I Can Hear You Whisper Read Online Free Page B

disadvantage. Mark and I would be starting at the beginning, like babies, only—unlike babies—with brains that were no longer optimized for learning a new language.
    As it happened, at that very moment, baby sign language was all the rage among the stay-at-home mothers of Brooklyn, including some of my good friends who thought signing would bolster their hearing children’s communication skills and who urged me to try their videos. This did not encourage me. Actually, it annoyed me. Faced with a child who might truly be deaf, I thought the idea of baby sign classes ridiculous and, in our case, of no more use than a knife in a gunfight. If we were going to learn to sign, we were going to have to go all-in. If I could have seen past my own prickly defenses, I might have found something useful, if limited, in those videos. After all, we had to start somewhere. I did use a handful of signs like MORE and MILK for a time, but I didn’t investigate further because I got my back up about it. I didn’t shout, “You have no fucking idea what I’m dealing with!” I took the brave passive-aggressive approach of ignoring baby sign language instead.
    Intellectually, I was interested in true American Sign Language and appreciated that ASL was a fully fledged language that could open a door to a whole new world. Over the years, my appreciation has only grown. But in my early foray into the deaf world, two things gave me pause. As I read, I discovered an aspect of the deaf community that no one is proud of: a long, alarming history of educational underachievement. Even after nearly two hundred years of concentrated effort at educating the deaf in America, the results are indisputably poor. The mean reading level of deaf adults is third or fourth grade. Between the ages of eight and eighteen, deaf and hard-of-hearing students tend to gain only one and a half years of literacy skills. Education and employment statistics are improving, but deaf and hard-of-hearing students remain more likely to drop out of high school than hearing students and less likely to graduate from college. Their earning capacity is, on average, well below that of their hearing peers. Why? Was it the fault of deaf education or of deafness itself? I did know that reading in English meant knowing English.
    Equally disturbing was the depth of the divide I perceived between the different factions in the deaf and hard-of-hearing community, which mostly split over spoken versus visual language. Although there seemed to be a history of disagreement, the harshest words and most bitter battles had come in the 1990s with the advent of the cochlear implant. The device sounded momentous and amazing to me, and that was a common reaction for a hearing person. It’s human nature to gravitate to ideas that support one’s view of the world, and hearing people have a hard time imagining that the deaf wouldn’t rather hear. As Steve Parton, the father of one of the first children implanted in the United States once put it, the fact that technology had been invented that could help them do just that seemed “a miracle of biblical proportions.”
    By the time I was thinking about this, early in 2005, the worst of the enmity had cooled. Nonetheless, clicking around the Internet and reading books and articles, I felt as if I’d entered a city under ceasefire, where the inhabitants had put down their weapons but the unease was still palpable.A few years earlier, the National Association of the Deaf, for instance, had adjusted its official position on cochlear implants to very qualified support of the device as one choice among many. It wasn’t hard, however, to find the earlier version, in which they “deplored” the decision of hearing parents to implant their children. In other reports about the controversy, I found cochlear implantation of children described as “genocide” and “child abuse.”
    No doubt those