Thanks Heebie!
There is also a store on my website where I am putting assorted t-shirts, posters, mugs, and tote bags with my silly ASL designs on them. Just FYI.
Clearly the Montanans need to move to Nicaragua.
The first thing I tell every family I work with is that they should start thinking about whether and where they could move. I don't have Nicaragua on my list of good bicultural/bilingual deaf schools yet though
Plus if they're from MT they may have hangups about Sandinistas.
I thought you were on about the Mormons, but it is on topic.
The Montana system is currently a factory for turning out traumatized language deprived deaf people who are almost entirely disenfranchised from the hearing majority and also dependent on the state. It's so destructive and pervasive and so easy to prevent and completely impossible to undo. It's exhausting.
The children are very cute & fun though, especially before they get broken by the system
I've been trying to figure out a more chipper way to talk about stuff because I'm so prone to just spewing depressing information. But also you can't solve problems if you don't talk about them.
The latest aggravating thing that happened was we got a law passed requiring regular language assessments for all deaf & hard of hearing kids, ages 0 to 8, and requiring a remediation plan if there's any delays.* The state government specified who is qualified to do the assessments. There are zero people in the state who have the qualifications, but I got someone in California to get a Montana license. A different part of the state is insisting that the assessment has to be done by someone "local." One child has now been waiting for 5 months while everyone argues endlessly about what to do. (I have a meeting on Friday about this one.) it's so dumb.
* The status quo is to occasionally do a language assessment of someone feels like it, and then document whatever amount of delay there is, and then carry on exactly as before, making no attempt to fix it.
Grumble, grumble, gloom, doom.
I didn't know about the Martha's Vineyard congenital deafness/bilingualism thing (though I did know about Tristan da Cunha, because I come from the wrong side of the Line), which in conjunction with the horrors of MT and MA (one deaf policy per town) suggests to me an unusual human-capital-raising opportunity for some enterprising political unit (nudge, Heebieville, wink).
> The children are very cute & fun though, especially before they get broken by the system
true generally
Dammit, I just ran into Buck of all people.
I also knew nothing of the cochlear implant thing(s). According to that (10-year old) lecture some kids that get implants do fine and get full language (Spoken and heard language? Wasn't clear to me.) but most don't, and end up with neither spoken nor signed language, and no-one really knows why. Has there been progress? Is it a tech/educational/totally other problem?
I have a friend whose daughter got that. But i haven't seen them for years.
Implants and hearing aids have exponentially better technology all the time, but they don't, and probably never will, actually give anyone typical hearing.
Hearing aids make sounds louder, and they can be programmed to make certain sounds louder than other sounds. But most deaf (deaf, hard of hearing, whatever) people have very uneven hearing levels, with some sounds that they are unable to hear at any volume. (For me, it is high sounds. Heebie can tell you the story of when I did not hear the extremely loud sink leak alarm for hours and hours and flooded their kitchen.)
Cochlear implants bypass natural hearing altogether. They put a bunch of wires in the brain that are connected to the processor, which has a microphone. The processor takes the sound waves and turns them into electrical pulses. The person wearing the implant, after practicing for a while, can interpret the signals as "sounds".
Implants are getting better and better, and have more and more electrodes. I think the top-of-the-line models currently have around 30, which is a huge improvement from 10 years ago when there were about 12 (I think). Each electrode fires whenever the microphone picks up a sound in a set range of pitches. So the infinite analog sound waves are translated into 32 (or more often 22ish) beeps.
With a lot of training and practice, many people can get their brains to translate the beeps to sounds. Implants have much higher success rates with people who previously were able to hear, and know what hearing sounds like. They're increasingly successful with children, but in a crapshoot way because there's no way to know where exactly the brain is getting the wire or how well the child will be able to utilize the 32 signals. Some kids can interpret sounds and speak in ways that are pretty indistinguishable from hearing people. Some can only hear environmental noise. Some get severe headaches and can't use the implant at all.
People who are born deaf are typically implanted around 1 year of age. There's no way to predict if or how well a deaf baby will be able to use the implant until they have learned how to talk, so they can tell you about it. But if they can't use it well enough to learn to talk, then you have a problem. By the time the kid is old enough to know they have an insufficient ability to process sound through the implant, the language acquisation period is long gone, and the kid doesn't know any languages.
Unless the family has also been using a sign language.
No one knows why some people can make better use of cochlear implants than others. But everyone knows exactly why some kids are language deprived.
It's because every medical professional they met (audiologist, pediatrician, CI surgeon, CI programmer, speech therapist) told them to spend all their time and energy making the child practice using the implant, and never to sign because it impairs spoken language acquisition- if a child has access to a language that is easy to understand, they will not be motivated to practice learning the language that is difficult to understand.
All of that is false. It's been proved false by a ton of studies, some of which are now 40 years old. You prevent language deprivation by haveing your baby acquire both spoken and signed languages. Then they're either bilingual, if they can successfully use the implant, or they're a native signer who can learn English as a second language, if they can't.
But also, in Montana, a lot of the kids who get implants don't get any of the follow up support they need to learn how to use them, anyway, so there's no chance for success there. And kids who have implants just get dumped in schools with no support there either, because everyone treats them as though the implant fixed them and now they're hearing.
Also insurance usually covers implants but not hearing aids.
For speech therapists, in order to get the specific certification in Listening and Spoken Language (=working with deaf kids, rather than hearing kids with speech/language issues) they have to explicitly promise to never use or promote any sign language.
There are still multiple national organizations who spend huge amounts of money opposing any governmental or school support for sign language and promoting spoken language ONLY for all deaf children. It's ridiculous.
(The AG Bell Foundation is one of them. Deaf people hate Alexander Graham Bell.)
Anyway! I'm working on trying to fix a tiny part of an enormous and complicated problem. More money more fixing!
Tangentially relatedly, I recently got new hearing aids and they connect to my phone via Bluetooth, and I can't hear well enough to understand speech on a phone but now I can secretly listen to music while I pretend to pay attention to stuff. (And also I can hear more, and after some practice, better. I care more about the phone thing though honestly.)
I thought my boss's boss was playing Pokemon Go during the meeting like I was, but it turned out he was adjusting his hearing aid to better hear the meeting.
I remember a new story on a device that you wore on your arm, and it translated sounds into pressing on your skin in a pattern, and it took people a month or so before their brains started coordinating what they were seeing (door slams shut) with the sensation on their arm. But then, for all intents and purposes, they were hearing to a degree with it.
I thought that was very clever, and I suppose it must not work as well as a cochlear implant, but it's still an appealing idea about the plasticity of the brain.
The insurance not reliably covering hearing aids thing really sucks. One of my line attorneys is hard of hearing, and just had a miserable couple of weeks while her good hearing aids were broken and she was relying on an old set that doesn't work for her well. Finding out that on top of the hassle she was paying for it out of pocket was shocking.
It's because so many people end up requiring hearing aids due to age-related loss. Some states are requiring coverage now, but mostly the bills specify that insurance must cover hearing aids for children. So the old people are still shit out of luck.
Here's a pro tip if anyone needs hearing aids here: find out what model your audiologist wants you to use, and then look for it on ebay. People in other countries with socialized medicine or lax laws (mainly Germany and India, in my experience) will program and sell hearing aids online. They're still expensive but maybe half the list price.
Usually, cooperating with German liars doesn't work so well.
24- vibrating/tactile response vests and seats are really popular for deaf gamers. You can't understand language from it but you can be aware of changes in musical environment and guns and whatever.
Tons of people use hearing aids solely for environmental sounds (sirens, explosions, doors slamming, someone yelling, etc) and don't ever communicate via spoken language. Hearing people are usually surprised by that. But then many hearing people are surprised by a lot of very random things about deaf people.
They're not liars! They're very polite and have fast shipping!
Aren't they stealing the hearing aides from the government?
No, I think they're official retail people who buy in bulk, mostly sell to local people (paid for by the government) and also sell overstock online on the side. I don't think it's illegal.
29: updating my deaf people stereotypes accordingly
Oh. Then my apologies to the Germans. I thought they were getting free hearing aides and "losing them" to get a replacement.
My way would probably be cheaper though.
It's people who have, like 50 of one model and 100 of another model, and everything is in the original packaging unless you send your audiogram to have them program it. Entrepreneurs!
32: Not all Germans are deaf, you know. And only some deaf people are Germans.
Frankly, if I lost a hearing aide I wouldn't even want them back. Aides are supposed to take care of you, not the other way around.
. You prevent language deprivation by haveing your baby acquire both spoken and signed languages. Then they're either bilingual, if they can successfully use the implant, or they're a native signer who can learn English as a second language, if they can't.
Has anywhere implemented this as policy?
Christ, sorry about the ableist language in 37.
39: Hah
38: Lots of deaf schools, yes. No governments at any level that I know of (in the US, I think Finland or Norway or something has it as a national policy).
Not Montana though!
Besides language delays and deprivation, families usually can't communicate well with their deaf kid, who (in Montana) is usually the only deaf kid in the school. The combination of isolation, inability to communicate with anyone, and the cognitive/neurological damage that LDS causes means the adult deaf community here has a lot of very traumatized people with limited ability to function in society, so that's what everyone thinks deaf people are like, so when deaf kids start getting developmentally derailed no one is surprised and no one tries to do anything about it.
One of the things I want to spend your money on is paying for families here to go visit functional deaf schools, and paying for signing families elsewhere to come to Montana. Most of the parents have no idea that everything could be much, much better.
Clearly the Montanans need to move to Nicaragua Finland. They could keep their guns, even.
35 last: Many Germans just don't care what you are saying.
If I were Canada I would get all over this. There are maybe 3,000 (?) Americans born deaf each year. Them, plus parents and a sibling would make 12,000 free people per year. Granted they're American, so a bit substandard, but I bet they'd be ok with a tune up and an oil change.
Canada actually won't let anyone with any disabilities immigrate, and they have kicked foreigners out of the country for having disabled kids. Including a doctor who was working in some remote area and then his daughter was born with Down Syndrome so they all had to go back to England or wherever they were from.
I'm getting notifications about donations, but I can only see first names. Thank you, whichever of those people are from here!