Well, I tend to look at the glass as more than half full in at least some ways. There are certainly inactive chapters at schools that ,IMO,*should* have chapters that only lack someone to get it started like University of Kansas, UN-Reno or U of Miami. However, I'm not sure that these represent a majority of the inactive chapters in the Fraternity.

I'd say that a siginificant number of those schools with inactive chapters are schools that fall into one of a couple of categories:

A) Closed, there are 13 chapters that will never exist again, including Central YMCA where APO President Pinky Hirsch initiated.

B) Smaller Community Colleges. APO has (at a guess about 40 charters mostly from the late 1960s and 1970s) that are at CCs, and while some are larger like the ones at Tarrant County, OTOH, you have a few like Herkimer County (NY) Community College where the total *county* population is 64,000 (a little bigger that the student body of Ohio State).

C) Religious Schools that right now don't trust anything calling itself a Fraternity and only trusted us back in the 30's, 40's & 50's because the Council Scout Executive (a good God fearing man) talked directly to the Dean of Men. (Perhaps an exageration, but for a few, I expect pretty close).


It also varies *significantly* from area to area. Western Pennsylvania (64/65/66) has 21 active and 3 inactive. OTOH, New York city/LI (97)has 3 active and 16 inactive. (oddly enough there are areas of significant percentage of the chapters are inactive at each of the compass points (Wisconsin, NYC, LA/MS and UT))

The closest two inactive chapters to where I am sitting are not likely targets any time soon. Gallaudet University (I still don't understand why) and Northern Virginia Community College-Annandale. Instead, the extension in the area is to schools where we haven't had chapters before: Uof DC, U of Maryland-Baltimore County and Salisbury University...

YiLFS
Randolph Finder

Eh, I don't see it as pathetic, it's a sign of the ever-changing dynamics and demographics of college students. It would be great to get some of our inactive charters back, but sometimes it just isn't in the cards. Considering how groundbreaking APO has been in terms of it's expansion (taking a fraternity based on Scouting, with 100% Caucasian founders and chapters, to HBCU's during the time of "separate but equal, opening membership to women and treating them as equals during a time when most women were sent to college to get their "Mrs.", bringing APO to commuter schools), there had to be something that wouldn't work out very well. Expanding to community colleges during the 60's and 70's is our something that didn't work out well. We were too aggressive and didn't take into consideration the fluidity and turnover of community college students, which is much higher than at four-year campuses. I think it could work at some community colleges (granted, I'm a sponsor to a community college effort), but the student dynamic has to be right, the section support constant, and the advisory committee phenomenal, but I digress.

There is also the general rebellion against all Greek-lettered organizations that you found in the 60's to 80's. ALL groups suffered membership losses, some national organizations even folded altogether. Those that could adapt to changing student needs survived, those who couldn't or wouldn't...didn't.

Randy,
As a former Gallaudet student, I "think" I know why Gally isn't on the list for rechartering. There are several factors to take into account:

1) The language barrier. Other than myself, I have yet to meet another fluent, hearing signer who could go in and help the rechartering efforts. That, coupled with having someone learn all rituals in ASL (which I had to do for my social sorority, at a National Convention no less, which I joined at Gally). From experience, I can tell you it's no easy feat.

2) All Gally students are required to complete 80 hours of community service prior to graduation. Given that they already have to do this, having a service fraternity only duplicates the required hours. Again, from experience, I have heard enough grumbling from students about THOSE hours, and I'm not sure anyone would join A Phi O to do more.

3) As the face of Gallaudet changes, so too does the face of the Greek system. There are several social GLOs on campus, but few of them are "national" organizations. Gallaudet, being the center of the Deaf community, has several GLOs that were founded by Deaf, for Deaf. There are currently four social sororities - Phi Kappa Zeta, Delta Epsilon, Alpha Sigma Theta and Delta Zeta. Of these, DZ is the only national group and the reason it was only chartered there is because DZ's national philanthropy is speech and hearing. Not that this is exactly what Gallaudet stands for, but back in the 90's, Gally was not as "Deaf-centric" as it is now. Then, it was more accepting of people whose first language wasn't ASL. Now, as the Deaf community shrinks due to genetic testing and the implantation of cochlear implants in younger and younger children, the Deaf community has become more insular. (This is a similar situation with the social fraternities as well)

4) As the number of Deaf of Deaf shrinks, so does the number of incoming students into the school. The incoming freshman class when I started at Gally (2001-2002) was less than 300 students, and of those 7 of us were hearing. The school is struggling to stay viable now, and it will only get worse as the years pass. With that "shrinkage", the student body will become more "Deaf" and those students who are from generationally Deaf families will want to join the fraternities and sororities that mom and dad joined, and those will tend towards the ones that were founded by the Deaf, for the Deaf.

HOWEVER...having said all this, should A Phi O choose to try and recharter at Gally, I'm happy to lend a hand (or both, as they're both used in ASL ;))

1) It was done once, is there any way that how it was done could have been recorded somewhere? I don't know if they would have filmed it, but is there any way to write down an official list of what signs are used for a translation? I know that there was discussion on how to translate the toast song in the '90s because it seemed to be done differently at each National Convention. An alumnus might be the way to go there. I believe that Gally does *better* than most other schools in keeping track of Alumni.

2) I know at some schools that have required community service hours that hours done through the chapter can be counted if they properly keep up with the paperwork. That might be a solution at Gally.

3) Not sure why Delta Sigma Phi National Fraternity though. Can't find a Speach/Language connection. I didn't realize the extent that Cochlear Implants have changed. From looking at the Wikipedia entry, it seems that just about any person with a functioning Auditory nerve can get one. (And as you indicated in 4, not having a functioning Auditory nerve at all is more likely than other types of deafness to be genetic.

That was one thing I realized very early with Gallaudet and its culture. If you asked 100 African Americans or 100 Hispanics "Would the world be a better place if there were no more of X?" (X being your group), you would get *presumably* 100 noes(maybe one extreme self-hater). If you asked 100 paraplegics or 100 blind people, you'd probably get 100 yeses (maybe slightly fewer with blindness). If you asked 100 deaf (and yes, using lowercase d was deliberate, almost anyone who uses capital D would say no) people, you'd get some number between 10 and 90 and the two groups would start arguing...

4) There is a *lot* of data on enrollment at Gally at http://www.gallaudet.edu/x2294.xml , which does seem to indicate gradually descending numbers... I'm really not sure how low the numbers would have to go before there would be serious talk at closing the school. A more likely problem might be accredidation or NCAA issues. Gallaudet has graduation numbers that are frankly hideous. As I read their numbers, from the 2008 document (http://ims.gallaudet.edu/pdf/20080227-0001.pdf), only 11% of their entering freshmen from the Fall 2000 class graduated in four years, 26% in five years, 34% in six years and 37% in seven years. However, other years were worse. (only 6% of the entering Fall 1996 freshmen graduated in 4 years). In that respect it is covering an academically *huge* spread of students, from those who if hearing would have only have only tried for admission to their local community college, to those who if hearing might have applied for Cal Tech or Harvard.

OK, if the students are more likely to join Greeks their parents belonged to, maybe we can find some Alpha Phi Omega legacies...

Sorry....you've got me on my favorite topic!!!!
 

Probably. I know that the toast song was interpreted at a national convention (96, I think) and was supposed to be on the APO website, but I could never find it. Personally, I know that I could interpret all of the rituals we have, because I have a much better working knowledge of them than I ever did of DZ's rituals. A Phi O's are much shorter, as well, meaning my arms wouldn't fall off, as I thought they might when I interpreted a DZ initiation. I doubt any ritual would have been video-taped, as one would likely capture sound as well as the signing and, should that tape fall into a non-brother's hands..............

And yes, Gally does keep great records of its alums....I'll tap a few people and see if I can turn up any DC area brothers who might be in the know. One thing to be cautious of: Students at Gally, regardless of if their GLO is a local or a national, tend to do things "their way". This became a huge bone of contention with me when I was CCD (Chapter Advisor term for DZ) of the Gally chapter after I left. If the A Phi O chapter chose to do things the Gally way, i wouldn't be surprised if the charter wasn't pulled for hazing. Believe me, it happens A LOT. (Again, a voice of experience here)

Could be....again, I'm willing to help out, if need be.

Same question with Kappa Sigma Fraternity. There tends to be a little more leniency amongst the administration about allowing national (read non-Deaf) fraternities on campus. I don't know why, but when the sororities wanted to expand, admin insisted on another Deaf sorority. DZ, at best, is tolerated by the administration. I have extensive stories about the copious amounts of crap I put up with when I rushed and pledged.
As for CI's, yes, they've changed and not all for the better. A common misconception the parents of a deaf child have is that a CI will make their child hearing. In reality all it does is make their child work harder to interpret mechanical sounds and, after months or years of training, memorize what those mechanical sounds represent. CIs don't make you hear the way you and I do, nor do they amplify natural sounds. They simply give a deaf person a database of knowledge to choose from to decipher the sounds they hear, after all that training. I have a sorority sister who got one, after using hearing aids all her life, and she said it was like learning to hear all over again.

You know a good deal about the Deaf community and its culture.....any background info you care to share? :)

I agree. Their inability to graduate their students is horrendous, but not completely their fault. One thing to remember is that Deaf students who attend a Deaf residential school learn English as a second language. After the Milan Conference of 1880, when all Deaf teachers were ousted from their teaching positions and replaced with Oralists, it fell to the Deaf community to keep ASL going in secret, mostly in the dorms after the teachers had left for the day. As the Oralists weren't successful in abolishing ASL, they were successful in reducing the number of qualified Deaf teachers, thereby leaving the education of these children to those who, once teaching in ASL was no longer forbidden, weren't native signers. Combine that with the "English is better, teach them in signs that are in English word order" and you continue to keep the Deaf community under the oppressive thumb of the much larger hearing society. Add to that mix the teaching of English by more skilled signers, in whatever word order you want, and you've got college students at Gally who are learning basic English sentence structure when they're freshmen in college!! And then, the professors aren't Deaf, and they expect the students to be "fluent" in written English. I can't tell you how many English papers I edited when i was a student there, simply because I had English as my native language. It did help the overall GPA of my sorority, let me tell you!!

Add to this mix Deaf students from around the world for whom ASL and English are their 3rd and 4th languages, and you've got horrible graduation rates.:o OH, and their drop-out and return rates are higher than most colleges, too. Many students come, feel they can't succeed, go to work for years, then come back and finish their education. Just as an example, my little sister in my sorority is 8 years older than I am, and I rushed and became a sister at 32yo!!!!

Because of the shrinking number of Deaf of Deaf children (about 5% right now) enrollment in residential schools is also at an all time low, and there are several states whose schools have closed or become Bi-Bi schools(bi-lingual, bi-cultural), where you're as likely to hear the kids talking as you are to see them signing. These schools, that once boasted only signers, have now opened their doors to kids with CI's and some have begun to allow kids with a lot more residual hearing than they ever have, simply to keep from having to close their doors forever.

All of this adds up to the campus culture of Gally changing, and not to the liking of those Deaf of Deaf kids, who never wanted the likes of me on their campus. Hence, the protests that Jane Fernandez wasn't "Deaf enough" for them anymore. BTW, welcome to DPN20!! But to the "closing of the school"? I seriously doubt it will ever happen. There are always going to be Deaf students who want to be educated at a Deaf university. Many of my classmates were what used to be known as "ORAL-FAIL", meaning they tried to learn to speak and function in the hearing world and couldn't, so they left their "hearing" university and came to Gally. The one thing about Gally is, if you're Deaf, or HoH, you will get in. Yes, there are placement tests, and yes, you can be put in remedial classes. But much fewer students are in those classes for YEARS like they were back in the 80s and 90s. And for those 5% DofD kids? They know eachother, they meet through their parents, they date, have kids and the numbers may grow. I know enough students that had kids while still in school and the number of them that gave birth to Deaf children was astonishing......put the statistics to shame! The Deaf community will never go away, nor will Gally. (IMHO)

Like I said...I'm happy to tap some resources. I still have friends on the inside. ;)

I have learned more in this thread than I have in any other thread on this entire message board.

*crash*

I've learned more on this PAGE than on any other thread on this board!

:o

Wow....I hope I haven't overloaded everyone's circuits.

As you might have noticed, Deaf History is one of my favorite subjects, so linking my favorite subject with A Phi O, which I am also very passionate about, made me very giddy!

And, by the same notion, if I've overloaded everyone on this subject, feel free to tell me and my hands to hush.......;)

The toast song generally gets translated at every convention, and often differently each time. It depends on if you have a fluent signer who was present at an earlier convention. I did find most of the toast song signed on the 75th anniversary CD (from the choir at the 1992 convention). It appears to be somewhere between ASL and signed english. The concepts were more or less kept in the same SVO (subject verb object) order, but articles like a and the were dropped. I don't know if putting the hands into the finger spelling positions for the first letter while making the sign to differentiate similar terms from each other is normal in ASL or if it represents a nod toward SE. The 1992 convention choir clip can be pulled off the CD as a separate .mov file and I'll send it to whoever wants it. Unfortunately the camera keeps moving around so you only see about half of it. The sign for Alpha Phi Omega apparently goes back to a sign that I was told we *used* to use in our rituals. Fraternity Sign in normal place, then over heart and then outstretched, palm up.



That sounds *somewhat* similar to some of the situations with Alpha Phi Omega (and GSS,KKY,& TBS) at HBCUs. A feeling that the *white* national doesn't understand black culture. And frankly, I think that with the local fraternities and sororities at Gally that are more than 50 years old would have to kill a pledge before getting thrown off campus due to the strong alumni ties they have. This would tend to *infect* the chapters of the Nationals with the same disregard.

List of Omega Omega chapter brothers would be accessible in the databasefrom the APO National Website, but you have to log in. I know that they've worked backwards from now in filling in the entries (so for example not all of the founders are in there).

The question is whether the current negative feelings toward expanding at Gally are more related to the fact that there are two active extension efforts in section 85 (UDC & Salisbury) or if it is something more (like the administration told the RD to sit on a flagpole and rotate)



Thanks. One of the reasons that I was always hesitant to look at rechartering Omega Omega is there, IMO, *has* to be a brother who signs fluently involved.



No clue, perhaps just different Dean of Students from time to time... Feel free if you want to share the stories. :)

I guess I sort of expected that. I just can't see a mechanical device like that stimulating the auditory nerve in quite the same way that the body does. It is probably more like the good prothetic limbs with nerve connections where the person who has it just has to experiment with what nerves to activate to make it move, which probably don't like up with what used to do it with the real limb...




You found me out, I'm actually an Omega Omega alumnus. (not) Actually, my knowledge comes from a couple of different sources... DPN (Deaf President Now) occured while I was in college and a group of friends and I tried to figure out if there was any way that students at Carnegie-Mellon would ever get involved enough in a Presidential selection process they way that DPN did (we decided no). I've been to Gally a couple of times, at one point (about 10 years ago) I was deliberately trying to visit all of the schools that I thought APO could spread to within 30 or 40 miles of my house with special emphasis on the inactive ones. I visited the library, just looking for issues of the Yearbook and the school newspaper (Buff and Blue?). And for Cochlear Implants, Wikipedia helps. :)




I've heard ASL refered to as a "half foreign" language and the way that the Boy Scouts deal with it for their interpreter strip seems pretty typical. For all languages, you have to have a five minute conversation, translate a two minute speech, translate 200 words from the written word and , for every language *except* ASL, write a letter in the language...

It doesn't help that the supposed halfway between English and ASL, "Signed English" is treated as completely hideous. I didn't understand the thing about 3rd and 4th languages for quite some time until I realized just how different the Sign Languages were from country to country. ASL actually has more in common with the French Sign Language than the one used in the UK.

The question is, "Do you agree that those who sign need to learn grammar in written English?"

There is a lot of mainstreaming as well...


I wonder if the Deaf of Deaf kids will get to the point where a person in Dr. I King Jordan's situtation (Born hearing, lost hearing due to accident) will no longer be acceptable.

I followed DPN10 as well...

The fewer remedial classes may also be an effect of better education in the secondary schools. I'd be interested to see whether MSSD (MSSD is Gallaudet's secondary feeder school run under the same umbrella) is feeding fewer kids into the remedial classes percentagewise than the non-MSSD schools.

Well, I would expect with the reduction in deafness due to disease that the students who became deaf prior to spoken language acquisition are much more likely to be deaf due to a genetic component. Those students at Gallaudet would be more likely to be socially together, thus *increasing* the likelihood of that gene going on to the next generation and probably also being less interested in genetic counseling that might reduce the continuance of the gene. (and that sort of counseling *can* cause reductions, Tay-Sachs is *gone* in the descendants of Eastern European jews for just that reason).


And the fact that Gallaudet takes anyone who is HoH/Deaf with a HS diploma greatly does reduce the graduation rate, IMO.



On the one hand, Gallaudet is *not* a prison. OTOH, I'm not sure if I've ever seen a college deliberately fenced off the way that Gallaudet is. Only school that seems to match it in the DC may be Georgetown, but not sure if the fence goes all the way around like Gally.

If Georgetown was in that neighborhood, I'd demand a fence too. :(

Yeah and real whiplash too. Trinidad just to it's east and southeast is gentrifying, but Ivy City to its north had all of the strip clubs displaced by the building of the new Nationals Baseball Station move there... (I visited Ivy City once dropping a woman off, that area is scary!)

Can you send it to me? I'd like to see what's there and then go to work on it. And then, I think what I might do over the summer (while I start my Masters, raise my 2 year old and care for an aging mother) is sit down and put the Toast Song into pure ASL, grammatically correct and everything, using the Fraternity Sign as you've described it here. Then I'll take it to a Deaf friend of mine and make sure I've got it right. From there, we can video tape it/digital tape it and pass it on to the National Office, so there can be one "Deaf Approved" version of it from here on out. As for it being signed at National Convention, who decides who gets to sign it??





You're right about the locals, I've seen some pretty ugly stuff happen and the admin turns the other way. The traditions are too strong and there's nothing that's going to change the way they work.

I'll log in and request it.....I think I'll have to pay for this one. They've given me two free ones so.....:D

I guess that would be a question for Jamie......Quala...you out there??? Care to chime in?

I am more than happy to help in this respect. Please remember, I'm NOT a native signer, nor am I from a Deaf family. I'm just one of the lucky few who caught onto the language and picked up near-fluency. Enough to become the 7th hearing undergrad in the school's history anyway! ;)


Ahh....another time, and after, say, a couple of Guinness! And then I'm willing to tell EVERYTHING!!

Yep....that's the way you have to look at it. The problem is, the docs never tell the parents that. And it's not until their child has had majorly invasive surgery where they've drilled a hole into their child's skull that they realize they still have a deaf child.....just one with a lot of extra, permanent hardware. (Can you tell I'm not a fan of CIs for kids?)






You had me going there for a split second!! It takes a very special group of people to stand up for themselves the way Deaf people do. Remember, they've been fighting Audism for so long, they've had to come to rely on themselves and others that support them, though far too few of their supporters are hearing. Me, personally, I was there for a couple of days during the whole "Jane" issue, but I had a young child and my friends knew I couldn't stay for the entire protest. I left when they locked down campus (like I said, friends on the inside who got me out through the MSSD campus;)). And yes, the student paper is the Buff and Blue.....I wrote for them one semester under a pseudonym. Long story)




LOL...it's hard to write a language that doesn't have a written format!! Just out of curiosity, who teaches the Boy Scouts the ASL? Do they learn it from a book or from a Deaf person?

This is another story all in and of itself. The reason ASL has more in common with LSF (French Sign Language) is because the "father of ASL", Laurent Clerc, was a Deaf Frenchman. He and Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, for whom the university is named, founded the first permanent school for the Deaf, the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, CT, in 1817. Clerc taught Gallaudet signs, Gallaudet taught Clerc written English on the boat journey from France to CT and those signs, coupled with the home-signs of the children in the school eventually evolved into ASL as we know it today!

As for Signed English, Signed Exact English, SEE II, LOVE, and cued speech, they may be in the continuum of English to ASL, but they have all have one fundamental difference from English and ASL.....THEY'RE NOT LANGUAGES!! They are simply man-made, created signing systems meant to "help" Deaf children learn English. They do not have any of the qualities that are attributed to naturally evolving languages, like English and ASL. I'll leave it at that for now, and we'll talk ASL Linguistics another time! LOL

NEED? No, I don't think they NEED to learn written grammar in English. It does, however, make it easier for them to find jobs, and function in the hearing world they live in. But not knowing English grammar doesn't make Deaf any more or less smart than any other English speaking hearing person who takes a foreign language in school. Believe me, I took Spanish for 4 years and I can't conjugate a verb. But nobody looks at me and criticizes me for it. But a Deaf person who isn't grammatically correct in English 100% of the time is labeled "stupid" . Talk about a double edged sword!



There is a lot of mainstreaming as well...




It already has become unacceptable. This was the issue with Jane Fernandez.....she calls herself Deaf, but she prefers to voice, married a hearing man and never went to a Deaf residential school. Her signing is intermediate, at best, and I can say from experience she had to ask me for clarification on a sign she'd never seen. (IRONY/SARCASM was the sign, I think) Because the DofD community has become so insular, they demanded a more "Deaf" choice for president, and their "voices" were heard!

I followed DPN10 as well...

I think they're faced with the same situation as any other residential school. English is taught as a second language and any graduate's grasp of the grammar will depend on the effort they put into learning.

It also has a lot to do with the fact that their parents were classmates and the kids grow up together. There are still "pockets" of Deafness across the country (South Dakota has several large pockets of Deaf families living in close proximity) and they gravitate to eachother when they're college age. And, unlike when you or I would have a child, finding out their child is Deaf is cause for celebration, not a tragedy. But, sadly, the right genetics don't always find eachother and often, there are hearing kids born from these relationships, meaning there are more CODAs (Children of Deaf Adults) coming into the world, growing up thinking EVERYONE signs and often having to go through speech therapy when they reach preschool age because they've been signing all their lives and don't know how to talk properly.....this is a whole other kettle of fish!!


Yup, it's true...but their standards have improved and continue to do so. I know there were several classes that I took where I felt VERY challenged, and then there were some where I never opened a book. I think it would have been the same at any other school, given the same courses.





It's more to recognize the original footprint of Kendall Green, the farm that became Gallaudet. Also, it sets the school apart from the rest of the neighborhood, which is, as was mentioned in other posts, very unsafe. There seems to be an unwritten rule that the neighborhood simply leaves them alone. Also, it has to be taken into account that there is a residential high school, as well as an elementary school on the grounds, so it keeps them separated from the college kids as well. There is more than one way on and off campus, but it's become a lot tighter, security wise, since the two murders that took place in 2000-2001. But, since it was another student, it eased up a lot after that.

I sent you a PM with my emails on it (work and home) and if you'll send me something from the account, I'll send it to you. [Which you got and replied to by the time I finished composing this] I don't know who the people are who translated it in the first place, but none of them that I met seemed particularly posessive, I'll post to APO-L tomorrow seeing if anyone has anything... Joseph Chen (Timber) is mentioned as having a movie with the ASL in some footnotes, but he just joined the Army (I do have a way to contact him through another brother on LJ. I don't know either way, if the National Board would lay an "Approved" note on it, but I think they have done some approval of the Spanish versions of things. In any even having an easily accessible movie with ASL done correctly probably has a good chance of remaining the standard. (Especially if you were to do something impressive like put it into Stokoe notation. :)


At the conventions I've been to, they do one of two things. 1) teach it to anyone who volunteers to be part of the APO Choir who sings the toast song first just before the entire fraternity joins in. 2) Have a separate group from the choir who gets taught it.

BTW, I do remember at least a few signs from when I learned it. the "Here's" was a motion like you were holding a cup and raising it to clink with someone and the "Firm" was two hands making a motion from in from of the collarbones straight down... (Don't remember the hand shape) Also "Fraternity" was done with the right hand in an F handshape brushing the left collarbone twice (where a man might put a pin)






Sounds like about the only thing that might help is forcing them to go co-ed and it sounds like the Administration is about a billion miles from doing that.



Well, what I was talking about was just the names and initation dates. I don't know on the full set with addresses. I figured you could get Gally to do the legwork there... 1/2 :)



Right now it seems like she's both stressed and depressed at least from her relatively recent livejournal entries (http://quala67.livejournal.com/42806.html)

Well you are better off than those of us who just finger spell (and get confused about the order of 6,7,8, & 9 on the fingers).




Have to figure out a time then. :) Or you can just drink the beer and then post. :)


I wonder if that is where the Star Trek people got half the ideas for the way the Borg look like. :)



If I was an Omega Omega grad (Hearing or no), with access to the amount of resources I've got, I'd be into the rechartering effort considerably more than I am. What did you think of I. King Jordan's editorial? (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...012101118.html)

I thought that MSSD wasn't that close to the Gallaudet University campus, I thought it was up in Northwest DC...
The Tower Clock (Yearbook) actually gave the most information...







Up to the scout, all BSA has is the rules on what the scout has to show, I *think* that the council can designate people who will sign it off, but I think it is so open that if a scout and his father (or mother) are the only "speakers" of the language around, the parent can sign it off. How the scout learned it is considered irrelevant. Doesn't Stokoe Notation count?


That makes sense. About the only things that the "base" language would have affected is those signs where the hand shape is designed to show which of several related words is meant... Does LSF do the "male signs are in the top half of the head, female signs are in the lower half" concept?

Sounds sort of like some of the Alphabets like Kanji and the ba-pa-ma-fa which have been created for the Oriental Pictographic languages.


However if I have a child who walks into kindergarden knowing only Chinese and for whom Chinese is the only language spoken in the home, I would hope that my school system would be able to the the child to know English grammar correctly by graduation. I'm sure there are difference in the English Second Language Acquisition techniques for a child with ASL used in the home from those of Chinese however...





Hmm. I don't know to what degree the school is considered "bi-lingual" as an entity, but having the President not know ASL well enough to know that sign seems a little strange. How knowledgable were the first four Gallaudet Presidents? (I group the Gally presidents into the first 4, 2 interims and "DPN and later".

Interesting looking back 10 years later.



But my guess is that the students know they can go on to Gally regardless of how much they achieve. No real reward for doing well, I guess...



I wonder if the grouping at Martha's Vinyard still exists... I wonder whether CODAs can be Homeschooled and end up fluent in ASL only... There is something in me that takes the idea of Celebration of a child's deafness to be wierd. If that's Audism, so be it.



Perhaps, what was your major? I had a couple of courses where I never opened a book but that was either because they were online or there was no book. I also had a class where the professor decided he wanted to teach from a book that had been out of print for 50 years. He got permission to copy the book and we reimbursed the copying costs. It was a Grad course in General Topology (Mathematics).







For good or ill it is an insular place. I know of people who didn't even know that Gallaudet existed until they opened the Subway Station. I had to deal with some of the same things at the Private K-12 school I graduated from in Taiwan. High Schoolers setting foot on the K-6 side of the campus was grounds for suspension. I think I remember a little about the Murders, but not much...


Randy

several things
 

I'll keep this short, b/c those of of following the recent discussions have been reading a lot lately!

1) Thank you for the kind words Randy - but just saying I've been stressed would have been enough. No need to post my LJ link to the world...

2) Gally isn't a target right now. This is for several reasons: a) Section 85 has got two efforts on the table now, and that's more than enough for one section to handle at a time, and b) in prior contacts with the school, I've not gotten a favorable response in trying to reactivate Omega Omega.

3) Therefore, while there are two efforts that are progressing - we are going to wait on the one that hasn't had a receptive administration.

thanks for all the info, Elyssa - *VERY* interesting reading!!