In a recent article, “The Distrust Runs Deep on Both Sides?” the author asserts: It’s not like these parents find out their child is deaf, go on the internet, discover a deaf community sharply divided between the oral and ASL-using camps, panic, and somehow decide they’ll embrace the oral camp while never trusting any single living ASL-using deaf person ever again. Doesn’t such a supposition seem ridiculous to you [...]

  If you’re the parent of a deaf child, especially one that manages to avoid early detection from newborn hearing screenings, you might find yourself with a lot of guilt.  Though my son did fail his newborn hearing screening, he later somehow passed an otoacoustic emission test (OAE) and was declared hearing until 15 months old, despite my intuition otherwise.  In hindsight, many people say to us, “How could you [...]

I don’t normally like audiologists and speech therapists. But my perspective on talking and speaking was forever changed by an audiologist, and I will always be grateful to her for that. Her name was Venita Gragg, and I was a 4th grade student at Maryland School for the Deaf, Columbia Campus when I met her. I thought she was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen and [...]

Henry Ford famously said that his customers could have their cars in any color they wanted, as long as it was black. How’s that for wide variety of choices, eh? Well, the same is true when it comes to Deaf education. If I was oral, and wanted my child to be raised orally, I wouldn’t have the same problem faced by Henry Ford’s customers. I’d have the choice of any [...]