Special Education

One of my pay-for-college jobs was sign language interpreting for a tiny school in an outlying rural area. My favorite charge there was a spunky girl named Tosha. Profoundly deaf from birth but born to a family living with no electricity and dirt floors even in modern times, Tosha had a pretty lonely life until she was six years old and the county finally discovered she was not in school. Her family, uneducated and a bit superstitious, assumed the girl who didn’t turn when they spoke or learn to speak herself was severely retarded or damaged in some other irreversible way and treated her in the only way they knew how--as a beloved, but wild, pet. By the time she came into the school system, she had lived for years with no academic training or specific intervention for her disability, but she was worlds removed from being stupid. By the time I met her at fifteen, this young woman was only two years behind her hearing peers, despite a childhood world of silence and isolation. And sense of humor? That girl was wicked sharp with a quip--even though I was the only one around for miles who knew how clever she really was. She eventually went onto a prestigious college for the hearing-impaired and kept me updated on her progress. Pride doesn’t even begin to describe how I felt. In Miriam Cohen’s See You Tomorrow, Charles, the whole class can see how amazing Charles is…even if he can’t see them.

http://www.amazon.com/Tomorrow-Charles-Welcome-First-Grade/dp/0440411513

http://www.answers.com/topic/miriam-cohen