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57 5 Danny I’d like to be the first deaf person in professional basketball. —Danny SINCE OUR last meeting, Danny and his family had moved, and he now attended a different residential school. Danny and his mother drove several hours to meet with me on this hot, muggy, ninety-degree day after deciding they wanted to take a vacation to come meet with me instead of my going to their home state. They arrived a few minutes early for our appointment, straight from their road trip. When we met previously, nineyear -old Danny was a day student at a residential school. Now, however, he stays in the dorm at his new deaf school and gets home every other weekend for a visit with his family. We agreed to meet at Danny’s old school, which was familiar territory for him. The school was empty on this summer evening. As I looked over the spacious campus through the main doors waiting for Danny to arrive, I had visions in my head of the students and staff scurrying about during the busy days of the regular school year. I wondered what Danny would be like now. I remembered him as being a very articulate, happy, delightful, funloving child who was positively engaged in his school milieu. One of the striking impressions that Danny left with us from his childhood interviews was that he projected a strong sense that being deaf is no big deal. Everything in his life seemed very matter of fact, taken for granted, and he was just plain happy. At the time, he fell right into our interviews, eager to show me his drawings of himself, his school, and his favorite TV characters, the Ninja Turtles. When Danny and his mom arrived, I greeted them and told Danny I didn’t know if he would remember me or our meeting of seven years ago when he was nine, here at the school. He responded that he didn’t remember . Taller, yet still slim at sixteen years of age, Danny was wearing a blue T-shirt and jeans and reported he was coming down with a cold. DEAF ADOLESCENTS 58 Profoundly deaf from birth, Danny is fluent in ASL. Danny’s mother proved to be a very competent signer. She told me that she and Danny’s father divorced, she is remarried, and that Danny has faced the challenge of adjusting to a blended family situation with hearing stepsiblings. Danny is not alone in his cohort as a child whose parents have divorced. Four of the seven adolescents in this study have parents who are divorced, and within the last seven years, at least one parent of each of these children has either remarried or has immediate plans to do so. It was evident in Danny’s interviews that he was facing difficult times. In his childhood interview, his outlook was much more optimistic. It was disheartening for me to see that Danny’s perception of his future vocational and socioeconomic opportunities, and his self-perception and general outlook , are not as positive as they were in our previous meetings. He is more reticent at this point in his life than he was previously. Despite his dismal mood, Danny does have multiple strengths and has encouraging things happening in his life. He is intelligent and communicates easily in ASL; he sees his potential for college and a career in computers ; he boasts of many friends, involvement in school activities, and a variety of leisure activities and hobbies; he depicts a close and communicatively accessible relationship with both of his parents; he continues to enjoy the company of his deaf peers; and he is content in school and family situations that are linguistically and communicatively accessible. In addition, Danny has a variety of successful coping strategies. Another interesting thing about Danny is that he teaches us that as an adolescent, he and other participants in this study now identify new and more subtle differences that indicate that one is deaf, such as stance, posture, and material goods.  AS DANNY, Marilyn (our voice-over interpreter and transcriptionist), and I continued toward the interview room, I asked Danny how he liked his new school. His response then and elsewhere in his interviews indicated he was content in his school environment. He said that he played sports, and his team has traveled here to play against his old school. He then sat down in the cushioned chair in front of the black...

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