Thomas Tranchin’s parents found out he was profoundly deaf when he was one-year-old. The whole family describes how devastated they felt when the doctor told them, and how they knew it would change their lives. I agree with Taylor, the movie was a little hard to watch. I’ve always been fascinated in American Sign Language and even before this class it was easy for me to say that if I had a deaf child I would introduce them to signing. My choice was backed up when watching Tommy struggle to convey his feeling and communicate with his parents. It was interesting, and heart wrenching, to watch parents struggle so much with the decision of where to send Tommy to school.
Mainstream is also known as the local public school. Deaf kids are likely to be alone or with very few other deaf classmates. Nobody signs and kids have to learn to lip read and figure things out on their …show more content…
Tommy’s mother pushed hard for this type of education. She kept saying, “How limited life would be if he didn’t learn to talk.” At the St. Louis school for the deaf, everybody learned to speak and were only taught with spoken English. Even though the teen who was interviewed was very successful in oral communication, that doesn’t happen very often. In class, we discussed that sometimes harsh methods were taken to make these kids not sign. I feel that if someone is going to speak, they will speak. If parents make this choice for them, I feel like they have nowhere to go; you aren’t a part of the deaf community, and if you wanted to be, you’d have to learn another language after working for so long on