Elizabeth Edgar: Think you are cut out to be Deaf? Here’s the pros and cons

I appreciate your effort in sharing Dr. Doman’s example. I have worn first, hearing aids from 1955 and then CI’s from 2012-14. The second example in your U-Tube presentation ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT SOUND LIKE what I heard at anytime with my CI – never. The first example is what I hear. That second example is simply nothing I have ever heard. Apparently my brain has evolved to hear beyond those limitations. So I would say you are guilty to some extent of spreading a falsehood without offering additional explanations. There are scientific explanations as to why. You provided none.

I cannot phantom how to hear music via vibrations and sign language. I do not know of any hearing people that can relate to your statement.

I find it ironic that you are trying to tell the world what something sounds like when you apparently do not hear anything? Am I right? No culturally Deaf individuals is a credible witness for what many deaf individuals who use all the hearing modalities available can do. So how can the Deaf Culture be an expert on technology that they refuse to acknowledge and use? Please respond.

Otherwise I relate to many of your examples. I have never found the Deaf Community exciting nor vibrant in my many associations with them. In general they cannot relate to doctoral level education experiences and explanations. I am told directly by interpreters to “dumb it down” because they don’t understand. They treat me as a traitor, because I was able to use my residual hearing capacities?

Why is learning Sign Language wonderful? I feel it is like accepting a gift that is unusable. Unless the Deaf Community accepts you, which they did not with me, where would I ever use it? For my personal situation it is no more relevant than learning the aboriginal native Navajo Language. Even the Navajo’s language is becoming extinct because it serves no relevant purpose beyond “culture.”

So your explanations fail many measures of correlation to explain the lives of myself and many of my peers that are becoming progressively a larger segment of the population of deaf individuals. You need to be far more careful about writing on some issues that you really have little or no comprehension of. The Ku Klux Klan positioned themselves as a Christian organization. They were absolutely un-Christian. So please, lets see some smarter and more carefully articulated and presented material from the Limping Chicken on the subject of being deaf. Fewer and fewer subscribe to the suggestions presented here.

You need to qualify that you speak for yourself and your Deaf peers but beyond that population you do not.

Beyond that I accept that you speak for yourself. Good luck.

@Elizabeth Edgar,
I share with some of your Pros and Cons Some of them require a closer look. Here among others, listed at random (not in importance):

1. I never could learn to read at accelerated pace. My reading is quite slow. I know, when I was reading a book as an 18 year old with my 10 year old brother. He always finished both sides whenever I was on the last line of the left page, although I was a “speedreader” among my deaf peers. This is because reading well and speedily requires the auditory fluency of a spoken language. Your case is extremely rare. Perhaps you belong to the top one percent in speedreading among the deaf population.

2. Perception and enjoyment of music. What we get from music is only the rhythm part of it, not the melody of tones. The vibration carries only a small portion of the sound spectrum, most likely not above 2K cps. We do perceive the most extreme low vibrations, those a human ear cannot get. I sensed the low frequency tone of a malfunction of a farming machine while my hearing father and older brother did not. We would enjoy the rhythm only after learning to associate it to our body movements. So what is dancing about for us. I essentially dance without music, as Nyle DiMarco, the winner of the Dancing With the Stars showed in one episode and made her dance partner and co-dancers dance without music for five minutes.

3. Many of your Pros are essentially accommodations to cope in the auditory world and allow us to participate as equals in it, Those accommodations are not needed within our own world.

4. Some of the Pros may be deemed to constitute Deaf Gain, our contribution to the whole world. Sign Language is one. The world-wide collegiate and collective mentality is the other one. Another pro is how a Deaf eye sees what a good architecture and cinematography should be. DeVIA as the name of the Deaf genre in visual arts emphasizes bold and contrasting colors. For example, the 16th century painter Juan Navarrete, known as “El Mudo”, engl. The Mute) changed the Italian Renaissance Style of Rafael and Tician to the Spanish Renaissance one, which emphasizes strong colors and contrasts. His style was emulated by the following hearing Spanish painters.

5. As to the Cons: Most of your Cons are audistic behaviors anyway. They need to be remediated to make the society, to which we also belong, more humane. English, like many other spoken languages, contain several audistic vocabulary and expressions. You named some already. They all presume as sine qua non the “normalcy” of being able to hear, and its lack as deficiency, requiring repair through medicine. The word “mute” and by derivation “verbal” presume the primacy of speech for communication. Sign language as an aberration, as a “non-verbal communication”.

6. Here in my area, only Deaf JW and hearing signers knock on my doors. BTW, their ASL movies are much better done than other Deaf filmmakers. The ASL is “pure”, no contamination of English signing at all.