Train Go Sorry

Inside a Deaf World

Leah Hager Cohen

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Year: 1994
• ISBN:
  9780547524115
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A "remarkable and insightful" look inside a New York City school for the deaf, blending memoir and history ( The New York Times Book Review ). Leah Hager Cohen is part of the hearing world, but grew up among the deaf community. Her Russian-born grandfather had been deaf—a fact hidden by his parents as they took him through Ellis Island—and her father served as superintendent at the Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens. Young Leah was in the minority, surrounded by deaf culture, and sometimes felt like she was missing the boat—or in the American Sign Language term, "train go sorry." Here, the award-winning writer looks back on this experience and also explores a pivotal moment in deaf history, when scientific advances and cultural attitudes began to shift and collide—in a unique mix of journalistic reporting and personal memoir that is "a must-read" ( Chicago Sun-Times ). "The history of the Lexington School for the Deaf, the oldest school of its kind in the nation, comes alive with Cohen's vivid descriptions of its students and administrators. The author, who grew up at the school, follows the real-life events of Sofia, a Russian immigrant, and James, a member of a poor family in the Bronx, as well as members of her own family both past and present who are intimately associated with the school. Cohen takes special pride in representing the views of the deaf community—which are sometimes strongly divided—in such issues as American Sign Language (ASL) vs. oralism, hearing aids vs. cochlear implants, and mainstreaming vs. special education. The author's lively narrative includes numerous conversations translated from ASL...a one-of-a-kind book." — Library Journal "Throughout the book, Cohen focuses on two students whose Russian and African American roots exemplify the school's increasingly diverse population...beautifully written." — Booklist

10

Stupid English

It is too cold for grammar. January is not such a good month for parts of speech; this is the message clearly emanating from the students in Sofia’s English class as they enter the room and spy the forecast on the board: GRAMMAR REVIEW. Punchy, frenetic, they waste as much time as possible before Liz Wolter can begin the morning lesson. Chris rattles his boxes of peanut M & M’s, which he has been toting around in a cardboard satchel as part of a fundraiser for the Junior National Association of the Deaf. Juanita buys a box and pries it open with her short, narrow fingers, promptly setting loose an avalanche of candies across the table. Tamara rolls a bottle of white nail polish to Sofia, then asks to borrow lip gloss from Patti, who proceeds to search vigorously through her blue gym bag. Rushes of air pour with a hot congested sound from the heating unit under the windows, and sunlight prints brassy diamonds high on the wall.

This is the top-level junior English section; these are the best students in their class. In a hearing school, they would be the ones most likely to enjoy English, the ones for whom it ought to cause the least amount of grief. But at Lexington, even among the brightest students, English remains to some degree unnatural, like foreign territory. If literature inhabits the most accessible region of this territory, if the language barrier is transcended by the animation of stories and drama, then grammar, it could be said, lies frozen in the nether regions, arbitrary and inscrutable.

Sofia’s first exposure to English occurred less than three years ago; that she qualifies for placement in the top-level class signifies her great knack for languages. But the fact that she is grouped with classmates who are all American-born is probably at least as much an indication that most deaf students approach English as a second language as it is of her particular talent. And successful though she has been, it has not come easily; it was English class that once drove Sofia, usually so even-tempered, to dash her pencil at the chalkboard during a lesson and wail, “This is a stupid language!”

Still, the students in this particular class can handle grammar lessons more readily than most; they have even requested them, asking Liz to administer periodic doses of grammar’s crazy rules. Naturally, whenever she honors their wish they automatically disown it, mounting great displays, veritable pageants, of resistance. Even now, sailing M & M’s and tubes of lip gloss across the table, they maintain a steady visual murmur against which the teacher must compete for their attention. Unruffled, Liz takes her seat at the doughnut-shaped table and zeroes in on Patti, directly to her right.

Patti is a model of preoccupation. Having reached one hand around the back of her head, she is expertly palpating her ponytail (which has been growing progressively lighter in shade over the past several weeks; today it is the color of burnt taffy). Finding it still damp at the core, she removes her shiny black scrunchie and shakes the hair free over her shoulders, that it might dry more quickly. Liz taps her fingers gently on the table before her.

“Patti, are you dreaming? Are you here?” she signs.

Liz is one of the better signers among the hearing teachers at Lexington. Both her speech and her signs are clear and precise; she fits them together like the teeth of a zipper. She knows that English is her students’ most difficult subject and takes nothing for granted, answering every question in the same judicious tones. Taped to the board behind her hangs a list of vocabulary words from her freshman class: “Mustache—hair above the lips (men); Twang—sound from a bullet; Saliva—spit, the water in your mouth; Squeezing—hold very tightly (maybe a hug or maybe to make orange juice); Probably—maybe will; Tears—water from crying; Cinnamon—brown spice, sweet (eat with rice?).”

“Do you have any work for me?” Liz queries.

Patti, forever late with assignments, chews her lip and smiles sorrowfully.

“Do you have the book?” presses Liz.

Patti has still not returned The Friends, the novel they were working on before the holiday. Now she purses her lips and continues shaking her head.

“Not even one little lightweight paperback book? Boooo!” Liz fingerspells the exclamation on both hands for emphasis, her lips puckering into a comically long tube. Patti laughs and tries to look penitent at the same time. Dispassionately, Liz registers a mark in her grade book. Then she looks up, full of purpose, at the rest of the class. The students cease their antics.

“What do you remember about grammar?” Liz begins without preamble. She has a wonderful poker face, useful for eliciting sobriety; her eyes, pale and ingenuous, gaze from beneath hay-colored bangs that fall as evenly as the calibrations on a ruler. Under the combined influence of their teacher’s manner and the subject at hand, the students become grave, focused.

“Pronouns,” offers Sofia, unwittingly trilling the r in her Russian warble as she fingerspells the word.

Liz stands and writes it on the board.

“Adverbs and adjectives,” contributes Chris, managing to flip the letters off his long, knuckley fingers in such a way that they appear manly, virile.

Liz adds these.

“Nouns, verbs.” This from Sofia again.

Liz writes, then pauses. A teacherly wrinkle forms between her brows. “What else? Nothing else?”

“That’s enough,” maintains Juanita sincerely.

Liz tucks in her lips to hide her amusement. “Okay. What are some pronouns?”

As the students dictate haphazardly, Liz distributes their examples in columns: first person, second person, third person. The columns grow long warped tails as she crams them full of words. Each time the students think they are finished, Liz coaxes a few more examples, and they trickle forth until the board is cluttered with a confusing, monotonous inventory: I, me, we, you, they, them, he, she, it, her, him, mine, hers, his, their, its, your, our, those, these, who, whom, whose, that, this. The students wait skeptically for meaning to emerge.

Now Liz switches to pure ASL. She makes the sign for a girl standing off to her right and for a boy off to her left, and then she shows the two figures coming together and kissing, rather sweetly. Her students smile. “Okay, how would I say that in English?”

“They kissed,” suggests Sofia, speaking and using signed English.

“How about a little longer and more specific?”

“The boy and the girl met and kissed,” offers Chris in similar fashion.

Liz writes that on the board. “Now . . . what if I say,” and this time she shows the boy approaching the stationary girl for a kiss.

“He kissed her,” responds Chris.

“Right! And that’s a little different. Or we could do it this way,” says Liz. She reverses the motion so the girl becomes the initiator; the students translate that into English. They catch on and practice more sentences, bilingually manipulating subject and object pronouns, gliding from ASL to English, one after the other.

ASL conveys the differences between subject and object as specifically as English does. It simply employs a change of direction rather than a change of pronouns or of sign order. Liz uses the grammar of ASL, which is perfectly clear and reasonable to the students, to teach them English grammar, which they find so unwieldy. The former is nothing they were ever taught; they acquired it naturally through use, just as hearing students understand how to form proper English sentences before they ever receive any formal instruction. This method ultimately serves two purposes. As the students learn the rules of English grammar, they are also receiving a subtler message: that ASL has an equally complex and worthy grammar, a grammar they have already mastered.

Now Liz writes on the board, “Patti borrowed her friend’s clothes.” Patti has been gazing up at the colored origami cranes strung along the ceiling. Stirred by currents of hot air, they look as though they’re flying in place. Tamara jostles her classmate’s wrist and indicates the board with her chin. Patti reads the sentence and grins.

“Now,” says Liz, “can we change this sentence to use ‘hers’?"

Sofia drums her feet under the table in a flutter kick of inspiration. “I think . . . Hers friend has a lot of beautiful clothes?”

Liz arches her eyebrows. “Tamara, you be the judge. Can we say that?”

“No way.”

“Sorry, the judge said no.”

“A friend of hers . . .” begins Patti, but she abandons the effort, the tip of her tongue pinched gingerly between her teeth.

“A friend of hers lent her the clothes,” declares Chris.

“Do you accept this, judge?” Liz turns to Tamara.

“No . . . I don’t know.” Tamara, wiry and alert, jiggles her knee and thumbs her lower lip in contemplation.

“Does it sound right?” Liz prods. The students understand that she means this idiomatically. Naturally, they cannot check the sentence phonetically the way hearing people can, cross-referencing it with vast stores of similar, overheard phrases.

“Yeah . . .” Uncertainly, Tamara reverses her decision.

“That’s right?” clarifies Juanita, struggling to keep up.

“This is a correct sentence, yes,” Liz allows. “But how can we make it clearer?”

Juanita, stumped, pushes her glasses up with two fingers and sucks in noisy desperation on her M & M.

“A friend of hers lent her clothes,” tries Chris, kicking the rung of his chair rhythmically. Someone’s hearing aid has started whistling, and Patti is striking her pen against the table with fierce, repetitive whacks. But this mounting cacophony, unlike the visual frenzy at the start of class, is a symptom of engagement rather than avoidance. Liz, the only one for whom it represents a potential distraction, chooses to ignore it.

“The grammar is right,” she concedes now, ”but the meaning is a little confusing, with two ‘her’s.”

“Patti borrowed hers clothes,” says Sofia.

Tamara’s head clunks dramatically to the table.

“No way. We can’t say ‘hers clothes.’” Liz shakes her head emphatically. “We’re getting closer, though,” she promises.

“Patti borrowed clothes from her,” proposes Chris.

“Ah!” Finally, a suggestion the teacher deems worthy of writing on the board.

Whenever Liz’s back is turned, she cannot interact. During the moments when she is cut off from her students, evidence of their waning interest appears. Patti and Tamara pass covert notes in purple ballpoint. Their written language reads like a hybrid of English and the faulty sign language they see used by so many of their hearing teachers: “R.C. told me that drop the plan the party at his house. He thinks because that we don’t like him. He told me I told him. It is not true . . . Yes, R.C. talk me by yesterday. But today during math then he ask me something wrong?” They chatter across the page in scrawls that creep, urgent and lopsided, up the edges.

Liz is still writing on the board. Sofia grimaces. “This is boring,” she avers, without voice. Chris watches her without reacting, then lifts the corner of his upper lip—in the hearing world a sneer, but in ASL a sign of agreement. He wears a peach-colored T-shirt with “Deaf Pride” emblazoned across the chest, newly purchased from the school store.

“I’m glad we got that one instead of the one that said ‘Deaf Power,’” remarks Sofia, looking at him in turn. As comanager of the store, she was involved in the decision about which shirt to order from Gallaudet. “Power sounds like better than hearing people. Pride sounds more equal.”

Tamara, glancing idly over the lists of pronouns on the board, is suddenly seized by a new question. She starts drumming the table for the teacher’s attention, uttering her name in clipped squeaks. Liz finishes writing and turns back toward the class.

“Tell me, tell me,” Tamara implores, jiggling both knees in tandem, “what’s the difference between ‘she’ and ‘hers’?” She fingerspells each pronoun on a different hand, ending with the last letter of each frozen stiffly before her, a tableau of impatience. Her manner expresses the general web of frustration threatening to overtake the group. The students rivet their attention on the teacher, waiting to see how she will explain this one.

With a single hand shape, Liz unravels the mystery of possessive pronouns. In ASL, possessives all share one basic sign: a flat hand, flexed at the wrist, fingers closed. By pushing the heel of the hand in different directions, the speaker distinguishes between mine, yours, hers, theirs, and so on. Liz shows the students how to plug this hand shape into sentences when they’re trying to decide whether or not to use a possessive in English. This is easy; this they know. The discovery of a new link between the languages appears to give them a second wind, and Liz takes advantage of the momentum to carry on, guiding them deeper into the labyrinth.

Twenty years ago, even if it had not been forbidden, few teachers of the deaf were able to conduct a lesson this way, using ASL as a bridge to English. They received their degrees without knowing even a few rudimentary signs, let alone having proficiency in the language or any understanding of its grammar and syntax. Ten years ago, the situation was little better. Teachers might have used signs in the classroom, but only as manual codes for spoken English, a string of disjointed nouns and verbs loosely pinned to speech, harboring no interior structure or reason. Recently, colleges have begun offering courses in ASL, but usually as an undergraduate elective rather than a requirement for people studying to become teachers of the deaf.

Liz’s ability to draw on ASL for teaching English grammar is rare. Her boldness in doing so is rarer. Even as ASL edges into social studies, math, and science lessons, the old idea that using ASL is antithetical to learning English lingers ominously in most English classrooms. The other English teachers may or may not use ASL; it certainly is not part of Lexington’s official curriculum. It’s just something that makes sense.

Downstairs, under the smart and crabby tutelage of Adele Sands-Berking, James works on his co...