"All Eyes"

In Deaf Women's Lives: Three Self-Portraits, Bainy Cyrus, one of three coauthors, tells about her life growing up in both the deaf and the hearing world. She attended Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she struggled with her delayed language development. Using five chronological readings, Bainy describes how a typical deaf child coped with delayed English language in the 1960s and 1970s.

Learning with Our Eyes

As a five-year-old, Bainy is in her first year at Clarke School. She and her classmates rely on the teacher, Miss Miller, to improve their language skills, in which they use their exceptionally sharp eyes to learn:

Although we had normal minds, my classmates and I lacked straight language, lagging a few years behind our hearing peers. We were unable to learn a full sentence on our own; therefore, we had to identify items before learning to use verbs. There were always two sets of cards—one set consisted of nouns and the other of adjectives. We would have to learn to match these two cards together and place them under the right picture such as RED BOW or SAD CLOWN. We were using our eyes to learn.

The interesting fact is that deaf people are exceptionally keen with their eyes, able to catch the smallest movement a hundred feet away. Because they have little or none of the auditory sense, deaf people treat their eyes as the number one sense for communication, education, security, and even entertainment. Deaf people are extremely visual. They "hear" with their eyes. They read lips. They read sign language. They read facial and body languages. They read TTYs. They read closed captions. They become alert to blinking lights of special devices. Deaf people are all eyes. That is how I feel about myself; I don't know what would happen if I lost my eyes. And how on earth did Helen Keller get by?

That's why Miss Miller began our language education by teaching us to identify things. We would immediately know that the long red strip tied into a knot was RED BOW and that the Bozo-like figure with his mouth arching downward was SAD CLOWN—if we got the adjective-noun order right. Then we would move on to the more difficult language pattern: verbs. We sure had a long way to go.

Complex Language

Now in their second year at Clarke School, Bainy and her classmates are slowly, very slowly improving their English language skills, this time learning to use full sentences, along with proper verb tenses, which is not an easy task:

My classmates and I had finally learned to say some complete sentences and could pronounce easy words without being misunderstood. Miss Miller had to drill language into our minds by making us read every sentence and correcting it. From day one she constantly said full sentences to us, knowing that we would not be able to understand every word of it. She wanted us to catch a flicker of the language rhythm so that we would understand that language did not contain isolated words.

Small words such as "the," "in," or "as" pose a problem for most deaf people who lipread because these words are likely to be missed on the lips. They just whip by so fast that deaf people don't realize that these words ever exist. I remember all the Clarke School teachers trying to correct our sentences, reminding us not to forget the small words. No wonder they had to keep telling us to say "I have a black dog," not "I have black dog."

Despite having learned to use verbs, my classmates and I still had trouble with proper tenses. That would take us more time to learn the difference between "I am" and "I will be." If you asked one of us, a tiny little deaf kid, what we had for supper and what we did afterward the night before, you would hear all the present verb tenses as if you were now watching the feast.

Every time I received mail from my family, Miss Miller read it out...