85% of deaf children attend mainstream public schools and many deaf advocates will say this is a good thing. Deafness is, after all, part of our society and deaf children need to be part of the world. But good intentions and good educational practices are two different things. And many deaf children don't receive the same quality of education as their hearing classmates.
Rachel Zemach is a deaf educator who spent a decade teaching at a mainstream school and also spent time teaching at the California School for the Deaf in Fremont, California. And she's the author of the new book, The Butterfly Cage.
The following is a transcript of a conversation between Matthew LaPlante and Rachel Zemach
Matthew LaPlante
From Utah Public Radio, this is UnDisciplined. I'm Matthew LaPlante. At the heart of Rachel Zemach's recent memoir are a few seemingly simple and sensible premises. Deaf children should have access to sign language from birth. They should be educated in the company of significant numbers of their peers. And they should be taught by both deaf and hearing teachers to become healthy achieving members of the Deaf community and wider society. But Zemach, who is deaf, writes that in her experience, that's not at all what's happening. A national effort to mainstream deaf children into hearing schools might have well-intended objectives, but it's missing any real sense of accountability for actual results. And the actual result as Zemach describes, is that many deaf children are being left behind. Zemach has seen deaf education from at least three significant perspectives. First, she became deaf at the age of 10, and so she understands how deaf children are taught from her experience as a deaf child. She also spent 10 years teaching a deaf class in a mainstream public school, and so she's seen deaf education from that viewpoint as well. Third, she most recently taught at one of the world's oldest and largest schools for the Deaf, where she has written that she and many of our students were able to thrive. Zemach has written about her experiences for USA Today, The Huffington Post and the Florida Sun Sentinel, among other publications. Her new book is called The Butterfly Cage. Rachel Zemach, welcome.
Rachel Zemach
Yes. Good to be here.
Matthew LaPlante
Rachel, because I do not sign we're working together today with the help of a speech-to-text program and you're answering with your own voice. But you've written before that there are many times in life in which even though you speak in a way that doesn't sound deaf to a lot of hearing people, you would love to be able to stop speaking. Can you talk about that?
Rachel Zemach
Yes. The problem with speaking well, with speaking in a voice that is fairly normal, is that hearing people just don't believe I'm deaf. And so they keep talking to me. And I have to keep trying to lip-read them and understand them, which I'm very bad at. I'm bad at lip reading and lip reading itself, it's very hard. So the more I speak, and the better I speak, the more psychologically people are convinced that I can hear. So that's where the problem is.
Matthew LaPlante
And for you the way that their voices are translated into your hearing into your physical hearing... and you've written this is like, a bunch of gobbly gook words right?
Rachel Zemach
Exactly, the hearing aid will amplify sound, but the sound doesn't make any sense. So for example, I listen to music all the time. But I have no idea what the words are to any of my favorite songs. I don't know any of the words in them, because that doesn't come across through the hearing aid. It comes from lip reading or having context. But the hearing aid alone isn't enough to make anything intelligible. Just louder.
Matthew LaPlante
And I think a lot of hearing people might hear that and say, Oh, well, I don't sign so what choices are there, but there are so many different choices now, more than ever for communication that is more equitable.
Rachel Zemach
Yeah, that's a great point that you made. And it's very important because technology now has given us access to tons of different ways that deaf and hearing people can communicate. One of them is this way. I'm talking to you and I'm understanding you via captions that are coming on the computer. And I could also understand hearing people through a voice-to-text app on my phone. And then deaf people have different kinds of telephones, we could use an interpreter on the telephone. We could use an interpreter on a Zoom meeting. There's many different ways. And the fear that people have that this is going to be too difficult. If you can't lip-read me and I can't sign, you know, then we're screwed.
Matthew LaPlante
With all the extra work that it takes even in the best of situations to communicate with a person who is hearing but does not know sign language, it must feel like a breath of fresh air to be at a table of friends, who all speak the same language in American Sign Language.
Rachel Zemach
Yeah, that's huge. In fact, I was at a Deaf gathering recently, a social gathering. And one of the phrases that deaf people very often say, at gatherings like that is that the reason they have them is they need their "Deaf fix." And it's true. When you live in the hearing world, and communication is constantly a struggle, and an ordeal and an obstacle. You don't take communication for granted ever. And then when you're around deaf people, all of a sudden, communication is easy, effortless, fun, and it's a huge positive, it's in and of itself, it's a wonderful thing, just to be able to communicate without any obstacles or hard work.
Matthew LaPlante
And on the other side of that would be the experience of being the only deaf person in a room full of hearing people or a community full of hearing people, you became deaf at the age of 10. And, among other challenges you faced, as you transitioned into this new part of your life, you've written that there were many times that you felt very lonely.
Rachel Zemach
Absolutely, I would say it's one of the most lonely feelings a human can have. To be in a room where you may be with your family, you may be with people who know you very, very well, and who are the closest people in your life, but you can't understand their conversation. And they don't know that. They don't realize it. And it's a shocking situation to be in because you want to understand them. And you feel that they should know what you're understanding and what you're not. But the reality is, all of a sudden, in a group conversation, the challenge of lip reading and understanding somebody becomes insurmountable. Because of the dynamics of a group conversation. It moves too fast and often the topic will suddenly jump from one thing to another, and you don't realize that. It's a very painful experience, to be honest.
Matthew LaPlante
You love teaching. When did you recognize that you wanted to teach and that specifically, you really wanted to teach other individuals who are also deaf?
Rachel Zemach
I think when I started babysitting when I was about 12, we lived in England, and I got interested at that point. And then I started reading books about Maria Montessori and her method got more into it. And every time I worked with children or was around children, their their imaginations, their freedom of thought, their intelligence, how quickly they learned, it was all fun to me, and captivating. And then when I became deaf at age 10, I realized, okay, I cannot teach hearing people because lip reading them, especially children who have very high pitched voices, and if I'm teaching a class from I have to find out where they are, in order to understand them and then try to lip read them from across the room. Just impossible. So the logical thing was to teach deaf kids and also, I felt I had something to bring to the table. I have experience, I have passion. And you're right, I absolutely love teaching.
Matthew LaPlante
To accomplish that you went to school at San Francisco State University and the deaf education program there was run and taught by hearing teachers. And this was pretty standard across lots of programs you write with results that range from, as you put it dismal to dismaying. But you did along the way, catch them glimpses of what really good deaf teaching by deaf people could look and feel like, can you tell me about some of those glimpses?
Rachel Zemach
Yeah, I mean, the main one for me, was a mentor teacher. In San Francisco in the Mission District, there was a woman named Rita Foudy. And she was a deaf woman. And by the time I did my internship with her, I had had so many horrendous experiences in other deaf classrooms. The deaf programs that I went to, they were all run by hearing people. And they were incredibly bad, most of them. And I was beginning to think teaching was not the right career for me. When I landed this internship, and the teacher was passionate about her job, she was so passionate that in the internship when I took off her her class, and she would do paperwork during the week that I was teaching her class. And I would see her in the hallway. And she was looking depressed. And I couldn't understand why she was getting more and more depressed every day. And finally, I realized she was missing teaching. And that's how much she loved teaching. And later, I came to understand it, because I felt the same way.
Matthew LaPlante
You first went to work teaching deaf children in a mainstream school. And there was something that, in retrospect, was very telling about the job, what the job would be, and how you would be treated and how your students would be treated. And this came during the interview, the administrator who is hiring you, you wrote didn't seem concerned at all about assessing your signing skills. And that's something that really should have been very important, isn't it?
Rachel Zemach
Yeah. Absolutely. If you're teaching deaf children, the number one thing that they need is language. Because most deaf children grow up with hearing parents who don't sign or who just have made up some homemade signs. So it's not real language, at the level that a brain can develop fully, or a teacher can educate a child. For those things, they need a real comprehensive, complete language. So most of my students came to my class in kindergarten, and they did not have language. They were intelligent. And they were very quick to learn. And they were wonderful. But if I asked them a question, like, what did you do on the weekend? Or your birthday was yesterday, did you have a party? They couldn't answer me. So I had to teach them language. And using ASL that was very easy to do, and made them very happy.
Matthew LaPlante
This really became a theme again and again, you wrote deaf children in public schools were treated as if they were intellectually behind their hearing peers and the way that the administrators were handling their educations was treated like an afterthought. Would you tell me more about that?
Rachel Zemach
You know, I think at the bottom of everything is the difference in the way hearing people who don't have a background in deaf education, think about deafness and deaf children. They think, okay, the problem is the deafness. And the problem is that this child will be isolated. So what we should do is try to teach them speech and lip reading, and try to teach them to pretend that they're not deaf. The trouble is, it doesn't work. You can't force somebody to hear. And even if you give them hearing aids and cochlear implants and FM systems, the best way for a deaf or hard of hearing child to learn is visually. So to try to give them an education through the ears, it, it doesn't make sense and it doesn't work.
Matthew LaPlante
Again, and again, in this book, you write about students who vastly exceeded the expectations that school administrators and sometimes their own teachers had for them. But you also write about your growing frustration that oftentimes the fact that these kids were indeed repeatedly demonstrating their capacity and their brilliance didn't make any difference to these administrators. It didn't change the fact that from the district's perspective, they were treated as though they were not as intelligent as other children. That frustration really grew in you over the years, didn't it?
Rachel Zemach
Yeah, I mean, I started the job so optimistic, and so excited, so thrilled to be finally teaching and teaching in that score. And then, as the years went on, I became more and more demoralized, to where finally, I left after 10 years, even though leaving those students was heartbreaking to me. And leaving the job was shocking to me. And when I left, I knew the program would go downhill. And it did.
Matthew LaPlante
You wound up teaching at the California School for the Deaf. From the very start, it seemed like a very different experience for you. Even before you were hired, can you talk about how even the interview process was just so different and eye-opening as to what they expected of their teachers?
Rachel Zemach
Oh, my goodness, the interview. My memory of the interview at the deaf school is a happy memory. I remembered sitting in this small conference room with about four or five administrators of the deaf school. And we were signing, it was all in sign language. And I knew they were evaluating my ASL skills very carefully. And I'm not fantastic at ASL. I'm fluent. I'm okay. I'm pretty good, but I'm not fantastic at it. I'm not a native signer. So I was a little bit nervous. But at one point during the interview, I told them, look, half my students have transferred here to the school. Now they can chat with their friends at lunchtime, for example, they can understand everybody, I want that too I want to be here where I can understand my peers. It's my turn, I want it. And it was a funny thing to say in an interview. And I said it with a lot of passion. And these administrators know exactly what I meant. Because in their life, they've experienced that to being left out when among hearing people. And maybe that's why they hired me.
Matthew LaPlante
There's a statistic in your book that is just really staggering to me. In California, there are approximately 17,000 deaf students and only about 9% of them have regular access to deaf peers. And this is in a state that has two of the largest deaf schools in the country. So this is presumably a better situation than in many other places in the United States. Why do you think this is still the case in our country?
Rachel Zemach
Because of the mentality that most hearing people have, they automatically assume that assimilation and listening devices and speaking is healthier and better for deaf children. And it's like they have blinders on. They just can't see anything past that assumption, they have cochlear implants, by the way at the multimillion-dollar business. So it generates a lot of money for a lot of people. The money is one aspect, but the belief is another one. And you put together the belief with the money, and you have a very powerful drive across the whole country, of people who parents of deaf children will encounter. When a parent has a deaf child, they're told to go to the doctor and get more hearing tests. And that doctor will tell them, get your child a cochlear implant. And they will also tell them don't learn sign language. Because if you do, the child will never learn to talk. And you want them to talk and to hear and listen. So get them a cochlear implant, put them in, in a public school, give them devices to hear, teach them speech, and focus on that. And parents are totally clueless. They love their kids, and they want the best for them. And if all the doctors are saying the same thing, of course they believe them. We just have this massive number of medical and educational people in power, who are all hearing they've never been deaf. They don't know how it feels to be deaf, and they don't know what, works and what will make a deaf child happy.
Matthew LaPlante
You have written that when deaf education is good, wherever it happens, there are ways to see it and feel it because as you write deaf students in mainstream schools or in any school should exude joy, they should have deep linguistic fluency. They should have confidence and ambition and hope and pride. After all of your work and research, do you think we are moving toward a world in which deaf kids in all schools are supported and encouraged to develop these traits, even if, of course, that's not the world that we currently live in?
Rachel Zemach
You know, in some way, things are getting better. However, I wrote this book, because I also see that things are not getting better, they're getting worse. Because the cochlear implant industry is becoming more and more powerful. And cochlear implants are recommended to 99.9 of all parents of all deaf and hard of hearing children by doctor. So there's a tremendous push towards technology, medical technology being the solution. And that's how hearing people see it. Deaf people are perhaps not verbal enough, no I don't mean verbal, but I mean, they have been, we have been beat down by years and years of oppression and fighting the same issues, of all of this making life very difficult for, for deaf people. And there is a certain level of trauma that makes many people withdraw from the fight. And I felt I had to write that book, I had to do something, try and do something because nobody is listening.
Matthew LaPlante
That's Rachel Zemach. She's a deaf educator who spent a decade teaching at a mainstream school and also spent time teaching at the California School for the Deaf in Fremont, California. And she's the author of the new book, The Butterfly Cage. Rachel Zemach, thank you so much.
Rachel Zemach
Absolutely thank you for your wonderful questions. It's an honor to be here.
Matthew LaPlante
UnDisciplined is a production of Utah Public Radio. And if you happen to live in Utah, you can listen to us on up our every Thursday morning at 10:30. And on KCPW at 10 on Thursday at noon on Sunday. If you miss us then you can listen to every episode of UnDisciplined wherever you get your podcasts. Our program is supported by public radio listeners like you. So if you're a donor to Utah public radio or KCPW in Salt Lake City, we want to thank you. And if you're not, why not? Head over to upr.org and click on the Donate link and make sure in the comments you let them know that you're a supporter of this program. Our producer is Clayre Scott, our theme music is Little Idea by Benjamin Tisso. And I'm Matthew LaPlante. Thanks for listening. Now go have big ideas.
