Story of the Day 4/22/ 2011

Today, Sarah went to the Library.
She entered the Library and offered the Librarian her pass.
This is the same truly brilliant librarian from yesterday’s Story of the Day.
Today, she was already aware that Sarah is deaf. So she smiled, only it wasn’t really a smile, it was more like a huge somewhat scared grimace. And made no attempt at all to communicate. In fact, she looked rather scared that the deaf kid might try to bite her.

And this was one of the more intelligent moments of Sarah’s day.

Sarah has recently had CART added to two of her classes. CART is a service where a typist comes in and listens to what is said in the classroom, - the lecture, the student’s comments, the PA announcements- and types it onto a keyboard and the text is displayed on a screen for Sarah to read.
This service is being provided as part of an assessment to determine if it would be beneficial to Sarah.
This assessment was finished on April 18th. Except, the school never even bothered to start it, but that is another story.

Anyhow, CART is being provided in two classes, English and Biology, during this assessment period.

CART is very useful for deaf students, especially when the interpreter services are deficient. Sarah has noticed that at times the interpreter is only interpreting 1 out of every 3 sentences, and missing whole areas of information, but the real benefit has been finding out a lot more about what the classroom environment is like. She has come home very disturbed by how rude the students are to the teacher, and by the very immature language that they use. She has also been disturbed to find out that most of her classes appear to be populated by people who are probably not capable of brushing their own teeth, in the morning.

In Biology class, which is her last class of the day, one student remarked on coming into the classroom and observing the set-up, “What is this for?”
The CART typist told him, “It’s none of your business.”

A somewhat brighter student replied, “So she can see.”

The first student, apparently getting the logic of this, responded by saying “Oh, I get it!”

We don’t.