Canadian historian James Fell has dropped another gem in his series.
–On This Day in History Shit Went Down: September 6, 1880–
It was called the Second International Congress on the Education of the Deaf, the first one having been two years previous in Paris. Lasting five days, it began on September 6, 1880, and some stupid-as-shit decisions were made. Basically, they said oralism is best, and they weren’t talking about the good kind of oral.
A few years ago, I temporarily went deaf, for about 2-months, due to an undiagnosed, non-painful ear infection. After I finally clued in, I got treatment from my GP, and my hearing came back.
I’d been living in the UK for many years by that point, and learning some basic BSL was challenging because it’s very different from ASL – even the fingerspelling alphabets are different! ASL uses 1 hand-alphabet, BSL uses 2-handed alphabet.
I was always signing to my British husband in ASL, without thinking! Fortunately, some of the signs we needed were more intuitive, so we got by. 🙂
We text each other a LOT under normal conditions, and both work from home with headphones on, so our communication has almost always been easy one way or another. If he’s got headphones on, I flicker the lights to get his attention, just like I was taught to get the Deaf teacher’s attention in ASL class.
