I know many of you are in the same boat as me and Chris right now — we’re in the midst of playing musical family houses, each of us following the partner into their respective family’s houses and waiting until it’s FINALLY time to go home.
Whether you’re exasperated by playing house-pong like I am when we visit Chris’s long-divided-by-divorce family, or whether your face is about to fall off from fake-smiling as you trail your oblivious partner around her family’s house as Chris is, the holiday stress is only added to, when, like us, you’re the only deafies in the family and constantly trying to keep tabs on what’s going on.

But, much to our surprise, this years’ visits have been quite enjoyable. Eye-rolling and silent cursing still pervade, yes, but there’s also been a surprising number of good memories made. After some thought, here’s a few theories we have as to why this year has been relatively painless:

1. We invited other deafies: This is especially handy if a) the event in question is a large family dinner and b) you happen to have a longtime deaf family friend in town who isn’t doing anything that night. Bonus points if that friend has since gained a significant other: all of a sudden you’ve accumulated enough bodies to populate The Deaf Table, thus fulfilling your familial obligation to show up and show Aunt Maisie how much you’ve grown, but not to sit there bobbing your head in that perpetual deaf nod. The first time we did this, I ended up texting my mother later that night: “Can we do that again next year?”
2. We paced our itinerary: One of our best trips this year at first looked like the most exhausting — first we visited each of Chris’ parents’ houses in turn, carefully making sure our time was equally divided, and then we visited his brother’s for brunch, and then stopped by his sister’s later in the evening to drop off some furniture we’d picked up at his brother’s and ended up staying for dinner, crashing on her futon, and then traveling back upstate to see his great-grandmother, who was sick in the hospital.In all, five different stops with different family members. While it took a lot of suitcase-living and gas-tank refilling, the result was some surprisingly meaningful one-on-one time with each part of the family. We had more meaningful conversations with each relative, and there’s no doubt that that was because we’d chosen intimate meals with each in lieu of the mass family gathering. No more relying on Mom for interpreting, no more rubbing eyes ready to fall out of our head after hours of darting around the room trying to figure out who was talking now.

   In fact, I think we got access to more family gossip during this trip than we did in our entire childhoods together. Who knew they were interesting people too?!

3. We came prepared: For me, this means bringing a bottle of Jack Daniels’ and an eye mask. Har har. Historically, I just pack three or four books and hope for the best. But lately this also means bringing our laptops and knowing where wi-fi connectivity is available. This way, we get to show our families what we’ve been up to by way of our blogs or the websites of organizations and activities we’re involved in. It also serves as great insurance should certain relatives suddenly forget we exist or need to run their own errands. We’re also blessed with a kid — anytime we find ourselves at a loss for small talk, we just look over at whatever cutesy thing she’s doing (stabbing her pricey new Nintendo, for example) and giggle in shared adoration. This year we discovered Apples and Apples, a great game also available in a junior version that doesn’t actually require the hassle of slow interpreting (like, say, my family’s favorite game, Trivial Pursuit), but can be great for conversation starting. Try Cranium as well, although deafies need to be on the same team, or, if you’re all talked out, Blokus.
4. We had a better attitude: Where before our angst just seemed to multiply every second we missed a word, for some reason, this year it hasn’t seemed to matter as much as self-preservation has. Dude, these people demand to see us all the time. For better or for worse, that must mean we mean something to them, after all. We went knowing we may full well be heading into a maelstrom of emotional drama served with a side of inadvertent exclusion, but this time we scooped on an extra helping of acceptance and optimism. What mattered most to us this time around was not so much turning a family trip into a civil rights march as making sure the kid got to know the people with whom we grew up.

And if ever we found ourselves tru-biz shoved under the coffee table and smiled at whenever we made a peep, well, it was their loss. We’d just turn the page in our suspense thriller and wait for morning to come. But more often than not, we shoved the bookmark in and found someone to chat up.

The current state of affairs makes me think of possible similarities between events after the Great Depression and our national attempts at revitalizing a crippled economy. I came across an old paper that caught my eye while cleaning out my stuff at home in Florida over the turkey break. I’ve added some current context, though:

The New Deal, enacted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was successful in alleviating the mass of the great economical strike that struck corporate America in the 1930s, in terms of boosting morale. The main task at hand, of course, was to reduce the exorbitant number that Americans dreaded—the unemployment percentage.

FDR first used the catchphrase “New Deal” when he accepted the Democratic Party nomination in 1932. This program targeted three main areas, relief, recovery and reform, also known as the Three R’s. Over the first two years, relief and recovery were on top of the national agenda as short-term goals. These goals were set around a strong recovery and a reform of the events that brought on the “boom-or-bust” catastrophe.

In order to ensure a historic comeback, FDR consulted Congress in a special session where Roosevelt elected to have all changes channeled through normal governmental activity. Doing so left the resources of a struggling nation in the hands of private enterprises. This action posed a significant risk, because the Great Depression was caused by the crash of the stock market, an entity that depends on both public and private enterprises; if the private sector crumbled once again, a shaky nation would have been plunged farther into darkness and debt.
With the creation of the Securities & Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Roosevelt was not giving the banks a complete facelift; he was simply revitalizing them. The inception of such committees and organizations opened the door in the job market, a move that helped Americans regain hope in employment and began striving for a stronger nation through jobs that led to salaries, which in turn was the catalyst to an economic boost and the availability of consumer spending.

The New Deal did not restore America’s economic strength, but dovetailed with the advent of the Second World War to eradicate the Depression. Since the war demanded the majority of Americans—mostly females, wives and mothers that were home because their men had gone overseas—profits escalated and ensured the beginning of a partial economic recovery. This is evident with the unemployment rate being posted at a staggering 19.1% in 1938. Over the next two years, unemployment hit 13 and then nine percent, under FDR’s watch.

Now, with the election of Barack Obama as our 44th president, we can see some parallels in our economy as there were at the time of FDR’s election. Rather than suffering a Depression, the economy is worse for the wear, due to over-lending and over-taxing of the economy in the effects of a war that has lasted far too long, among other factors.

With the steps President-Elect Obama is taking towards boosting our stagnant economy, what ace does he hold up his sleeve?  Will his ongoing Cabinet appointments be cogs in the gears that will propel our nation forward?

Your thoughts await!

It’s been a long slog, but our usual deaf barriers for watching internet video are crumbling. Hulu.com today added a filter to its search engine to return only closed-captioned videos. I’ve been catching up on new episodes of The Simpsons for weeks now, and their captioning is wonderful.

If you have not been using Hulu, you are missing out, my friend. There are dozens of television series up there ready for you to just click’n'watch. It’s all high-quality and legal. The commercials are just 15 seconds each, and appear during the show’s natural commercial breaks for on-air television.

When you go to Hulu.com and click on either “Recently Added” or “Most Popular” in the top navigation bar, you can see a link for “Closed Captioning” at the very bottom of the list on the left side. Click on that and you’ll get only media that’s captioned. You can click on the other categories to narrow down your search to a specific category of closed-captioned video.

For example, I clicked on “Highest Rated,” “Science Fiction,” and “Closed Captioning” and boom, I learn that all episodes of Firefly are on Hulu, free and completely captioned.  Oh boy!

Their selection of captioned media keeps growing, which is great news for all of those deaf and hard-of-hearing cubicle workers out there. It is also great for me because it gives my Netflix queue more breathing room (no more Simpsons or Firefly DVDs).

If things keep going in this direction, I won’t need to watch live TV anymore. I pretty much now limit my cable watching to just On-Demand HBO and AMC for True Blood and Mad Men respectively, and my Netflix DVDs are all about Battlestar Galactica. I catch up on Grey’s Anatomy via abc.com (which also provides closed captioning but not as well-implemented as Hulu’s). I have more than 30 full-length movies waiting on my computer that I’ve ripped from my friends’ DVDs, all open-captioned via HandBrake’s burn-in subtitle feature.

And heck, if I’m ever stuck watching live TV for any reason, at least there’s always an episode of Law & Order on some channel, so I’m all set.

Gee, it’s a good thing I’ve got graduate studies to prevent me from becoming a total desk chair potato.

A friend of mine—a new teacher who just started recently—is having a rough week.  We had a long talk about teaching in general and how to get past the rough spots.  I agreed to put some of my advice for my friend into a blog in hopes that it might help someone else out, so for better or worse, here you go:

1) Wise Up.

Deaf Education isn’t just about imparting knowledge (which is what you were probably taught in college).  Deaf Education is also about the politics of being right.  From the moment you accept a job as a teacher, you are surrounded by dozens of people who not only think they’re right… they want to prove it.  Some have been burning to prove it for decades.  And some, long before you ever shook hands with them in the hall and said “hi,” had no qualms whatsoever about using you to do exactly that.

2) Recognize the difference between an administrator and a Merry-Go-Round.

I once worked in a school where a kid started whirling around inside of the classroom with a sharpened pencil in each hand.  This was only his latest disruption in a string of increasingly dangerous screw-ups.  For safety’s sake, I sent him to the office.  Before that same period was up—no exaggeration, this was less than five minutes later—the office sent him right back.  The principal felt the situation had been defused, you see, and the kid really just needed a time-out.  I was told to focus on developing some alternative classroom management skills, because my current approach wasn’t really benefitting anyone.  So in time I did develop such a skill: I learned to recognize which administrators I could trust to do their jobs, and which administrators I could trust to hand a shotgun back to a ten year-old if they thought the act would help them avoid a confrontation with Mom and Dad. 

3) Accept that even people you don’t like or agree with personally might also be good teachers.

Just because certain other teachers don’t like or respect you, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t know what they’re doing in a classroom.  Don’t reject this possibility out of pride, arrogance, or insecurity.  Accept it and make the realization your strength.  After all, if it’s true, then the reverse must logically also be true: The fact that they don’t like you doesn’t automatically make you incompetent.

4) Realize that there’s such a thing as a bad student. 

There’s a saying that goes like this: “There are no bad students, there are only bad teachers.”  My take on that?  True, but false.  The younger a student is and the less he can think for himself, the more his “bad” behavior is probably a product of bad teaching (note: not all teachers work in schools).  The older he gets, however, the more his bad habits are a product of his own continuous choices.  Once he gets past kindergarten, he’s been warned.  He has been told to finish his homework, be respectful, and not bully others.  If he arrives in your classroom and still hasn’t figured out how to do these things, it’s unlikely that his troubles are the sole result of your being too stern with him or your failure to inspire him. 

5) EROEI—live or die by it.

“Energy Returned on Energy Invested” is a brutal little equation of efficiency that demands sustainability, and it will not be denied.  If you’re putting more effort into teaching your students than they’re putting into learning from you (or conversely, if they’re a classroom full of intellectual dynamos and you’re slogging day after day through the equivalent of a mental tar pit), someone is eventually going to run out of gas.  People ultimately have bad weeks and rough spots in Deaf Education because someone has been putting too much in and someone else hasn’t been getting enough out—both usually for far too long.  So if the overall enterprise has recently started feeling like a giant net loss of energy… now you know why.