What's That Pig Outdoors? (5 page)

Much later she read in the biography of a famous author (whom she never identified) that he had improved his work by “taking paragraphs from great literature, cutting the individual words apart, and then trying to reassemble the paragraphs.” It was a quantum leap backward from a professional writer whose aim was lapidary prose to a deaf child who hadn't even a crude concept of language, but Miss Mirrielees made the jump. If the writer could perceive the rhythms and subtleties of English syntax by assembling and reassembling single words on paper, she reasoned, the deaf child could also learn its rudiments, and more, with the same method. Thus what she called “Chart Work” was born out of the old idea called “Plan Work.”

Chart Work began with Miss Mirrielees creating an event in the child's life, such as taking the youngster to a farm. She'd make sure that the child
not only saw a cow, for instance, but also saw that it ate hay and produced milk, which was collected in a bucket. When they returned home, she would draw pictures on a blackboard of the cow, the hay, and the bucket of milk. As she drew the objects and acted out their relationships, she would also say their names, making sure the child watched her lips. Then she would write the name of each object under its picture, saying the name as she did so.

But she did not stop there. This was not merely “cow,” “hay,” and “milk.” “The cow,” she would say slowly, “eats hay and gives milk,” acting out the verbs as she wrote them along with their nouns on the blackboard. She would repeat the words, pointing to their pictorial and written representations on the blackboard, until the child had made the connections among the three kinds of symbols—pictorial, written, and spoken.

Later Miss Mirrielees would progress from blackboard to large paper charts on a wooden stand, using a set of large rubber type to stamp the words under pictures either drawn or cut out from newspapers and magazines. Each chart carried a complete story made up of several sentences. When the chart was done, the child's mother and father would copy it onto cardboard, cutting out each word on rectangular strips, then assembling the whole into proper order in a pile of strips bound together with a rubber band: “The,” “cow,” “eats,” “hay,” “and,” “gives,” “milk.”

The goal was for the child to learn not merely what the shapes—drawn, printed, and spoken—stood for but also their proper arrangement. As time went on, the child learned to place each cardboard rectangle containing a word on the table in correct order, mimicking that on the chart. This was how Miss Mirrielees taught English syntax. The meanings and order of concrete nouns and verbs were easy, but the abstract parts of speech—articles and conjunctions—took longer to learn. This, however, is exactly the way hearing children experience language. Only in this case the form of the symbols was different.

It should be pointed out that Miss Mirrielees did not emphasize teaching all deaf children to speak the words at the same time they learned their visual shapes. Nor did she immediately place a great deal of significance on the pupil's watching the movements of the teacher's mouth as she wrote or printed words on a chart. The time for learning these skills
depended on the age of the pupil, whether the deafness was from birth or from disease or accident after the rudiments of spoken language had been learned, and whether the loss of hearing was complete or only partial (and thus could be alleviated with hearing aids).

Speech and lipreading, Miss Mirrielees believed, were to be emphasized only after the thorough assimilation of printed language had given these skills a solid foundation, a better chance to succeed. Once the notion was firmly planted in a child's mind that printed thoughts could be strung together into a necklace of ideas, then the arts of conveying and understanding them on the lips could be engaged.

What was most controversial about the Mirrielees Method was its reliance on the parents of deaf children as its vehicle. Miss Mirrielees saw her major task not as a teacher of the deaf but as an instructor of parents, who, she believed, rightfully possessed the keys to their children's vaults of language, speech, and lipreading. In the 1940s, authorities in the education of the deaf warned parents that shouldering such a grinding responsibility was impractical and even dangerous.

Miss Mirrielees knew home teaching would be a wearying task. Regular hours must be devoted to it. The deaf child must be taken somewhere nearly every day for experiences upon which to build lessons. Charts and materials must be prepared. All this must be done in addition to the normal tasks of parenthood.

But, she argued, her method was neither difficult to understand nor hard to put into practice. She saw no reason why a mother could not teach her own child, although educators warned against it (she dismissed these warnings as “professional self-aggrandizement and egotism”). Backwoods pioneers, she said, had educated their children at home. Ambitious modern parents of hearing children consciously encouraged their learning. And unconsciously, parents were always teaching their youngsters.

By the early 1940s Miss Mirrielees had begun distilling her experience into manuals that she left with each family to follow after her departure for the next one. Some of these mimeographed, hand-bound manuals still exist. Designed to fill every possible inch of a long, legal-sized sheet for reasons of economy, they are laboriously typed in tight single spaces, with the narrowest of margins. Hand-corrected typographical errors abound.

Mechanically, these manuals are difficult to read, although they are fluidly and clearly written for the most unsophisticated of housewives, the profession of most women of the day.

Soon Miss Mirrielees began selling these manuals by mail to parents with whom she could not work in person. She had been advertising her services in the
Volta Review
, the most prominent publication in the field, and it was one of these advertisements my mother had seen.

At that time, during the summer of 1944, we had moved into “Skunk Hollow,” the dilapidated, makeshift quarters in Portsmouth for the families of Navy officers. I had no idea where we were or why we had moved there; no one knew how to tell me. But while Dad worked to help prepare the
Randolph
for her sea trials, Mother settled down with Miss Mirrielees' first lessons. Nearly every day, following the teacher's dictum to provide me with memorable experiences, Mother (with Dad's help evenings and on weekends) would take me for walks in the countryside, and then, while what I had seen on my trips was fresh in my imagination, make charts and hang them up for me to look at. Soon these charts of crayoned pictures and rubber-stamped sentences became not merely schoolroom tools to me but a kind of Book of Life that no other child I knew was lucky enough to own, and I was proud of them.

Even though I couldn't speak, I still had a child's knack for making friends easily. Some of those friends quickly joined our little “classes”—as many as eight or ten at a time. For them it was like a preschool, and they were enthralled by the preparation and presentation of the charts of my outings. As I learned to read, so did they. Big Bird would have been proud.

This experience of learning along with hearing children was an early form of “mainstreaming”—the philosophy, still controversial today, of educating deaf children as much as possible with hearing classmates of the same age. Its immediate result was that though I might be deaf, for a remarkably long time I never felt “different” from my peers. I didn't know any better, and neither did they.

At some point a few months after Mother and Dad had begun the Mirrielees lessons, I experienced an epiphany. Though I had stopped talking, the concept of speech had never quite left my subconscious, and as I learned to read from the charts, somehow I made the connection between printed and spoken language. Dad remembers that the breakthrough
was a jubilant moment very much like the occasion when Helen Keller exultantly learned her first word—“water”—as Annie Sullivan pumped it over her hands. It would make a better story if I or my parents could recall the exact word I spoke, but I'm afraid we've all forgotten.

Whatever it was, it loosed the floodgates of language. As speech returned to me, with it came the knack for lipreading. In fact, I thought
everybody
read lips. When I talked to people, I'd grasp their faces and turn them toward me so that they could see mine. Evidently I assumed everyone was deaf like me. Eventually I did learn that they weren't, but by then I'd decided, with all the off-center wisdom of a small child, that deafness was a minor, if interesting, human characteristic, like freckles, blond hair, double-jointedness, or the ability to teeter along the top of a board fence.

Each morning for two hours, sometimes more, I'd sit at a little table and assemble sentences, mimicking the charts. Little by little my reading vocabulary grew. And after that first breakthrough, so did my speech. Some sounds were easy, others more difficult. The consonant “m,” for instance, was a snap. Mother would press her lips together, flare her nostrils, and, engage her larynx—
mmmmmmmmmmm
—while holding my little hand first to her throat so that I could feel the vibrations there, then to her nose for the same reason.
Mmmmmmmmmmm.
Easy. Mustn't let too much air out the nose, though. Hold back a little. There. You've got it, Hank! Ooh!

Oooooooooooo.
A little harder but not too much. It's easy enough to pooch out the lips and switch on the voice box, but that's only the half of it.
Ohhhhhhhooo.
Too much like a low rumble in the back of the throat. The vibrations of the larynx need to be focused in the front part of the mouth, with the help of the tongue as well as the lips.
Ooooooooo.
See, Hank? Feel it right here, on both sides of your mouth? That's it!

To this day, however, the sibilant “s” gives me fits. Producing it properly requires the tongue to be placed just so, behind and perhaps a little lower than the juncture of upper and lower teeth. The tongue must be shaped and tensed in a certain fashion, too, and the difference between the right way and the wrong way is very small. How does a teacher get all this across to a four-year-old who hasn't the slightest idea of the anatomic structure of the maxillary cavity? Not easily.
Thsthsthsthsth.
Nonononono, says
Mother, with a slight shake of the head. Try again.
Sthssthssthssth.
That's better. C'mon, once more.
Ssssthsssssss.
A huge smile. Good enough for government work.

Mother had to be my jailer as well as teacher. Four-and five-year-olds have the attention spans of shrews; ten minutes after beginning a two-hour session, I'd demand to be let out to play with my friends, who with normal childhood capriciousness sometimes tired quickly of our “play school.” Some days degenerated into a two-hour contest of wills. I was adamant, but Mother was immovable. Until every last lesson of the day had been learned, she wouldn't release me from battleground to playground.

During these go-rounds I learned a trick that infuriated my parents. When I'd been naughty and Mother or Dad was laying down the law, I'd shut my eyes tight so I wouldn't “hear” the scolding. If I couldn't see it, I must have reasoned, it wasn't happening. Does a tree falling in the forest make a sound if no one is around? It certainly does, and I quickly learned why in the form of a sharp thwack across the seat of the pants. A few more swats cured me of the habit. Just the same, lipreading a chiding is much harder than it sounds. Can
you
look someone in the eye while he gives you hell?

On October 9, 1944, the
Randolph
was commissioned, and Dad went to sea. While the carrier steamed to the Caribbean on its shakedown cruise, Buck, Mother, and I drove to Ho-Ho-Kus for the duration. It was not a good time for Mother. She resented Dad's volunteering for sea duty and leaving her with all the responsibility for my training. Worse, all the way up to Ho-Ho-Kus I cried and screamed, as four-year-olds will on long auto trips, while my brother gasped between attacks of asthma. Fortunately, Mother recalls, the old Ford we owned had only one door that would open—the driver's—and she didn't have to worry about one of us tumbling out onto the highway. A trooper stopped her for speeding, but when Buck informed him at the top of his voice, “My dad has gone to sea!” she was let off with a warning.

Before the
Randolph
sailed to join the Pacific fleet, Dad came home to Ho-Ho-Kus on a brief leave. There he spent hours teaching me to ride a bicycle, a process that, because of my damaged sense of balance, took a long time and was more nerve-racking than the usual bumps, scrapes, and bruises of a normal childhood. As I've said, so long as I had a definite
horizon to focus upon, I could walk normally. Pumping pedals, keeping handlebars straight, and staying upright, however, was an infinitely more complex undertaking. But I learned. Soon I was riding on the sidewalk, then in the street. As I wobbled out into traffic with my playmates, Mother's and Dad's hearts welled up into their throats.

Miss Mirrielees had urged them to allow me to live as independent and normal a life as possible, and they stuck to this wisdom, though other parents would phone them to announce indignantly, “I almost hit Hank with my car this morning!” It was Dad's belief that they hadn't come within a country mile of doing so but just wanted to express their outrage that a handicapped child wasn't being sheltered from life's everyday perils. (To this day “Caution Deaf Child” traffic signs make me wince. The parents who demand them on their streets mean well, but I can't help wondering what sort of self-image, let alone self-reliance, such signs create in the youngsters they are intended to protect.)

In Ho-Ho-Kus, Mother continued to labor with me, using Miss Mirrielees' methods—not just Chart Work but the conventional speech and lipreading drills she advocated after the groundwork had been laid. “Bee, even, Jean, whee, mean, green,” I'd say, attempting to sharpen the long “e” sound into one that would please Mother. Our task no longer was one of crude shaping but more delicate polishing. By early 1945 my speech had become quite intelligible, though nobody would mistake my breathy monotone and foggy articulation for the voice and speech of a normal hearing child. And I had a gift for lipreading. So long as my interlocutor faced me, I could communicate with almost anyone who dealt with children of my age.