While what you said is true, I think schools can’t establish effective Bi-Bi programs if their teachers are forced to think on a year-to-year basis. Student progress needs to be tracked across several years, and the effort to utilze Bi-Bi methods needs to be consistent from year to year. If one teacher is doing everything he/she can to implement Bi-Bi methods in his or her own classroom, but then next year’s teacher isn’t building on that, that has an impact on the overall effectiveness of the program (if indeed one can even get started due to the lack of concentrated effort). Plus the gains a student makes within a single year and the gains that he makes over several years in an effective program are going to be two very different things. So I think that teachers need to start in their own classrooms, yes, but schools need to get on the ball and start changing too, in order to support those teachers (and ultimately a successful program).

The conference established oral education across the globe and as everyone has stated continues to have an impact on deaf education.

Again we have to realize that this conference was made up of experts in the field who deemed at that time 1880 that oral education was the best method and approach and they voted as such. It was a collective effort.

It is 2007 more than 127 years have passed and most all hard evidence and research still supports oral approaches to education for the deaf.

As a community we have failed to counter these arguments that continue to support oral education and thus we are where we are today.

ISD started sending the teachers to CAEBER for training… THIS YEAR! There have been a lot of practices on implementing Bi Bi philosophy at ISD, but there have been no formal training until now. Now CAEBER has been relocated to Gallaudet U.’s campus from New Mexico, I am hoping we’d see statistics soon ;o).

Following that vein of thought, you know what two problems I’d like to beat so far as WRITING is concerned in my classrooms? The preposition problem.
I have no difficulties teaching my students what prepositions are or what they’re for. I don’t even have that much of a problem teaching them where they go. But I notice over time that prepositions seem to drop out of English sentences altogether, or else without constant attention on the part of the writer, they start showing up in the wrong place. If you look at that list of classifiers Shane was talking about in his article “Deaf Ninja” you can see how the prepositions are built right into the classifier along with the nouns:
(http://www.jal.cc.il.us/ipp/Classifiers/).

I think that one place Bi-Bi writing programs should start (especially when a kid is very young), is by separating the components of classifiers and showing their equivalents in English parts of speech. There ARE equivalents to an extent, and we should be mapping the path back and forth as early as possible. Because that’s an almost overwhelming job to accomplish in one semester once these same students are in college.

From my perspective, the topics that they covered are really issues about the education, not about the education itself. I want to be clear that I am not against the discussions on the issues surrounding the education for the deaf and hard-of-hearing kids. It is important to know what are the issues but they don’t produce practical benefits for the kids and their parents. For example, the deaf school that my children are attending is not a full-fledged bi-bi school but it uses the bilingual approach in many areas. My children can’t afford to wait for the issues to be solved before they can have the best education.

One example of emphasizing on education is reading. The importance of reading is noticeably absent from DeafRead even though the name includes the word “read”. One teacher at my children’s deaf school said that reading is absolutely not an option for the deaf kids. Every day they do not read, they lag a bit behind. It may not be a big deal when we look at one day. But, it makes a big deal when we look at 10 years that have 3,652 days (or 3,653 days :-). Just imagine how powerful the influence will be on the deaf and hard-of-hearing kids when more vloggers get involved in reading.

Issues about education are fine but education itself is much more important.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
josephpietrojeungriolo@gmail.com

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this post in the public domain.

People will discuss what they’re interested in, and I think most of us aren’t passionately interested in education, nor sure about how to emphasize the importance of education is to teenagers and still attract viewers’ interest in general.