Cover next page > title: Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe author

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Page He was perceived by many students and colleagues as being kind of boring and old-fashioned, even though of course he wasn't. He just came from a different culture he was born in a different age. He was sometimes unnecessarily academic,
but that may come from his being educated in the classics.
Bill was not essentially a very good teacher. He couldn't inspire people very easily. He tended to complicate his message,
whether he wrote it or whether he spoke it. He tended to burden his message with complicated metaphors and literary allusions, and so the message had a hard time getting out. I think in someways he worked against himself. But if Stokoe did find it difficult to get through to his students, this probably had as much to do with his training and the culture of the times as with his personality and teaching style. Up until the time he arrived at Gallaudet, he had taught students who had been speaking, hearing, reading, and writing English all of their lives.
Stokoe arrived at Gallaudet utterly unprepared for the poor reading and writing skills of his students. He never blamed them for their shortcomings he realized it was his responsibility and that of the other teachersto help the students to develop the skills and strategies necessary to improve their reading and writing.
As chair of the English Department, Stokoe inherited a system that entitled each student enrolled in a class to spend half an hour a week alone with the professormuch to the chagrin of some faculty who, in Stokoe's words, "preferred to lecture once and get it over with" Stokoe approved of this individual tutorial system because it enabled him to interact with his students, get to know them better, and most important, help them achieve the academic goals he was convinced they were capable of with the proper guidance and instruction.
Those individual sessions revealed tome precisely where the students needed help. When I read their papers through, if there was apart that I couldn't understand, I could simply ask the student questions, and he or she would usually respond,
"Oh, I forgot that" and put in what was missing or insert the connecting idea.

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