Author: Karen Putz

This week’s Disability Blog Carnival focuses on the theme, “What Professionals Should Know About Disability” and is hosted over at Ryn Tale’s Book of Days.

If I had a dime for every time a professional predicted an outcome for a child with a disability based on what they “learned from many years in the field,” I’d be a millionaire.

Make that a zillionaire.

I’ve heard the same stories over and over from families: “My (insert professional) said that if I did (whatever it is they’re recommending) then my child would (fail, succeed, you name it) so I better follow their advice or (earthquakes will happen, the world will end.)

No kidding, I would be rich, indeed.

So here’s what I wish professionals knew:

Park Your Bias at the Door

You may feel strongly about a certain course of action, but pushing it isn’t going to help either one of us. It is one thing to share your personal belief system and your knowledge in a way that helps me to expand my own, but it’s another when you steamroll it over me or have an agenda of your own.

Expand Your Skills

You may be trained in one direction, but take a look at your profession and see if it can be expanded in other ways. Make sure you have the skills in all areas. I once had a pediatric audiologist tell me, “I don’t have much experience around deaf and hard of hearing adults.” If you’re in the business of working with children, make sure you’re familiar with the adult world they’ll be growing into.

This is My Journey, Not Yours

I do value the input that professionals have given me over the years. What annoys me is when they don’t like the direction my choices are going in and they express their opinion. Keep in mind, this is my life and my journey. Even if your professional opinion differs from mine, have the graciousness to expand your views to respect mine.

Finally, I’d like to share some tips over at Hands & Voices for those who work in early intervention with deaf and hard of hearing babies:

A Parent’s Wish List for Early Interventionists.

My oldest son’s Stanford Achievement Test results came in the mail last week. I glanced through them and was surprised to see results equal to 6th and 7th grade results. There were two results that said “PHS.”

What does “PHS” stand for, I asked the school counselor. That means the student scored “Post High School,” or college level, she replied.

Oh cool, my son at least had two results in the PHS range.

When I showed David the results of his test, he said, “But Mom, that test was so easy. How could I score so low in some areas?”

I shrugged. Maybe it was a bad day–everyone has an off day, you know?

I was at my friend Beth’s house over the weekend and she asked me about David’s scores. She was showing me her daughter’s scores and going through the papers, explaining that one of the forms was just a sample.

Uh oh.

I went home and looked more carefully at the test results. I was indeed looking at the sample results and interpreting them as David’s results. The paper that I thought was simply a deaf norm comparision was actually the test results for David. He scored a “Post High School” in every catagory.

David was happy to learn that his brain cells were working fine.

Mom, however, is still trying to figure out where hers went.

Twenty four point six million.

Read that again.

$24,600,000.

A pretty big number, eh?

That’s how much the head honcho at Tyson collects to run the world’s largest meat processing facility. The Proxy Governance firm believes that Tyson executives are over-paid: Proxy Firm Says Tyson CEO Paid Too Much.

If you remember awhile back, I had a culinary adventure with two bags of Tyson chicken parts. The outside of the bag showed beautiful white pieces of chicken. Inside both bags were mostly fatty chicken parts with a few white pieces tossed in.

So hearing that the Tyson CEO is collecting a huge amount of compensation for his job just makes me mad. How about directing the company money to produce a quality product instead?

Listen up, Tyson–you need to cut the fat from the executives’ pockets as well as your product.

Dr. Robert Davila’s book, Moments of Truth: Robert R. Davila, the Story of a Deaf Leader,was recently released and it is on my pile of “books to read”.

I first met Dr. Davila at the Chicago Hearing Society Volunteer Lunch in October, 2007. He is shown above with Jill Sahakian (CHS Director) and Mary Clark. Bob was the keynote speaker and he shared stories of growing up deaf in a large Hispanic family. His father passed away from a heart attack when he was a young boy. After he became deaf at the age of eight, his mother put him on a train to head up to the residential school over 600 miles away. Dr. Davila learned to speak Spanish at home and learned English and American Sign Language in school.

Aaron at Aaron Cues has a wonderful summary of Dr. Davila’s recent speech at the Illinois Mom’s Night Inn: A Chance Encounter with Dr. Robert Davila.

Dr. Davila impresses me with his resiliency and his strong work ethic. I look forward to reading his book: Moments of Truth: Robert R. Davila, the Story of a Deaf Leader. I’ll be sharing it with my kids as well.

My sister Linda and I recently went out to dinner at our favorite restaurant, Luigi’s House. On the way home, we were reminiscing about the past and Linda brought up some memories about her three years at Central Institute for the Deaf. We had never really talked about her time at the auditory oral school that she attended from preschool until third grade. So tonight, I asked her some questions about her memories of the school.

Linda was born with normal hearing. When she was two years old, she fell off of a chair and hit her head on the corner of a baseboard. She instantly became profoundly deaf.

My parents didn’t really know what to do. They lived in Ste. Genevieve, a very rural town with almost nothing in terms of support services. During an appointment with the family doctor, my mom learned about Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis. They brought Linda to CID to be tested and learned that she was severe-to-profoundly deaf.

“I remember Mom crying and she got up to leave the room,” Linda recalled.

Mom made the decision to have Linda live with her sister, Velma, and attend CID. Aunt Velma’s house was about 45 minutes from CID. Every morning, Linda joined another classmate, Rick Wind and one of his parents on a car ride to school. Every afternoon, Aunt Velma walked a half mile to a bus stop and rode the bus to CID to pick up Linda. They took the bus back together and walked home.

“Aunt Velma worked really hard to help me learn to listen and keep my speech going,” Linda recalled. “Every night, she would place sentences in front of me and go behind my back and I would have to practice listening to each sentence.”

That was clearly a form of Auditory Verbal therapy, and this was in the mid-1950’s, long before Auditory Verbal was widely known.

I asked Linda about her memories of school, I was curious if it matched some of the negative things I had heard about the early days of auditory oral schools.

“I really liked it at CID,” said Linda. “My memories are good ones. The teachers were wonderful. I can remember hugging them, especially Dr. Helen Lane. I would go to Dr. Lane’s office to visit her every opportunity that I could.”

Linda remembers that the teachers were strict about getting the kids to work on their speech and practice listening. “They didn’t seem to give up and they worked with us over and over.”

Linda remembers taking rhythm and music classes with a piano. She also remembers trying to identify different sounds. “When they played airplane noises, we would run around on the floor and pretend we were airplanes,” said Linda. “I also remember some objects and animals that made noise, and we had to listen to identify which object made which noise.”

Linda went to Northern Illinois University and attended the Program for Hearing Impaired for one year. She was introduced to American Sign Language at NIU–just as I was many years later. Linda moved to Michigan a few years ago and she’s been getting involved in the deaf clubs up there.

In the family photo above, Linda is second from the left in the back. I’m not in that photo, I wasn’t conceived at that point. 🙂

Illinois Hands & Voices hosted a Mom’s Night Inn this weekend. This is an event that I always look forward to. Not only is it a weekend to connect with other moms of deaf and hard of hearing children, but it is a fun learning experience as well. This is the third year we’ve hosted the event and we used a new location this time which seemed to work out well.

On Saturday, we had Leeanne Seaver from Hands & Voices as a guest speaker and she did a presentation on “Beginning With the End in Mind.” We had pizza and salad for dinner, crafts, massages and manicures. There was more food later that night (lots of chocolate!) and some great discussions.

We were so fortunate to have Dr. Robert Davila from Gallaudet join us on Sunday morning, thanks to our board member, Mary Clark. We had a parent and child panel and it was interesting to get both perspectives: the parent’s story and the deaf/hard of hearing child.

Here are some photos from the weekend:

Fun crafts included votive candle holders and inspirational bracelets!

The panel:

Leeanne Seaver, Dr. Davila and me: