Cover next page > title: Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe author
Download 2.48 Mb. View original pdf
|
| < previous page page_46 next page > If you like this book, buy it! < previous page page_47 next page > Page 47 tion in school achievement, and all the rest of it. Ignore all that and notice the students. Find out what they can do and want to do and encourage them to want to do more. Show them how to do it. Don't tell them but show them on the board or on paper or with signsif you can signand give them a chance to try it. Be generous with praise when they do it right, and be as careful as can be when you are criticizing the mistakes they make. Remember how brilliant they must be to have gotten where they are, to have made it to an institution of higher education under the circumstances which existed for them. This is not to say that Stokoe's early experiences at Gallaudet were easy. Initially, the students resented Stokoe's arrival. Gil Eastman, who was a Gallaudet student at the time, recalls the resistance he and the other students felt toward Detmold's reforms and their suspicion that Stokoe had been hired simply because he was "Detmold's friend" Eastman, who eventually headed the Theater Arts Department and became one of the best known deaf actors and playwrights in the country, recalls that the students complained about the new curriculum primarily because of their reluctance to change: The students' argument against the new curriculum lasted through the rest of the academic year. In the fall of 1953, the Gallaudet freshmen invaded Dr. Detmold's office to protest his drastic changes in the curriculum. We were lost in chaos. We had to take brand new courses that had never been offered before. We said that it was not fair to the past students. It was a tough program. We often planned a boycott but that never happened. Several months later we got used to the changes but we still did not like Detmold's transformation.13 In October of 1955, when Bill Stokoe's arrival was announced in the Buff and Blue (the school newspaper, the students held his friendship with Detmold against him. Eastman remembers a group of students complaining "Not fair Why did he hire his own friend I am not going to take a course under him. I heard Download 2.48 Mb. Share with your friends:
|