in ‘07. I can’t believe I graduated high school ten years ago. I’ve been looking forward to my 10-year reunion for a while, but seeing all those ’07s just makes me feel kind of old instead!