Story of the Day 10/ 19/ 2012

Sarah is still waiting to get her paper back . The one she wrote for Psychology AP.
The baby journal. The one that is in dialect.

I am rather certain that no matter how her teacher responds to this creative attempt on the part of her deaf student, the teacher will not fully appreciate where it is coming from- from Sarah's world where there are no sounds.
No regular , hick Hoosier speech, none-the-less a black southern dialect.

I am rather certain of this because Sarah is busily working on another project for this class.

Sarah is captioning some videos.

Fifteen of them.

They are short - one to five or six minutes in length.
And she is captioning them.

You see, Sarah's IEP ( Indvidual Education Plan which is the plan they provide for students in special education) states that all videos shown in her classes are to be captioned.

If they are not .... wait, it says "all" so how could they not....?
Yes, but in the years Sarah, and Aaron before her, have been at this school, you would be amazed how many times the videos have not been captioned....
So, if they are not, Sarah is to be provided with a transcript of the video, given time to read the transcript before viewing and then be able to view the video.

And if there is no transcript, then Sarah will be provided the opportunity to watch the video with the interpreter - who will be interpreting it.

Which is what happened.

It didn't work very well.

The videos , not all, but some, had poor sound quality which was made even harder to listen to because of assorted accents, and the fact that Sarah's interpreter is hard-of-hearing- as in wears hearing aids.
And a few of them were done at a hyped-up-on-a-heck-of-a-lot-of-caffeine rate.

After watching the videos, Sarah realized that the next deaf or hard-of-hearing student taking the class would have the same problems; so Sarah offered , to the teacher, to caption them.

Sarah started working on this a couple of weeks ago.
Over the week of fall break,which was last week, Sarah spent a few days having her old mother write down what was on the videos, because, after all, Sarah cannot hear them.
Then Sarah typed up all of the captions.
But, now, comes the next part of the problem, putting the captions on the video; because if you cannot hear the video, you cannot be sure you have put the captioning in the correct spot.
That is what she is currently trying to work on.

In the meanwhile, Sarah's old mother is very certain the the teacher has no idea what Sarah is doing to caption these, or what it means to have the deaf student do the captioning.

Which is why I can't imagine that the teacher is going to get the full import of what it means when Sarah writes a paper in dialect.