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on the spot:

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CURING THE MAINSTREAM SYNDROME
Pamela Wright-Meinhardt
Words: 338
[Essay]

"I have hearing everything."

Grinning, the second-day-at-a-deaf-school student looked at me, interrupting my paper-sorting. Her mouth shaped the "-ing" sound and she held the grin that resulted from forming that sound. She confidently expressed herself, not with triumph or arrogance, but with full honesty. "I have hearing everything." Her eyes searched mine for acceptance.

Peering up from my pile, my eyes listened. I paused for a moment.

A thought flashed through my mind: I knew what a Deaf person would be expected to say.

But what do I say to this child? This child who has been mainstreamed all her life. A child who knew words like infrared or epitome, but barely could string together a coherent sentence. A child whose parents had spent so much time and energy into making her "normal," and she desperately craved their approval. A child who goes home every day to parents who don't communicate with her or take the time to know whom their child really is. How could I grant acceptance to such an inane comment?

This girl was, technically, according to the PL-94142, a failure. She failed at being "included," so we were the next option. The public school systems so ardently keep their successes, but we're supposed to fix the failures. Then we're supposed to release our successes back to the public schools. In such a skewed system, the casualty of war is the children's concept of their selves.

The bright, gifted mainstreamed deaf student's graduation gift is a weak identity, but they're celebrated as a success. The average mainstreamed deaf child sorely lacks social skills and often converse in wooden and stilted manner, but they're considered a success. The ones who stay in public schools with severe language delays are passed from grade to grade and graduate with almost no viable skills, but they're considered a success.

A child who has no concept of life being anything but what she has always lived wanted my acceptance. I calmly nodded my acceptance. She will finally, now, actually learn.

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Pamela Wright-Meinhardt teaches at the Minnesota State Academy for the Deaf. She was a featured artist at Deaf Way II International Cultural Arts Festival. Her poems "Silent Howl" and "When They Tell Me . . ." appeared in the anthology Deaf American Poetry, which is available at http://www.clercscar.com/books.

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