#deaf teens

[living-deaf-society]

Delta flight attendant eases deaf teen's travel worries with kind note

A deaf 16-year-old, traveling for the first time alone, received a kind note from a flight attendant that helped ease her worries.

[thesoundconfessions]

Watch This - Deaf Teens: Hearing World

Instead of a regular blog post, I’m excited to share this video (with subtitles!) with you all. It is a roughly one hour documentary, and if you want to understand Deaf Culture a bit more, I highly recommend watching this video. I’ve never found anything else that was as close to being comprehensive, yet unbiased and still manages to challenge the viewers’ perceptions while doing so respectfully.

It’s also made me realize I’m very fortunate to be able to sign, speak and read lips – allowing me to participate in both the Deaf and hearing cultures, although I find that I have more hearing friends than deaf friends right now.

The official synopsis:

“An insightful documentary by director Claire Braden about five deaf teenagers as they take their first steps into the hearing world. It follows some extraordinary young people who have some extreme and surprising attitudes towards their deafness. It highlights how not all deaf teens want to be able to hear and are often defiant against being part of the hearing world, but also the lengths some deaf teenagers will go to in order to improve their hearing.

The film highlights the difficulties deaf teenagers face when they enter the big, wide hearing world for the first time - providing a fully-immersive experience which illustrates what it's like to go to a music festival and not hear the music, how hard it can be to keep up with conversations and make friends, but also the joy of silence.”

Please watch, and feel free to comment here with your thoughts! Below, here are my thoughts:

In general, I really enjoyed the discussions that took place in the video, and even though none of them had the same background as I do, I was able to find a small connection in each of them to relate to.

Christianah, who takes her hearing aids out a lot (hm, reminds me of my childhood and stubborn refusal to accept my hearing loss, although not embrace it like Christianah does). Also in the way that she has frustrations when ordering/talking to strangers in customer service (like a fast food restaurant, hearing the repetition over and over again).

Jake and Adam – talking about employment, which I found heartbreaking. It’s true, but I like to think it’s better now with technology and more communication-based jobs revolving around computers/software. But to hear that he can’t become a pilot, that’s just disheartening.

Meghan, who I found myself relating to more, was a champ. I identified with a lot of her experiences – hearing silence for a month after the CI operation, not really enjoying music in that time period, and the audiologist telling Meghan that it takes time to recognize the sounds eventually – that is absolutely spot on. In addition, her frustration with the education system – having to struggle with lectures in the dark is something I never want to experience again.

Sarah’s educational experience was also illuminating. She relies on a notetaker and interpreter to understand and learn the material – her point about having to watch the interpreter and have a notetaker because she can’t look away to take notes – this is a salient fact many people fail to grasp when it comes to hearing loss support. When she dines with Asher and they explain how they take turns talking/eating – this is a great point of Deaf Culture – there is only one speaker at a time. AT ALL TIMES.

I wish there was a deaf club/social event as awesome as theirs in my area!  That’s all.

[kkatiebb]

BBC THREE: Deaf Teens: Hearing World

A documentary highlighting the situations that deaf teenagers go through. You may think that it must be very frustrating or depressing for a person who is deaf to not be able to experience the things that fully hearing people can, but this documentary shows that just because you can't hear doesn't mean you cannot lead a perfectly happy life. Obviously, sometimes people with this disability can get annoyed that they cannot hear like many of us but it doesn't get them down and they are evidently very proud of their deaf culture. This documentary offers a very interesting insight into the lives of the deaf culture and I would highly recommend it.