whoelse10

at my school, ISDB, (Idaho school for the deaf and the blind).. most of the teachers there are hearing... any suggestions that i can do so ISDB can have more deaf teacher... hearing teachers don't help us that much... cause they don't know sign language that well

Deafness

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Rose Immortal

Somebody else will have to give you a good answer for your question...

But I have a question for you. I apologize if this sounds stupid, but in your observation, does it seem to matter as much to the blind students, to have teachers who are also blind? I don't know enough to have idea about that.

Nesmuth

Turn on the Dr. Rachel Stone alarm!

Richard

Y

Blind students with Blind Teachers would NOT work,
but Deaf students with Deaf Teachers would work
effectively depends. People cannot compare
Apples with Oranges same thing as
they cannot compare Deaf with Blind.

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Teresh

While I am not blind, and thus I cannot imagine what it is like to be blind, blindness doesn't really have the community aspects that deafness does... ie, I do not believe there is a such thing as a Blind culture (I could be wrong, though). While I certainly would not question that on the social level people who are blind would enjoy the company of other blind people perhaps more than seeing people, but I would say that since the language barrier doesn't exist with people who are blind (written communication yes, but not speech), blind people are more apt to feeling as though blindness is a disability, whereas deaf people enter the world with a language barrier and often come to dislike interacting with hearing people because hearing people generally communicate in speech and hearing people can't hear.

Since blind people do not experience this language barrier, there's really no impetus for blind students to want their teacher to also be blind.

Deaf and hard of hearing people, however, have a different situation. Since we can't hear all (or any) of a hearing person's speech, communication requires an interpreter... Which generally doesn't do anything but make the situation more complicated. Thus, we can conclude that it would be better to have deaf instructors. The problem with this is the fact that deaf instructors are hard to come by. The number of deaf kids is increasing very rapidly... And there simply aren't enough deaf teachers to go around. :\

I think that, eventually, as more and amore deaf people become educated at Gally, CSUN, or NTID, and more people become comfortable with being deaf (even if we're OK with it, among the total of all dhh people, we only number about 10%... most people have a problem with it and deny that they are dhh even though it's obvious to everyone else), the situation for deaf students in primary and secondary schools will improve and slowly but surely deaf instructors will replace hearing ones.

Will this happen in our lifetimes? I have no idea. But I hope so.

Unegawahya

We do have blind teachers for blind students. And they do work just fine. The blind teachers work side-by-side with teachers or teacher aides who are not blind. My camp's counselor is blind himself and taught some blind children swimming with no problem. So they can't prevent a blind person from becoming a teacher. He/she will require a helper like a teacher's assistant (aide) who can see.

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O'siyo Witstatologi nihi Yigaquu osaniyu adanvto adadoligi nigohilvi nasquv utlc

Rose Immortal

Interesting to read what all of you had to say.

Like I said before, being neither blind nor deaf, I don't know enough to form my own opinion yet, but I appreciate those who took the time to write out theirs.

signer16

Although I can't say that blind people have, or believe they have, a culture; they do have many organizations and events. A very strong advocate for and of blind people is the NFB, National Federation of the Blind, much like deaf people's NAD. If you are interested in reading more, you can go to their website. They also have written a series of books, called the Kernel Book series, which can be accessed online through the NFB website.
Like deaf people, they want to show the world that they can do just about anything. Less like deaf people, there are many things, other than communication, that they need help with. Also, most of them want their blindness to be seen simply as a characterstic, not a defining part of them.

Rose Immortal

Thanks for the reading recommendation...I'll poke around there when I get some time.