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(Please read the attachment at the bottom first - attaching it as a file is the only way I could figure out how to post the two poems side by side)
I can’t say that I know what either of these situations feels like, but I imagine that it would be something like these poems.  Living a world where you don’t feel like you belong is one of the worst feelings.  For the second poem, there is an answer for the woman.  She can go to a woman’s college and feel like she belongs.  She can learn to be proud of her womanhood.  There is a place for her.  For the first poem, the girl or boy can go to a deaf school and learn deaf pride.  A deaf school is one of the only places a deaf person can learn about his or her culture because 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents.  The problem is that these deaf schools are facing the threat of extinction.  The new educational ideal is “mainstreaming.”  This is the practice of putting disabled children into regular classes with the thought that social integration of all children is the best way to teach.  This has a giant impact on deaf students, because it isn’t just changing their educational format, it is changing their understanding of themselves:
 
During the 1980s…The reification of this phrase spawned the most prevalent outcome of the law: mainstreaming.  Mainstreaming’s proponents (many of whom are unfamiliar with the special circumstances of deafness but see special programs as a way of isolating and stigmatizing learning-disabled and emotionally disturbed children) believe that the least restrictive environment for all children is the same: regular public school.  The goal of social integration must now be achieved at any cost.  As desirable as this outcome may be for many children, for some it amounts to bad pedagogy.  For the deaf, it means the dissolution of their culture. Cohen 54
 
The basic of education is that concepts are taught in a language.  Putting a child that only knows Spanish into an English only classroom will not result in much learning.  The child needs to learn English.  America is set on this belief.  We refuse to formally teach our children in any other language but English, despite that we are the “melting pot” and so many people don’t speak English.  While I don’t entirely believe that this is the way to go about education, I am even more opposed to the fact that America is forcing deaf children to learn English and then be taught in English.  Does anyone else find this ridiculous?  Deaf people have a form of communication that works for them.  It isn’t primitive or a “dumb” form of communication, it is just different.  Why do we force our norms of communication onto them?  It would be like forcing women to pee standing up because men pee standing up.  I’m sure we could learn how and eventually aim into those urinals after a lot of practice, but why would we want to?  Why would we go through so much effort to pee standing up when we have our own way of peeing that works so well?  We sit down, men stand up: it’s a perfect system.
            Granted, up until fairly recently deaf schools were also taught in English because the general view was that oral teaching would better prepare deaf students for the world than teaching in sign.  This view has slowly changed as people realize that sign language isn’t inferior to English.  So I guess I am advocating this belief, in addition to the belief that deaf children should have their own school.  I’ve only recently started reading about deaf culture, so I have a lot of interest and ideas, but only the start of solid understanding.  It’s something I really want to continue learning about.  I am especially excited to learn sign language so I can enter into a second world.  As far as I understand it, mainstreaming will cause deaf children to live split between those two worlds, which I believe is detrimental to their education.  For part of the day deaf children are in their own class with other deaf children, and the other part of the day they are “mainstreamed” into a regular class with other hearing kids.  It will make them feel like something is wrong with them: being deaf is a problem, not something to be proud of.  It is like the kids that had to leave for part of the day in elementary school to help with their reading.  Everyone knew that they were behind on their reading, and that’s why they had to leave.  Pulling someone out of class is the best way to show everyone (and the person being pulled out) something about them is different.
            A deaf school seems to be the perfect solution.  It gives deaf children a positive view of themselves and lets them be proud of who they are instead of ashamed because they are different.  In my mind it is comparable to a woman’s college.  We could go to a co-ed school and learn, but Bryn Mawr makes us proud to be women.  A women’s college is a culture all of its own that can never be recreated at a co-ed school, even if the co-ed school had a strong feminist movement.  We will eventually enter the real world again with men, similar to how deaf children will enter the real world with hearing people, but the philosophy is that we are better prepared.  We are empowered with our physical and biological body.   I think the dissolution of deaf schools will cause deaf empowerment to fade away.  People won’t be proud to be deaf; they will view their success on how well they can assimilate into the hearing world, how well they can be “normal.”  And that is just unfair.  It’s unfair that we are all taught that the ultimate goal is to be normal.  I am proud to be a woman, and if I was deaf, I would want to have a childhood where I was taught to be proud of being deaf as well.
 
Cohen, Leah Hager. Train Go Sorry. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994.
Ramsey, Claire L. Deaf Children in Public Schools. Washington DC: Gallaudet
     University Press, 1997.
 

http://www.tsd.state.tx.us/dac/images/silver.png
 

"Deaf Pride"
http://www.harriscomm.com/catalog/images/N343.jpg
 
www.harriscomm.com/
^It's a really cool website if you want to check it out; it has products for deaf and hard of hearing people, people interested in sign language, deaf culture, hearing loss, etc.

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