Month: October 2022

When I was a kid, I never really thought that much about being deaf. Sure, I couldn’t hear, but I felt like I had a pretty similar upbringing to most other kids. I went to school, didn’t enjoy homework, was forced to play soccer for a few years, etc. You know–the usual.

But it wasn’t until I started doing these blogs that I really started to parse back through my life to see what really was different upon reconsideration, and to my surprise, it started basically at the moment of my birth.

As soon as I was born, I was rushed to a hearing screening room (as was typical for the hospital I was born in), and promptly started my life by failing a test.

Incredible. Just fantastic. Little did I know, this would be an omen for years to come…

But I digress.

So, my first time disappointing my parents (just barely out of the womb) achieved, I set out to become the most difficult child on the face of the planet.

That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it probably didn’t feel too different for my parents, especially considering all they had to deal with in order to get me to a point where I could essentially be normal. They took me to numerous audiologists, hospitals, surgeons, etc. in order to finalize how I would get my cochlear implants and what kind of cochlear implants I would get.

That’s not all they did, though. They also spent that time teaching me American Sign Language so that there was at least some way that I could converse with them. 

There is some mild controversy about whether or not sign language in combination with spoken language assists a child in learning language, as opposed to just waiting for them to get cochlear implants, and according to one study from the National Library of Medicine, there is no advantage to parents’ use of sign language either before or after cochlear implantation. This study is cited at the bottom of the post, if you are interested in looking into it beyond the very basic overview I just gave you.

Regardless of the situation, I was made to learn sign language. I, unfortunately, do not remember it today, but at the time I was about as close to fluent as a less-than-one-year-old could be.

After I received the surgery that put magnets into my head in order for my cochlear implants to function, I ran into two more problems. Well, one was really just an inconvenience, and the other was actually more of a problem.

The inconvenience was the “Wearable sound processor” that was my first foray into sound and hearing. It was functional, but it was, comparatively to my very small child-like frame, massive. 

This is an image of it that doesn’t do the size and weight of it justice:

Source: https://collection.maas.museum/object/415633 

It somewhat reminds me of the progression of lightsabers in Star Wars, honestly. A massive battery pack that somewhat resembles a proto-saber in unwieldiness and size eventually evolving to something a lot more sleek and slight. I had to wear a whole harness in order to use this processor, and it was something that I was used to back then, but would be a total nightmare now.

Looking back at where I started, I am, quite frankly, ecstatic at how far we have come in regards to technology and knowledge about deafness. I’m especially glad that I don’t have to wear that blasted harness anymore. What a time to be alive!

 

Sources:

Geers, A. E., Mitchell, C. M., Warner-Czyz, A., Wang, N. Y., Eisenberg, L. S., & CDaCI Investigative Team (2017). Early Sign Language Exposure and Cochlear Implantation Benefits. Pediatrics, 140(1), e20163489. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2016-3489 

My list of sources thus far for the assignment are the following (they will not be in APA as of now, but will be once I finalize my list and see what is actually referenced and utilized in the essay):

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/teaching/myth-eyewitness-testimony-is-the-best-kind-of-evidence.html

• Examples of eyewitness testimony in use, contrasted with the intense fallibility of eyewitness testimony in comparison to DNA analysis as a comparatively trustworthy source of evidence. This source also draws attention to the Innocence Project, which is a nonprofit organization that showed that of 358 individuals sentenced to death since 1989, 71% of them had been convicted through eyewitness misidentification. This source also indicates how eyewitness testimony is subject to unconscious memory distortions and biases.

https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-13-3-c-how-reliable-are-eyewitnesses 

• This source expands on the evidence and information above, alongside including a specific case in which an individual by the name of Frederick Daye was wrongfully accused of rape and sentenced to over a decade in prison due to faulty eyewitness testimony. The source goes on to draw attention to numerous studies that consistently determine that approximately half of all wrongful convictions in court are from eyewitness mistakes.
• The source also notes the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 ruled that “not all testimony is created equally valid or invalid,” indicating that a major change has occurred from eyewitness testimony being the most reliable to now being needed to be presented with a grain of salt to the jury (in modern justice settings, the jurors are often, if not always, told that eyewitness testimony is faulty and subject to error).

https://courses2.cit.cornell.edu/sociallaw/FlowersCase/eyewitnesstestimony.html

• This source discusses the history of eyewitness testimony and how it has fallen from “its lofty standing” of the perfect piece of evidence.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/eyewitness-testimony-loses-legal-ground-in-state-supreme-court/

• This source discusses how eyewitness testimony has lost much of its value and trustworthiness in the New Jersey Supreme Court, as they have changed the standards for admitting eyewitness testimony as reliable evidence. This is a move away from the 1977 guidelines for the Supreme Court, indicating a shift in the usage and reliance on eyewitness testimony.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-equation/202201/wrongful-convictions-memory-and-eyewitness-testimony

• This source more in-depth provides reasoning for the loss of trust in eyewitness testimony and the science behind memory.

https://files.deathpenaltyinfo.org/legacy/files/pdf/StudyCWC2001A.pdf

• This source provides 46 examples of cases that were reliant on faulty eyewitness testimony that resulted in the death penalty for innocent individuals.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.1487

• A century ago (1908), Hugo Munsterberg first suggested the idea that eyewitness testimony was not a reliable method through which to prosecute a potential criminal–he was met with scorn, backlash, and harsh criticism–for who wants to believe that our eyes are misleading us?
• However, now, it is common knowledge in legal and psychological circles the fallibility of eyewitness testimony, and in 2011, the New Jersey Supreme court created new rules that weaken the ability of eyewitness testimony to sway the jury, for judges must in depth explain each and every influence that could cause the witness to misremember the facts of the situation. This is part of a nationwide court reform to try to change the usage of eyewitness testimony and lower the rate of false convictions.
  • • https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/nyregion/in-new-jersey-rules-changed-on-witness-ids.html 

I briefly touched on school from a deaf person’s perspective last week as part of the “everyday experience of being deaf,” but I thought that this week, I would go a bit more in-depth with it, since school has, understandably, been one of, if not the largest part of my life for the past thirteen-ish years, and since I have been deaf for all of those thirteen-ish years, I have about thirteen-ish years of being disabled in the American school system, which means I have about thirteen-ish years of grievances, compliments, complaints, “meh”s, and anything in between–so let’s dive in.

First and foremost, like I discussed in the “‘deaf,’ ‘death,’ and ‘Deaf’” post a handful of weeks ago, I went through several years of speech therapy prior to being put in school so that I could keep up with my naturally hearing peers. This speech therapy, however, despite ending near this point in my life (give or take a few years), was promptly replaced with OT–Occupational Therapy.

This happened because of something that I mentioned in my last post–my IEP. My Individualized Educational Program.

Why Occupational Therapy was seen as a suitable replacement for speech therapy or even viewed as necessary was beyond me, but it allowed me to get out of classes I didn’t enjoy or were good at (Music because I’m deaf and it doesn’t make sense to me, and Art because I suck at it), so it at least served some useful purpose.

However, this was the only aspect of my IEP that I did not view as strictly necessary–the rest were rather simple, but overall game changing for a deaf student. Across Elementary and Middle school, my IEP consisted mainly of a few seemingly minor changes/necessities, but they helped immensely.

First and foremost was a seating requirement. Due to my ability to read lips, as part of my IEP I was allowed to have preferential seating in order to better hear and understand the content being covered in classes. Secondly, the teachers were required to wear and utilize amplification systems that were directly connected to my cochlear implants, allowing me to properly hear what they said. If you want examples, you can look at my previous blog post.

However, throughout high school, I had a very different experience with my IEP. Specifically, I didn’t have one.

This wasn’t because I decided I didn’t need one, and it definitely wasn’t because my parents and I didn’t want one, it was because I went to a private school for high school since my local public high school was really lacking in regards to academics and the private school made it incredibly clear to me and my parents that, under no conditions or law are they required to adhere to my IEP.

Which is such an abrasive way to start a relationship with a student attending your school–but I digress.

Luckily, my teachers were very understanding and flexible, and allowed me to essentially keep the more key aspects of my IEP, but that was because I got extremely lucky.

If they hadn’t been so understanding, I probably wouldn’t be here today.

So, the moral of the story, if anyone reading this ever ends up in a situation where you can fight for a student’s IEP to be used and not ignored, please do what you can–it might just change a student’s life.

One of my personal favorite TED talks is Will Stephen’s “How to sound smart in your TEDx talk,” simply because it combines humor with with an actually highly helpful guide to public speaking with the assistance of visual aids–in a mere six minutes, no less. By drawing direct attention to each and every aspect of his speech patterns and actions (his usage of statistics, images, gesticulation, anecdotes, tension breakers, the list goes on), while utilizing them to give a speech about “nothing” so there is no other information, Will Stephen truly impresses upon his audience the intricacies of giving these kinds of speeches–a crash course in how to give a TED talk, if you will.

In regards to topics for my unit two projects, my ideas as of now are the shift in the idea of the value of a college education, the large shift in college costs, older aspects of medicine to modern aspects of medicine, a shift from unprofessional politics to professional politics to the weird mix we have now (specifically, the founding fathers and various presidents being wildly unprofessional and uncordial compared to the idea now that our politicians need to be professional and polite), the shift from Christmas’s origins being entirely pagan to Christian, the reliability of eyewitness testimony in courts, the shift of streets being open to every individual to being reserved for cars only, and the medieval ideal of a Divine/unquestioned right to rule to a John Locke-style right of revolution.

My personal favorite of these topics, as of now, is the shift of the accuracy of eyewitness testimony now being considered largely untrustworthy. Eyewitness testimony, until the last few years, was essentially the most damning type of evidence–and it’s not hard to understand why. A trustworthy and level-headed individual who was at the scene of the crime very pointedly accusing somebody seems like a flawless piece of evidence. Well, it seemed like one until several psychological studies were conducted in recent years and eyewitness testimony was found to be incredibly unreliable and solely responsible for the incarceration of an innumerable amount of innocent individuals.

My research for this will likely consist of identifying these studies, quantifying their results, and drawing correlation and causation between reliance on eyewitness testimony and incarcerations that were later proved to be false. My arguments will follow these same ideas, by pointing out numerous case studies, tangible examples, and finding and utilizing expert psychologist opinions.

I wanted to take this blog post to talk a bit about a few everyday situations as someone who has a hearing impairment. This will kinda be about whatever comes to mind or whatever I want to talk about, so things like classes, the pros and cons of being deaf on a day to day basis, just general, everyday communication with people, and some other things as well.

For the most part, the majority of my posts have been about things that aren’t so great about being deaf, or things that are relatively negative, but I want you to know that there are actually some positive things about being deaf–and I’ll be sure to point those out as I go through the day to day life of someone with a hearing disability.

First and foremost, sleeping is both great and terrible as someone who’s deaf. It’s wonderful because noise doesn’t disrupt my sleep at all, meaning that it’s considerably easier for me to sleep on the weekends than my friends, because the loud groups walking around outside don’t bother me at all.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, though, since the fact that I can’t hear when I sleep means that traditional alarms don’t really work for me. This has essentially become mostly a non-issue, though, with the invention of alarms that shake beds. It’s certainly a rude awakening, though. The main problem with not being able to hear when you sleep is that if, say, a fire alarm goes off when you’ve already fallen asleep, it’s going to be bad–which is, I feel, a pretty big understatement. The best solution that I have, as of now in the dorms, is that the lights will flash when the fire alarm goes off. With luck, it won’t ever need to happen, but who knows what the future will hold?

Usually, most of the impacts that being deaf has on my day to day life end up being on the minor side of things, but classes are an example of an important impact that my hearing impairment has. Of course, as you can probably assume, it makes classes much more difficult, period. Understanding what professors and fellow classmates are saying is much more difficult than you might realize, and it takes a lot of patience and acceptance that there are going to be things you don’t hear. Luckily, throughout grade school, I had an IEP–an Individualized Education Program, which is essentially a plan developed by parents and disability specialists to ensure that a disabled student has equal access to information and resources that allow them to actually learn in a productive way. An IEP can be made for a student with dyslexia, ADHD, Autism, deafness, blindness, etc. And now, I still have something similar, since I work with the PSU disability office for accommodations. So while the classes aren’t easy, they’re still doable and I’m still getting support–which is good.

A positive that I want to touch on, though, to end this off, is that my cochlear implants are Bluetooth–which means that I never have to buy headphones for anything. I can just connect them to my phone or my computer to listen to stuff. And if I cannot, for one reason or another, connect to something through Bluetooth, there are cochlear implant-specific devices like the ones that I have linked below if you want to read more:

https://www.cochlearimplantlife.com/home/2019/10/29/roger-select-review

https://www.cochlearimplantlife.com/home/2019/4/4/roger-pen-review

(I tried to get images inserted, but sites would not allow me to.)

On the whole, there are definitely negatives to being deaf, but there are plenty of positives, too. I guess it just depends on if the glass is half empty or half full for the day.

Idea 1: The value of a college education.

• Over time, it has become common belief/common sense that one must attend college in order to get a well-paying job and make a reasonable living. However, it was not always this way. This is, in the grand scheme of things, a relatively recent development. Just several decades ago, the amount of people that went to college was immensely smaller than it is now, and the idea about the necessity of college has also shifted. Now, it is almost expected and required to attend college for at least four years if you want to get a job beyond working at Starbucks. Some key players are the college themselves, who marketed their product as necessary, and the consumers, who saw much more success in the job market when they did indeed attend college. This idea is complicated because it is a strange development over history that was marked by gradual and total suffusion within our culture. There was no one point where some government official declared that this was how we did things now, it just slowly and naturally became a facet of American society.

Idea 2: Student debt is now a problem.

• Just like it says on the tin, student debt has now become an incredibly prevalent problem faced by our society. College used to be considerably cheaper, but it is now vastly more expensive. In 1986, for example, PSU’s average tuition cost for in-state residents was about $2,760 according to Lehighvalleylive. Now, according to the PSU admissions website, the tuition cost for PSU in 2022-2023 is approximately $19,286. This is almost a 700% increase in cost. Compared to many other inflated costs over this time, this sticks out as a massive outlier. And according to Educationdata.org, 43.4 million Americans have student loan debt as of 2022. That is approximately 13% of Americans, and, on average, according to US News data, the average debt is around $30,000. This is important for this audience to know since they are college students, and debates about waiving debt have been hovering around in the media as of late.

Idea 3: Medieval medicine to now

• Bloodletting, the four humors, plague masks, and magic are generally not considered viable treatment options today. I want to explore the shift in medicine and treatment from these actively harmful ideals to what we have now. This idea is complicated because medicine is something that we are still figuring out today, but we have made a lot of progress since the days of bloodletting. What interests me is how very real the possibility is that in the future, we may look back on how we did medicine now with the same distaste as we look at the ancient practices of bloodletting.

Sources:

https://educationdata.org/how-many-people-have-student-loans

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/see-how-student-loan-borrowing-has-changed

https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/news/2017/06/the_numbers_behind_penn_states.html

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-us-college-went-from-pitiful-to-powerful

https://admissions.psu.edu/costs-aid/tuition/