Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  “How about a little longer and more specific?”

  “The boy and the girl met and kissed,” offers Chris in similar fashion.

  Liz writes that on the board. “Now . . . what if I say,” and this time she shows the boy approaching the stationary girl for a kiss.

  “He kissed her,” responds Chris.

  “Right! And that’s a little different. Or we could do it this way,” says Liz. She reverses the motion so the girl becomes the initiator; the students translate that into English. They catch on and practice more sentences, bilingually manipulating subject and object pronouns, gliding from ASL to English, one after the other.

  ASL conveys the differences between subject and object as specifically as English does. It simply employs a change of direction rather than a change of pronouns or of sign order. Liz uses the grammar of ASL, which is perfectly clear and reasonable to the students, to teach them English grammar, which they find so unwieldy. The former is nothing they were ever taught; they acquired it naturally through use, just as hearing students understand how to form proper English sentences before they ever receive any formal instruction. This method ultimately serves two purposes. As the students learn the rules of English grammar, they are also receiving a subtler message: that ASL has an equally complex and worthy grammar, a grammar they have already mastered.

  Now Liz writes on the board, “Patti borrowed her friend’s clothes.” Patti has been gazing up at the colored origami cranes strung along the ceiling. Stirred by currents of hot air, they look as though they’re flying in place. Tamara jostles her classmate’s wrist and indicates the board with her chin. Patti reads the sentence and grins.

  “Now,” says Liz, “can we change this sentence to use ‘hers’?"

  Sofia drums her feet under the table in a flutter kick of inspiration. “I think . . . Hers friend has a lot of beautiful clothes?”

  Liz arches her eyebrows. “Tamara, you be the judge. Can we say that?”

  “No way.”

  “Sorry, the judge said no.”

  “A friend of hers . . .” begins Patti, but she abandons the effort, the tip of her tongue pinched gingerly between her teeth.

  “A friend of hers lent her the clothes,” declares Chris.

  “Do you accept this, judge?” Liz turns to Tamara.

  “No . . . I don’t know.” Tamara, wiry and alert, jiggles her knee and thumbs her lower lip in contemplation.

  “Does it sound right?” Liz prods. The students understand that she means this idiomatically. Naturally, they cannot check the sentence phonetically the way hearing people can, cross-referencing it with vast stores of similar, overheard phrases.

  “Yeah . . .” Uncertainly, Tamara reverses her decision.

  “That’s right?” clarifies Juanita, struggling to keep up.

  “This is a correct sentence, yes,” Liz allows. “But how can we make it clearer?”

  Juanita, stumped, pushes her glasses up with two fingers and sucks in noisy desperation on her M & M.

  “A friend of hers lent her clothes,” tries Chris, kicking the rung of his chair rhythmically. Someone’s hearing aid has started whistling, and Patti is striking her pen against the table with fierce, repetitive whacks. But this mounting cacophony, unlike the visual frenzy at the start of class, is a symptom of engagement rather than avoidance. Liz, the only one for whom it represents a potential distraction, chooses to ignore it.

  “The grammar is right,” she concedes now, ”but the meaning is a little confusing, with two ‘her’s.”

  “Patti borrowed hers clothes,” says Sofia.

  Tamara’s head clunks dramatically to the table.

  “No way. We can’t say ‘hers clothes.’” Liz shakes her head emphatically. “We’re getting closer, though,” she promises.

  “Patti borrowed clothes from her,” proposes Chris.

  “Ah!” Finally, a suggestion the teacher deems worthy of writing on the board.

  Whenever Liz’s back is turned, she cannot interact. During the moments when she is cut off from her students, evidence of their waning interest appears. Patti and Tamara pass covert notes in purple ballpoint. Their written language reads like a hybrid of English and the faulty sign language they see used by so many of their hearing teachers: “R.C. told me that drop the plan the party at his house. He thinks because that we don’t like him. He told me I told him. It is not true . . . Yes, R.C. talk me by yesterday. But today during math then he ask me something wrong?” They chatter across the page in scrawls that creep, urgent and lopsided, up the edges.

  Liz is still writing on the board. Sofia grimaces. “This is boring,” she avers, without voice. Chris watches her without reacting, then lifts the corner of his upper lip—in the hearing world a sneer, but in ASL a sign of agreement. He wears a peach-colored T-shirt with “Deaf Pride” emblazoned across the chest, newly purchased from the school store.

  “I’m glad we got that one instead of the one that said ‘Deaf Power,’” remarks Sofia, looking at him in turn. As comanager of the store, she was involved in the decision about which shirt to order from Gallaudet. “Power sounds like better than hearing people. Pride sounds more equal.”

  Tamara, glancing idly over the lists of pronouns on the board, is suddenly seized by a new question. She starts drumming the table for the teacher’s attention, uttering her name in clipped squeaks. Liz finishes writing and turns back toward the class.

  “Tell me, tell me,” Tamara implores, jiggling both knees in tandem, “what’s the difference between ‘she’ and ‘hers’?” She fingerspells each pronoun on a different hand, ending with the last letter of each frozen stiffly before her, a tableau of impatience. Her manner expresses the general web of frustration threatening to overtake the group. The students rivet their attention on the teacher, waiting to see how she will explain this one.

  With a single hand shape, Liz unravels the mystery of possessive pronouns. In ASL, possessives all share one basic sign: a flat hand, flexed at the wrist, fingers closed. By pushing the heel of the hand in different directions, the speaker distinguishes between mine, yours, hers, theirs, and so on. Liz shows the students how to plug this hand shape into sentences when they’re trying to decide whether or not to use a possessive in English. This is easy; this they know. The discovery of a new link between the languages appears to give them a second wind, and Liz takes advantage of the momentum to carry on, guiding them deeper into the labyrinth.

  Twenty years ago, even if it had not been forbidden, few teachers of the deaf were able to conduct a lesson this way, using ASL as a bridge to English. They received their degrees without knowing even a few rudimentary signs, let alone having proficiency in the language or any understanding of its grammar and syntax. Ten years ago, the situation was little better. Teachers might have used signs in the classroom, but only as manual codes for spoken English, a string of disjointed nouns and verbs loosely pinned to speech, harboring no interior structure or reason. Recently, colleges have begun offering courses in ASL, but usually as an undergraduate elective rather than a requirement for people studying to become teachers of the deaf.

  Liz’s ability to draw on ASL for teaching English grammar is rare. Her boldness in doing so is rarer. Even as ASL edges into social studies, math, and science lessons, the old idea that using ASL is antithetical to learning English lingers ominously in most English classrooms. The other English teachers may or may not use ASL; it certainly is not part of Lexington’s official curriculum. It’s just something that makes sense.

  Downstairs, under the smart and crabby tutelage of Adele Sands-Berking, James works on his college-entrance essay. It’s the last period of the day, and it’s wet outside, with great metallic sheets of rain rippling past the window, but warm in here, in Adele’s box-shaped yellow classroom. On the back wall, chunky letters cut from construction paper spell out the advice GOOD READERS MAKE PICTURES IN THEIR MINDS. A pair of gold-rimmed spectacles perch elegantly on James’s nose; they are new, obtaine
d after much prodding from Adele. Through them he can see what people say without needing to squint.

  Right now Adele is saying, “This is a very good start. Very good start, James.” She sits in a kid’s chair right beside him at the table and holds what exists of his draft—one neatly printed paragraph on yellow legal paper: “I is Interested in Archessurial Drafting because I took Art and woodwork class for two years and also I’m interest to build bridges, house, etc . . . that how I’m interest and I want to improve the city.”

  The way James writes is no measure of his intelligence. It is a measure of how difficult it is to master an oral language without audition. No hearing person, not even someone who is illiterate, would say, “I’m interest to build.” Hearing people do not need to be taught the proper construction, “I’m interested in building”; we acquire that knowledge through exposure, without effort. Adele understands this, and James suffers no loss of dignity in her eyes. Outside of Lexington, however, he will probably always bear a stigma because of the way he uses English, no matter how hard he and his teacher work together now.

  Adele points to his opening. ’“I is/ James?” she queries, with indignation that may or may not be feigned. He uses his eraser, writes in “I’m.”

  “You cheater. What’s that really supposed to be? 1 what?”

  “Am?” he fingerspells.

  “Yes. This is very formal, James; no contractions.” She waits while he makes the change, then tackles the next error, and the next, and they slog through the entire paragraph, correcting grammar and spelling and punctuation. Adele helps him clarify concepts as well; they decide that he means carpentry rather than drafting, furniture rather than bridges.

  “F-U-R-T —” James gets stuck in an attempt to fingerspell the word before writing it down.

  “Fur-nih-chur,” pronounces Adele, trying to help him sound it out.

  “I have no hearing aid,” he protests.

  “Well, thank you, James. That makes it easy.”

  “I lost it,” he tells her defensively.

  “Okay, look: fur,” she repeats out loud, breaking it down.

  “F-U-R,” he spells.

  “Nih,” says Adele.

  “N,” spells James.

  “Nih,” she repeats.

  “N” is still all he gets.

  “I.” She gives him the missing letter, then, “Chur.”

  “T-U-R-E,” he finishes, plucking the last four letters from memory.

  When they finish editing the first paragraph, Adele launches him into the next part of the essay, in which James is supposed to describe himself, his experiences and attributes. “Remember last year when we talked about supporting your ideas with examples? You’re trying to convince them to accept you,” Adele explains. “Why are you special?”

  The question gives him pause. James’s guidance counselor, after all, has advised him to apply to Camden County College in New Jersey, which offers a two-year vocational program for deaf students. Getting accepted should be a cinch, and James could learn a trade, but he wouldn’t earn a degree; he has a hunch that this program is geared for students who are not in fact very special. Pat Penn, the cook in the dorm, has advised him to apply to Morehouse, the college where her own son goes. The idea of a black school appeals to James, but the thought of taking the SATs and competing with hearing students is daunting; in truth, he knows Morehouse is probably out of his league.

  The essay he is working on today is for neither Camden (which requires no essay) nor Morehouse (which he has yet to contact); it is for his application to the National Technical Institute of the Deaf (NTID), at the Rochester Institute of Technology, upstate. Created by an act of Congress in 1968, NTID is easier to get into than a hearing university or even Gallaudet, its liberal arts cousin; still, it is highly respected and offers the advantages of a sizable deaf community within a larger hearing college. The fact that NTID’s application entails writing a personal essay raises it in James’s esteem—not that he has any great affinity with essays, but it seems an indication of the school’s selectiveness, and suddenly this seems important.

  Now, in his last months at Lexington, feeling himself on the brink of being passed along into a future he cannot fathom, James sits up and takes notice. Within the Lexington community, he has been protected, respected, and admired. Outside these doors, what sort of deaf adult will the world perceive him to be? For James, who long ago found it in his own best interests to abnegate his power of selfdetermination, the answer to this question depends on who will be advising him, helping him, speaking for him. Somewhere beneath his measured nonchalance, he has registered the significance of this next step. He will surface once to aim himself, then surrender to the current again.

  After pestering Adele into giving up her prep period—he himself is forfeiting woodshop to be here—James finds himself this afternoon, of his own accord, in the unlikely setting of an English room. He submits himself to Adele’s prickly guidance and the awkward medium of written English for the sake of a voluntary essay. Now, having orchestrated all this on his own, he reclines like the blinded prince, entrusting his next move to the person in command.

  “Many kids are applying,” she is telling him, her long white fingers knitting an obstacle, a dare. “Why are you special, why accept you?” Sometimes when Adele is talking to deaf students, her speech slips into shorthand, a condensed English gloss of her signs.

  “I don’t know.” James shifts in his chair, places one heavy brown boot under the table with a thunk.

  “Yes, you do,” Adele insists. “I know. You know. Tell them.” They face each other as though squaring off, the teacher with her thick blond hair chopped off below the chin, her pointed features frank and challenging, the student with his arms crossed and his neck held slightly back, the new gold glasses forming halos around his placid eyes.

  “Sports,“ Adele prompts, smacking the table. “Sports! What about being captain of the ■wrestling team? And you’re involved in another very important activity this year, what is it? Come on, you know.”

  “Black Culture Club?" he ventures slowly. Wrestling was last year; this year he’s too old. And the Black Culture Club has met only a few times; in spite of being its president, James hasn’t been very involved.

  “Yeah! So that tells them you’re a leader, you’re president of the club. Also means what else? That your culture is important to you. Need to show them why you’d be a good addition to the school. Why do they need someone like you?”

  “Not me,” he scoffs, but without removing his eyes from her face; he absorbs her words with skeptical fascination.

  “Yeah. I’m serious, James.” Adele, glowering, reaches over and tenderly picks a scrap of masking tape off his shoulder. “It says you’re an athlete. And a leader.” She pretends to be on the admissions committee, reading his essay. “Mmm, mmm-hmm! An athlete and a leader! Wow, involved, interesting person! Complete person!”

  She becomes Adele again, fixes him with a strict blue stare. “They want students who will do something important with their lives. And you will. I know that. And you know that. Right?”

  The noncommittal smile, the dubious gaze, have finally been shed; Adele’s relentless faith has stripped James bare. The January rain strums at the gray windows, two narrow panes. For a moment here inside, with the comfortable mess of papers and colored chalk, the teacher in her crisp white blouse so tall and powerful, James borrows her confidence, shares her certainty. His face has gone sober, his lips have drifted slightly apart, and he answers seriously, crooking one fist at the wrist: “Yes.”

  Then he glances at the sheet of legal paper, half filled. “So I’m supposed to tell them I’m important to them?”

  “Well, you don’t have to say exactly that,” Adele responds tartly. “You don’t have to say,’You’re a jerk if you don’t accept me.’”

  James bursts out laughing, his cockeyed chipped tooth shining, and shakes his head, passing a gold-ringed hand over his jaw.
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br />   “Okay, work on this,” she orders him. “You have twenty minutes to beef this up. I want this much by the end of the period." The side of her hand slices down near the end of the page. This teacher will never stop busting his chops; James counts on it.

  “Impossible,” he protests, but without any heart; this is just to get her goat. He picks up the pencil, grave again. His future may hinge on how well he can portray himself in this headache called English. When he begins to write, his penmanship is painfully neat.

  This is the morning of fluttery stomachs, extra No. 2 pencils, lips chewed raw. Down in the basement, in the breakfast room, the usual mischief and gossip are absent. Cocoa grows cold; bagels and jelly become bright forgotten centerpieces, replaced in front of the students by Regents review books, over which heads are anxiously bent.

  In New York State, the Board of Regents gives two types of exam: the Regents exams, which students must pass in order to graduate from high school with a prestigious Regents diploma, and the Regents Competency Tests, which they must pass in order to graduate at all. At Lexington, students often graduate with a third option, something called an IEP diploma, which is awarded to those students who complete the Individualized Education Plan established for them by the school but do not pass the RCTs. IEP diplomas, offered only by special education programs, provide a way of acknowledging years of hard work. Awarded onstage amid all the roses and flashbulbs of commencement, they signify tremendous accomplishment for many students and their families. However, in the outside world, they carry about as much weight as play money.

  On average, 60 percent of Lexington students graduate with IEP diplomas. That means that fewer than half graduate with regular academic diplomas. Only a handful even attempt to take the Regents exams; about one or two a year qualify for Regents diplomas. The RCTs, given in six subject areas—reading, writing, math, science, global studies, and United States history—are the standard fare. Reading and writing are the worst. The others are hard, but these two seem designed to try the students in their most vulnerable places.