Ageless Passions by Karen Putz

Category: Uncategorized

  • Central Institute for the Deaf–My Sister’s Memories

    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. 🙂

  • Wordless Wednesday–Dreaming of Summer

    It’s freezing cold in Chicago and I’m dreaming of summer at the lake!

    Happy Wordless Wednesday!

  • Neil McDevitt, Firefighter


    At a recent Illinois Hands & Voices Parent Connection meeting, a parent shared her heartbreak when her young deaf son expressed a desire to grow up and become a fireman. “I know he won’t be able to be a fireman, but there’s other things he can do,” she said.

    Oh yes, I told her, he can become a fireman. And girls can grow up to be firefighters as well. I told her about the firefighter I knew who worked in a town near me. About Mike McConnell, a forest hydrologist who is trained to fight fires as well. And about a volunteer firefighter that I found through a blog, the Deaf Firefighter’s Blog.

    The mom’s eyes grew wide. I could see her attitude shifting, to one of great hope for her son’s future as another barrier came tumbling down.

    I had the pleasure of chatting with Neil McDevitt, a volunteer firefighter with the Montgomery Township Fire Department in Pennsylvania. Neil has been a volunteer with the department since 2003. When he’s not on duty, he works full time as a Program Director for the Community Emergency Preparedness Information Network (CEPIN) at Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Inc. (TDI).

    “Our program is a FEMA-recognized training partner,” said Neil. “We developed a class called “Emergency Responders and the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Community: Taking the First Steps to Disaster Preparedness” and we’re also working on some other new programs as well.”

    Neil wears a pager at all times and “Yes, I sleep with it on,” he shares. As a firefighter, Neil has encountered house fires and car accidents where people have died but he prefers to focus on the positive attributes of his job.

    “My most memorable experience happened a few months ago. A group of students from the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf in Philadelphia came to my fire house for a tour.” Neil had planned to teach his regular session on fire safety, but when the students arrived, he quickly realized that he needed to switch his approach to include the deaf students with developmental disabilities.

    “I wanted to give the kids some hands-on activities, so I asked a firefighter to start one of the trucks and lay out a small hose line. We set up some cones and put tennis balls on top of them. Then we gave the kids the hose line and told them to knock the balls off.” Neil took great delight in seeing the smiles on the student’s faces. “What really made it special for me was one young boy who was severely developmentally disabled—he showed no expression during any of the previous activities and he suddenly lit up in a big smile when he touched that hose line.”

    When Neil first began as a volunteer, he taught a class on non-verbal communication. “My reasoning for this was that firefighters already use a lot of non-verbal communication but they never really consciously thought about it,” said Neil. “Rather than teaching ‘ASL101’ and forcing them to learn something new, I personally feel it’s more effective to make them more conscious of what they’re already doing.”

    One of the tough aspects of the job is the challenge of funding interpreters for meetings and trainings. “I know it’s easy to say that it is required by the Americans With Disabilities Act—that they should be paying for it, period. If it was a paying job, I would have no problems requesting interpreters left and right,” said Neil. “However, this is a volunteer organization and my feeling was, if I came in ‘demanding’ interpreters, then I would win the battle but lose the war.” Neil, instead, tried to use creative approaches to cover the cost of interpreters. For trainings held by the county or a training academy, the interpreters were willingly covered upon request. Neil was able to obtain a small grant from Prudential Insurance company to cover the cost of interpreters for other meetings.

    Neil has plans in the works to include a new position into his role as a volunteer firefighter. “Right now, I have a proposal with the Chief to create a Public Information Officer position in the department and assign me to that role,” said Neil. “We’ll be meeting to discuss that a little later in the year. Basically, the Public Information Officer is the person who works with the media and public to inform them of what’s going on with the incident.”
    For every mom of a deaf and hard of hearing child who dreams of being a firefighter, Neil has this to share: “It really is a rewarding job. You’re giving back to your community, helping people in a very real and tangible way. Even if a deaf person isn’t the one in front of the hose and putting the water on the fire, they’re all working toward a common goal. I hope I never have to use American Sign Language for a deaf victim (especially since I know practically every deaf person in the township!) but I also know that I bring a talent to the table that very few departments are able to.”

  • Mom’s Night Inn–Rested and Exhausted!


    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:

  • The Dance of Language, by Sara Kennedy


    I met Sara Kennedy several years ago when I first joined the board of Hands & Voices. I knew I liked this hip mom from the beginning, as she was also a homebirth mom. Sara wrote a beautiful article about the delicate dance of language and communication and I wanted to share it with my readers:

    Not so long ago, I looked down at a 14 month old toddler in my lap after learning that she could not hear. Those intense blue eyes confounded me – did I know her? Did she know me? Communication as I had known it halted altogether. Sara Madeleine became again, in my fear of the unknown, the little stranger that she had been to me on her first day of life, before we started the dance of learning to know one another. Like most parents, I don’t think I heard another word the audiologists said after “your daughter has a profound hearing loss.”

    As a health care provider, what surprised me next was that it was up to us, as parents, to decide how we wanted to communicate with her. There weren’t reams of double blind randomized controlled trials to tell us that a majority of children learned to read and write well or to speak or to become CEO’s with this or that method. It was up to us, a couple who couldn’t yet define otoacoustic emissions or knew anything about the oppression of Deaf people in history… to choose Maddie’s first language.

    To read Sara’s full article go here: The Dance of Language.

  • Wordless Wednesday–Two Hours in a Beauty Salon

    My Mother-in-law gave me a gift certificate to her salon because a few scraggly gray hairs popped up over the summer. The kids noticed.

    “Mom, you’ve got GRAY hairs!” they announced on one beautiful sunny day. You’ll note that they added an “s” to that sentence.

    I’m no longer a dye virgin. Today, I spent two hours at the Lush salon. I had no idea a shampoo could feel so good. The last time I was shampoo’d by someone was on my wedding day (and no, it wasn’t the hubby).

    Happy Wordless Wednesday!

  • June Prusak, Manager of a Youth Program

    June Prusak has a fun job. She gets to go swimming, scuba diving, bowling, shopping, and rock climbing. She’s been hit by dodgeballs, volleyballs and basketballs. And every year in July, she gets to scream along with the other deaf and hard of hearing kids on the roller coasters.

    June is the Youth Program Coordinator at Chicago Hearing Society. She graduated from Gallaudet University with a B.S. degree in Leisure Studies, Therapeutic Recreation. For the last ten and half years, she’s been planning fun activities for deaf and hard of hearing youth age seven to high school in the Chicago area.

    “The best part of my job is being with deaf and hard of hearing kids!” said June. “I get to play with them, talk with them and use recreation opportunites to teach them about life, responsibilities, leadership and communication.”

    June runs the Adult Role Model in Education of the Deaf (ARMED) program and does approximately 65 presentations per year. The program sends a deaf or hard of hearing role model to different schools and the students get a chance to learn about professions and ask questions. For students with Ushers Syndrome, June arranges it so that each student can have one-on-one time with the role model to ask questions about being deaf blind.

    There were many memorable role models throughout the years, but Chef Matt Krueger from Indianapolis stood out. “He did a cooking demonstration with the junior high kids,” said June. “It was a hands-on kind of role model instead of the usual presentation.”

    June sets up a variety of activities throughout the year. A lot of her time is spent making arrangements for the event and making sure that releases are signed and transportation is arranged. “The worse part of the job is waiting for parents to pick up their kids,” said June. She once waited at a police station for three hours when a parent finally showed up at midnight. June also runs a Leadership Workshop where the kids learn leadership skills and gain confidence. June helps them identify areas of strength and work on things they can improve.

    The kids often look up to June as a role model but June recalls taking a SCUBA class for the first time with a group of deaf and hard of hearing teens that turned into a teachable moment. “The teens struggled with the SCUBA textbook, but it was easy for me. However, in the lake, the teens did every skills test and passed easily while I struggled in the water, due to my ears. It was nice for the teens to see me struggle.”

    “I hope and I feel like I’m giving back to the Deaf Community through the Youth Program,” said June. “I enjoy giving the deaf and hard of hearing kids the positive aspects of life, recreation, communication, Deaf Culture and so on.”

    June takes great delight in seeing the positive outcomes of her program among the deaf and hard of hearing kids as they grow up. A high school student recently came up to her and recalled a lesson that she learned in sixth grade. Another student had a very resistent attitude about deaf role models as a younster, but grew up to seek out positive deaf role models after June introduced him to a deaf pilot. June has seen attitudes change and positive self esteem blossom as a result of kids meeting deaf and hard of hearing adults.

    “You never know who you impact, how you impact, when you impact, etc… until that day comes!”

  • The Impact of Hearing Loss on Kids

    Paula Rosenthal posted an interesting article from the Better Hearing Institute on her blog: One Million Youth in America with Hearing Loss May be Left Behind, National Survey Finds; Even ‘Minor’ Hearing Loss Causes Major Problems

    The study focused on unilateral and mild hearing loss and found that when left untreated, several areas of life were affected, namely:

    Social skills (52%)
    Grades in school and language development (50%)
    Emotional health (42%)
    Relationships with peers (38%)
    Self-esteem (37%)
    Relationships with family (36%)

    Also in the study was this quote:

    “Based on our findings, I am concerned that a sizeable population of young people in America is being left behind because they do not fit existing paradigms of hearing disability,” said otolaryngologist Dr. William Luxford of the House Ear Clinic, a BHI Board member and co-author of the study. “We need a fundamental re-examination of the current hearing health policies and protocols influencing America’s children with hearing loss.”

    Dr. Luxford is right. We do need a re-examination of the health policies and protocols. But those policies and protocols need to include a network of parents and hard of hearing adult role models as well as connecting kids with other kids. I would like to see that included in the solutions and perhaps we’ll see different numbers in the catagories above.

  • Captioned Radio–Don’t Read and Drive!

    Tim Poindexter over at Disaboom posted a recent release about captioned radio:

    Closed Captioned Radio? That’s Right, It’s Here!

    The first over-the-air broadcast is set for January 8, 2008.

    Back in April, 2006, the actual idea was demonstrated at a Broadcasting Conference: Harris Corporation and NPR Labs to Demonstrate New HD Radio Services for Hearing and Visually Impaired at NAB2006.

    I remember reading about this back on Jared’s Blog awhile back, but I didn’t pay attention to it much. The radio was something that has been off-limits in my life for so long, that I didn’t even think of the impact of captioned radio.

    I can imagine that captioned radio is going to be a great tool for adults and children with new implants as they’ll be able to use the radio to practice listening therapy.

    It’s going to be interesting to see how this develops. All radio transmissions are supposed to convert to digital by 2010. This doesn’t yet mean that all will be transmitting captions, but the capability is there.

    If they’re installing captioned radios in the front dash of a car– uh oh! I have a feeling we’ll be seeing some multi-tasking drivers out there.

  • Non-Fiction, Non-Captioned Movies

    Arrrghhhh!

    The oldest son has a few extra credit projects that include watching non-fiction movies from the library. The few movies that I found aren’t captioned, and have no English subtitles.

    I’m off to browse the Described and Captioned Media Program list to see what they have on there.

    We have encountered this same issue in the schools. I do wish that we could make it mandatory that all educational materials be captioned so we wouldn’t have to deal with trying to substitute movies or change the curriculum.

    When my oldest was in middle school, they showed several movies without captions. It wasn’t until about the fourth movie that my son finally mentioned it to me. We had a meeting at the school and I made it clear that they needed to provide every movie with captions. The team agreed.

    When Lauren entered middle school, the vice-principal called me to the school to inform me that the science teacher had a movie that wasn’t captioned. They couldn’t find a comparable movie that was captioned. The movie covered lab safety, the same movie that my oldest son previously sat through with an interpreter before we enforced the captioning issue. My daughter doesn’t use an interpreter. What could they do?

    Well, one option was to hire a CART interpreter at the tune of $90 to $119 per hour with a minimum of two hours. His jaw dropped. Or, ship the movie out to be captioned, which could cost a pretty penny. His jaw dropped more.

    In the end, the teacher created a powerpoint instead and showed that to the class instead of using the movie. The school is now in the process of going through all of their DVDs and identifying the ones without captions and looking to replace them with captioned versions.

    If we could just pass a simple law requiring all DVDs to be captioned or subtitled, think of the energy we’d save.

    After all, as Larry Siegel says, “The importance of communication and language for deaf and hard of hearing children is so basic as to be beyond debate.”