Teacher shows a silent world to students who can hear

From: Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel, FL - Jan 22, 2004

By Margo Harakas Staff Writer

All her life Cathy Oshrain has witnessed how her deafness causes blindness in others, blindness to her intellect, blindness to her capabilities.

So in the late 1980s when she applied for a job as a lab technician, she didn't flinch when the interviewer noted a perceived insurmountable problem -- her impaired hearing.

He never explained how deafness might impede Oshrain's ability to draw blood, which was what the job entailed.

Instead of reacting with anger or frustration, Oshrain struck a deal. She would work free, as a volunteer, for two weeks, she said, to prove she could do the job.

"In one week, they hired me," the 47-year-old woman says, grinning. And when she left the job, it was filled by another deaf technician.

It was a lesson well taught, long before Oshrain became a bona fide teacher.

More than hands

It's 11 a.m., and this North Miami Beach Senior High class is laughing appreciatively. Teacher Cathy Oshrain is showing with theatrical flair how fluency in American Sign Language involves more than hand precision and finger spelling. It's a language nearly as dependent on body English and facial expression as on the gab of fingers. It's the movement of body and eye that impart the emotion, the inflection, the intonation.

To illustrate the point, Oshrain mimes a sentence without resorting to a single hand sign.

Then the 5-foot-3 dynamo slips off her jacket to really ham it up. The students are signing in response, waving hands and dashing to the front to act out the next sentence.

"She's awesome," says Vanessa Frias, 15, a second-year ASL student.

"She's a really cool person," says Janessa Soto, 16.

Oshrain, who lives in Hollywood, is one of four deaf teachers in Miami-Dade County who teach ASL to the hearing. (Miami-Dade has six other staffers who are deaf or hard of hearing but they are teachers or teaching assistants for the deaf.)

Anywhere from 100 to 140 hearing students each year sign up for Oshrain's classes. Most have never met a deaf person before.

Those who have, like Jessica Victor, often have an odd reaction.

"I used to think it was scary how they acted," admits 16-year-old Jessica. "They just looked different."

Oshrain, deaf all her life, is well-acquainted with such notions. To sensitize students to what it means to be deaf, each year she has Silent Days in which she hands out earplugs to her students, and forbids them from talking for two days.

The students then write a paper on what they've learned, how well they grasped or didn't grasp their various classroom lessons, and how teachers and peers treated them.

With her level II students (she teaches only two levels), she takes the experiment even further, dividing the class into the deaf and the blind. She pairs them up. "We have the deaf leading the blind," she says. The blind react to sounds and translate conversations; the deaf serve as the duo's eyes.

Oshrain came to the school eight years ago, having earned a bachelor's in liberal studies from Florida International University. (She'd later earn a master's in "varying exceptionalities" from Barry University.) She intended to teach health sciences to the deaf. But when the principal needed an ASL teacher, she was delighted with the opportunity.

For three years she taught part time. In '99, she became a full-time teacher and the following year was chosen the school's Beginning Teacher of the Year. She was also nominated as the county's Rookie Teacher.

Oshrain, who also teaches Deaf Culture and Deaf Studies at Miami-Dade College, remembers well her first weeks as a new teacher and the challenges posed by a couple of troublemakers who childishly mocked her.

Other students told the offending students to knock it off, that they weren't funny, that they were simply being cruel.

When they continued, Oshrain took the offenders aside.

"How would you feel," she asked in speech not easily deciphered, "if your mom or dad or siblings were deaf and made fun of?"

"Most of them would really feel bad and apologize repeatedly," Oshrain says, "and we would have a closer student-teacher relationship." The unreachable were booted out of class.

Then there was that other problem, centering on the sounding of the school bell. Wanting to duck out early, a couple of students would falsely tell her the bell had rung.

Catching on to the ruse, Oshrain had a light installed that blinks when the bell sounds.

With her first-year students, Oshrain will vocalize, but she encourages her students increasingly to sign as they gain the skill.

She takes a harder line with second-year students. "I tell them I will never use my voice unless I am mad, and that I will not understand or respond to them if they vocalize to me." She appreciates, however, that it is difficult for those dependent on speech not to forget and use their voices.

"She is," says principal Raymond Fontana, "one of my better teachers. She's very intelligent, and she's a good teacher. That's what she should be known for.

"You see her and you don't see a handicap."

'A deaf accent'

Oshrain, who hopes one day to return to college to get a doctorate in counseling, does not know the cause of her deafness. "I have a sister older than me. She was born deaf, too," she says through a student interpreter. She has student aides in each class to assist her. (This interview was conducted face to face and through e-mail.)

Unlike her sister, who went to deaf school for three years, Oshrain plunged right into the mainstream public schools. "I was tested and they found out I have a high IQ," she says.

Still, "It was very hard," she admits. And very frustrating. People, she found, were either fearful of her or thought she was stupid. Other children taunted her. "I'd go home in tears plenty of times," she says.

The love and support of her parents eventually gave her the strength, she says, to stand up for herself.

Equally important was her determination, for in those days, schools did not provide interpreters, note takers or any other special assistance. She got through school primarily by lip reading, a skill she jokes that she began learning in the womb. "Only about 30 percent of the deaf community is skilled at lip reading," she points out.

Thanks to 13 years of speech therapy, she also learned to talk.

She remembers sitting before a mirror watching her own lip formation as her mother worked with her on her speech.

"Most people think I'm from another country," says Oshrain. When strangers inquire about her accent, she says, "I tell them I have a deaf accent."

The thing with Oshrain, says principal Fontana, is that "Sometimes you forget she is deaf ... She fits in with the faculty, she participates in everything."

And he sees so many kids signing these days, in the hall, in the cafeteria, in the classroom, "It doesn't stick out any more. It goes with the turf."

Interestingly, few of her high school students plan careers as interpreters.

The only student in this class who might make a career of signing is Diana Munera, 18. She enrolled in ASL because she has a deaf sister who is four years younger. Though Diana has been working with her sister for many years, she says, "My ASL skills were not that good."

Now, she is one of Oshrain's student assistants. Colombia-born, Diana also helps out once a week with an ASL class for parents of deaf children. "I translate the English words into Spanish," she says.

Fontana sees Oshrain's influence extending well beyond her classroom.

"The real benefit," he says, "is Ms. Oshrain has shown kids and teachers alike a handicapped person can function just like the rest of us, if only given a chance.

"Kids don't see her as a deaf teacher, but as Ms. Oshrain, the teacher. She's one of us."

Margo Harakas can be reached at mharakas@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4728.

MORE INFO
Among the dozens of sites are:
http://www.where.com/scott.net/asl

http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/asl.asp

http://www.masterstech-home.com/ASLDict.html

http://www.deaflibrary.org/asl.html

http://www.lessontutor.com/ASLgenhime.html

Copyright 2004, Sun-Sentinel Co. & South Florida Interactive, Inc.