Story of the Day 11/ 12/ 2009

I don’t’ have any stories.
Well, I do, there are the 4 that I sent out on a slow boat to China. I mean for approval and corrections, that seem to have gotten lost in cyberspace.
And then there is the Deaf School.
Except that Sarah asked me not to make them my Story of the Day, for several days now.
She didn’t’ say I couldn’t’ write about the public school that Aaron attended.
So, I will .
I will compare the school that I cannot write about in my Story of the Day with Aaron’s years at Northview Middle School and North Central High School.

At the Deaf School, which isn’t’ my Story of the Day, we have continual problems. Big , fate , serious ones.

At Aaron’s Middle and High schools, we had two that I can easily think of . There was the one high school teacher who had allergies. Apparently, she was allergic to the microphone for his FM system. The FM system is a microphone that the teacher wears- or students giving presentations use, and it feeds directly into Aaron’s hearing aids.
That way, if he is 15 feet away from the speaker, he can hear hem as well as if they were 4 feet away. Which is still only as well as a deaf person hears when using hearing aids, not what you probably hear, but it is a lot better than nothing.
Anyhow, the best I could figure out, this teacher was allergic to the microphone. Even the idea of wearing it made her break out in hives. So she didn’t’. She didn’t’ wear it, and she didn’t’ break out in hives. Much later, it was explained to me that she probably didn't really have an allergy to it, she just didn't like how it went with her clothes.

The other problem was the captioning. You know, the words that show up on the bottom of the TV screen if you turn that function on.

This allergy wasn’t confined to one teacher. We had two in high school who suffered from the affliction. A Biology teacher and the Hebrew teacher.

In Middles school, only one teacher appeared to be allergic, and it was the health teacher. Health. You know, the word they substitute for SEX ed. They do that because none of the teachers can keep a straight face while saying the word “sex”, and if they did manage to keep a straight face long enough to actually say it clearly enough for a student to hear, word might get home to the parents. At that point, there would be a sudden legal action taken against the school by a very offended parent or parents. The exact same parents whose child is most likely to get an STD or become pregnant before the end of middle school, since they also have never said that word or explained it , at home.
But, back to the teacher. The Health teacher.

She was apparently very allergic to captioning. At least, that is what I initially presumed. Except that I was wrong.
It turns out that the teacher wasn’t’ actually allergic to the captioning. The videos that taught about “reproductive systems” were antiquated.

I know about antiquated. My friend Harriet has explained to me about computers and antiquated. When she and her husband bought their first brand new computer, they bought a computer that was just below the top of the line. The husband said it would last forever it had so much memory. It would be ridiculous to get anything faster. And that was in about 1991. It became antiquated. But she was able to keep it. It makes a great doorstop.

Of course, Harriet is no longer married to that husband, he has also become antiquated, but she doesn’t’ use him for a doorstop.

Okay, I don’t’ think she actually kept the old computer as a doorstop. But she could have.

I have a cousin who was very concerned with computers becoming antiquated. This was about 10 years ago. In 1999. He was sure that there was going to be a major crisis, too, when they all blinked out over the date change that apparently the computers weren’t prepared for. So, he had stockpiled food , water and ammo in a rural place he likes and he kept urging me to do the same.

But back to the videos.
The videos were antiquated.
I know this because my son took that class in 2003 or 2004. And those videos weren’t’ captioned.
If they were made to be sold after 1995, they would have been required to be captioned. Mind you, I didn’t’ say made after 1995. Made to be sold after 1995. That is because the legislation was coming for a while. The date had been set, and companies planning on not having to spend a fortune to re-edit videos were actually captioning them well in advance, so that they would only pay to have them edited once….as well as not being stuck with a bunch of videos they couldn’t’ sell.
You see, it is a little different than buying copy of a 1950 classic. That videotape…ooooh, speaking of antiquated!...that videotape could have sat on the shelf and not have been captioned, even if you bought it in 2009…because it was sitting on the shelf. But we are talking educational materials for sale to schools. Those don’t’ get stuck o the shelf at Target, or in the bin at Best Buy. They are taken around and touted and then ordered.
So, the company was not planning on marketing these videos by 1995.
At any rate, these dusty, musty videos that saved the teacher from actually ever having to say, not just the word sex but also copulation, masturbation and erection, were pulled out and shown to his “health” class every day for weeks. And then the kids were tested on the material.
As soon as the problem arose, I started complaining.
Well, my kids was sitting in class day after day watching uncaptioned videos.
And he was going to be tested on the material. For some reason, I seemed to think this might be a problem.

You see, for Aaron to watch the videos un-captioned is like having the rest of the class sitting I the room day after day and watching an un-captioned video, with the sound turned off. And then being tested on what they learned. Well, actually, didn’t learn.
So I complained.

And the resource teacher- the cute little thing who I could pick up with one hand, except that she is taller than I am, went off to try to fix the situation. Which turned out to be unfixable.
You see, those were the only videos they had. No, not the sales people or the catalogues, but the school. And we couldn’t’ interrupt the smooth flow of the health class to try to order some captioned ones.
And , no, the teacher didn’t’ have enough time to either explain what was in the videos or to write down everything in the videos to get the information to Aaron. Apparently, not only could she not say the word sex, she couldn’t’ write it, either. A very serious allergy, I must say.
And while I understand the issue with it being too expensive to just up and order a whole new set of videos for the class, I think the school could have bought the teacher a nice big bottle of Benadryl and she could have presented at least some of the information in a lecture. Except, apparently this went against their zero tolerance policy on drugs.

And , no, they couldn’t turn the sound off to make the situation equal for all the students. So Aaron would just have to take the test, never having been given the information.

Which isn’t exactly what happened , either. That is because my son is a serious student. During some of the videos, and after some of them, he would ask his classmates what the video had been about. He was asking other 13 ad 14 year old boys to recap the lesson.

So, we settled for the next best thing. The teacher couldn’t’ teach him the material because of her allergies, and the video couldn’t’ teach him because it wasn’t’ captioned, but the students could. So, they had to test Aaron on what the classmates taught him…which meant they had to accept the vocabulary he learned from them as correct in answering the questions on the test.

Apparently, the teacher’s allergies didn’t extend so far as to prevent her from Xeroxing the tests, you see.

Incidentally, unlike the parents previously mentioned in the Story, I am not allergic to the word “sex”. And I had explained body functions and sex and even…..you might want to cover your eyes…birth control with my son when he was much younger. Which, incidentally, is really a better time to start the discussion, not a year after some of those students have already been exposed to the allergens.
But I never taught him the vocabulary he needed for the test. In English. You see, my son’s first language is ASL, so that is what I used to explain things to him which, to be honest, makes everything much clearer.

But thanks to the efforts of his classmates to help him learn the material in English, Aaron was able to pass the test, although they had to accept answers like “boner” to their questions.