Chapter 36

"What do you call a deaf person who doesn't speak?" I thought this question was funny but a good question I guess. The book answers the question simply, you call them a Deaf person. You should not refer to them as mute or deaf-mute or deaf-and-dumb. It would be very insensitive to call them mute or deaf-and-dumb. It's rude to call people dumb anyway but to say someone is mute when they are Deaf is really not nice. 

All Deaf children will have some sort of speech coach and auditory training. I think it's okay that they get this training because it could help them in the long run. I don't think they should be forced into it but they should be shown the advantages and disadvantages. 

For Deaf people, it is hard to control the volume of their voice. Makes sense, they can't hear how loud or quiet they are. I'm sure they are able to hear the volume of a room, if it is very loud or very quiet but that doesn't mean they can hear their own voice.

This reminded me of a time I was in Florida with my family. My stepmom had on headphones and was listening to music. We asked her a question (had to shout because of the music) but when she started answering us back she was yelling! We all were like, "Betty, shhhh" and started laughing. She took off the headphones and was so confused as to why we shushed her. We then told her, just because you can't hear your voice over the music doesn't mean we can't either. Now looking back on this, I feel kind of bad that we did that because this is what Deaf people would experience all the time. Luckily, it was just us in the hotel at the time so our reactions didn't offend anyone.