Quotes from Lou Ann Walker

Theories and goals of education don't matter a whit if you do not consider your students to be human beings.

The inability to hear is a nuisance; the inability to communicate is the tragedy.

I was the only student she'd taught who'd actually known any deaf people. Most of the students in my courses were there because they'd seen a movie or read a Helen Keller book.

We don't sign here, of course. We want to prepare these children to enter the normal world." She believed that.

It was like the old joke: the operation was a success but the patient died. Theories and goals of education don't matter a whit if you don't consider your students to be human beings.

In sign, you more often than not start a story with the punch line. It's the telling that is important.

But thinking back on all those times, I had this odd, inescapable feeling that society thought it was some kind of sin to be deaf.

From the first two-hour class on, I had not said a word. I wanted them to know a little bit of what it is like to be deaf: lost, confused, unable to communicate.

If the students didn't understand the charade, I'd turn and write on the blackboard, but I tried to avoid even that. I didn't want the students automatically translating everything from sign to English—that slowed the process.

Children of defectives often feel guilt." These words seared into my brain.

And then she made a sign that sent a chill up my spine. It was a slang sign meaning "I'm deaf," but it's crudely done, made by putting the thumb in the ear and turning the rest of the hand downward—almost as if the hand is a donkey's ears.

This work was throwing me into the intimate functioning of people's lives.

Over the centuries people have blamed everything from eating a green chestnut to being cursed by a gypsy. Others have cited being frightened by a burglar, consuming improper combinations of food, and thinking and speaking impure thoughts as direct causes of deafness.

One of the criticisms leveled at deaf people is that they're rigid thinkers. For

Just as there are accents in speech, there are regional accents in sign. People from the South sign slower than people in the North—even people from northern and southern Indiana have different styles.

In fact, an alarming percentage of deaf children graduate high school with a third-grade reading ability.

no one had ever let them think that initiative was acceptable behavior.

What's interesting about the studies is that prelingually deaf people (people such as my parents, who were born deaf or who lost their hearing early on) have no interior monologue.

In most of us there is a tiny voice we consult as part of our thought processes. Deaf people literally don't hear themselves thinking.

to leave a child without language for a moment longer than is absolutely necessary seems cruel to me.

Tell Doris Jean I figure it's about time I learned that sign language,

By the time we got back to his house, Grandpa couldn't reproduce the two signs he'd learned, but he hurried inside to describe to my grandmother how he'd tried.

And there is also a camp of compromise—those who favor "total communication," or signing while speaking in full sentences.

The oralists believe in speaking and lipreading without ever signing; and the manualists are pro-signing in American Sign Language (ASL).