Articles
by and about Alice and her children
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to read articles about Jill, her siblings, and their mother Alice
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Mom's story of a child's first day at her local school is an illustrated book
Player beats 'sound barrier'
UMR's Roseler
Needs Community's Help to Play
Deaf Olympians; Three Clayton Athletes Hope to Attend World Games
Articles by and about Alice
"No Surrender"
by Alice Roesler, University City
On television recently, a special called And Your Name is Jonah was shown. It portrayed a child who is deaf and whose parents, after frustration and struggle, gave up trying to help their child live in the hearing world, and found their solution in the world of silence and sign language.
The fact that “Jonah” failed to speak is not the tragedy of this movie. The tragedy lies in the way it portrayed the attempts to help him overcome his handicap. Learning to speak and lip-read was shown as a ridiculous and unfeeling attempt to ward off the inevitable failure. As the mother of four deaf children who have succeeded in the “normal” world, I wonder why deafness is singled out as the one handicap for which the answer is “surrender.”
Does it really matter if deaf children are not taught, as other handicapped children are, to strive to use all of their human abilities, even if the results will be less than perfect? Does it really matter if they are given an education which tells them that they are first of all deaf, and that their lives must be built around their handicap, rather than around their abilities? It does to me.
"THERAPIST, MOTHER OF 9, SAYS CHILDREN NEED ROLE"
by Nancy Marlowe, Horizon Editor, Dec 14, 1986
Alice Wheat is a family therapist who think she has special insight into family problems. She is the mother of nine children, four of whom were born deaf and all of whom are now successful adults.
She says a lot of family problems stem from her perception that there’s no role for children in today’s family structure. “I don’t know how we drifted into this as a culture,” she said, “but there's no role for children.”
“We treat them like dolls. We dress them, take them here and there, but when they are 18, then suddenly they are adults and we expect them to behave in an adult fashion. So few parents expect children to participate in the work of the family. They may use computers at school, but they are not trusted with the washer and dryer at home. The child does not learn to become a contributing member of the family.”
Wheat makes it clear she is not a child’s therapist. “My focus is on the parents,” she said.
“A parent comes to me and says, ‘I can’t get Johnny to mind (whether Johnny is 2, 12, or 16), I’m feeling frustrated. The kids don’t seem to respect me.’ When I ask, ‘What job does the child have in the family?’ The answer is often, ‘Oh, well, it’s easier to do it myself.’ Very often the mother takes on all the work of the family and winds up feeling frustrated, overwhelmed, overworked and doesn’t realize her role in the problem.”
Wheat says she wants to offer her services to those who may think they can’t afford counseling.
“I want to reach folks who don’t want to go to a public agency but who find a private counselor pretty expensive,” Wheat said. “I’m not trained for or interested in long-term therapy. So, I want to work with those folks who are stuck. I want to help them see the problem, choose the solution and get on with their lives.”
Wheat came here in 1986 from St. Louis, MO. “I just looked on a map and said, ‘Where would I like to live if I could live anywhere?’” Her marriage had ended in divorce and when her youngest son graduated from high school, she moved to Asheville.
“I was a counselor in private practice in St. Louis. I also worked with the women’s center, with the battered women, recovering addicts and with development opportunities for poor women who wanted to turn their lives around.”
Wheat said her experiences as a mother help her as a counselor. “We had nine children. Four were born deaf. The deafness was caused by a recessive gene we did not know about. Our first, fifth, seventh, and eighth child are deaf. Three are married to hearing people, three have college degrees, and all speak. This is a passion of mine — deaf children can learn to speak.
“I compare sign language to a wheelchair. When someone simply cannot walk, the wheelchair is their lifeline. A wheel chair is not the first choice of someone who has a problem walking, but deaf children are taught to rely on sign language from the beginning.”
As a mother of nine, Wheat says she knows what she is asking when she advises parents to do things as a family, “but find some time with each child.”
She has a master’s degree in counseling from the University of Missouri at St. Louis.
“My theory of counseling is that growth and change are almost always possible,” Wheat said. “My job is to help people identify problems and choose solutions.”
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"SIGN LANGUAGE ISOLATES DEAF CHILDREN, SAYS MOTHER OF 9"
by Tula Andonaras, staff writer
Alice Wheat is the mother of nine children. She married when she was 18 and had her first child a year later. She had never been involved with deafness before Jill was born.
“Even the doctor thought her deafness was caused by something at birth,” said Wheat. “Both my husband and I had no idea as to the real cause of her handicap.”
Wheat’s fifth, seventh and eighth children were also born with the inability to hear.
“By that time, the doctor figured out what was causing my children to be born deaf,” she said. “Both my husband and I were carrying a recessive gene that caused the deafness in my children.”
At the time of the birth of her children, Wheat lived in St. Louis, MO.
“That was very fortunate for us,” she said. “One of the best institutes for the deaf is in St. Louis.” Wheat had her first child tested at the St. Louis Central Institute for the Deaf.
“I was told that Jill was intelligent and that she’d be able to do what any other child could do. She would even learn to talk,” said Wheat.
The institute that Jill would attend was an oral school. Its staff did not believe in sign language. Before Jill was old enough to start going to school, Wheat took steps to get her ready for the institute.
“I took a correspondence course on how to deal with a deaf child,” she said. “That kept me going until she was five and entered school. From infancy, I just kept talking to her, just started pouring in the sign language. Contrary to what some people think, deaf children do want to talk. I encouraged sounds and mouthing of words. Jill wore a hearing aid from the time she was a month old.”
Wheat believes that it helped her four deaf children to have “hearing” brothers and sisters.
“My role was to see that whenever a conversation was going on, that the deaf know what was going on,” said Wheat. “Even if a news story broke on the television or radio, I told them about it. I always wanted them to be informed about the world around them. The newspaper became very important to them.”
Wheat explained that deaf people cannot hear consonants, only vowels. “From reading of speakers’ lip movements or from the context of the sentence, they can figure out what the word is. They become word detectives. They can even talk on the telephone if they make the call because they know what the subject of the conversation will be.”
Wheat advocates learning to speak rather than using sign language. “So many parents don’t know that there is an oral option to sign language,” she said. She views sign language as an inferior form of communication for the deaf. Her children learned sign language as adults only to communicate with other deaf people who did not know how to speak. She noted that if her children had not learned to speak, they wouldn’t have been able to finish college and work at jobs.
“My oldest child, Jill, has a bachelor’s degree in biology,” said Wheat. “Her husband is not deaf, and they have three hearing children. She is now working in the post office, helping her husband get through graduate school.
“Ralph has a master’s degree in petroleum engineering and has a very good job. His wife and two children are hearing. Jean, who began to read at the age of 3, has a degree in special education from Trinity University and teaches the deaf. She is a terrific role model for the kids and parents. When she was one, she had an operation on a benign brain tumor. I remember that her head was wrapped. She wasn’t wearing her glasses or hearing aid. I was speaking to her and she wouldn’t respond. Then she asked for her glasses and started talking. I realized how important sight was to her to read my lips. My fourth child born deaf is Steve. And he has a good job in the post office.”
Wheat said she is proud of her children and the things they’re accomplishing despite their handicap, “Many times it has been a struggle for them and a frustration.” In return, Wheat’s children are proud of her.
“When the kids were grown, I went to college after being out of school for 27 years,” she said. “I have a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in counseling. I won a scholarship to study in Germany for one year. It was important to me the way my kids saw me.”
Six months ago, Wheat left St. Louis and moved to Arden. “After 35 years of being a mother, I decided it was time to enjoy a little solitude,” she said.
Wheat spends her time writing children’s stories and wants to work part time doing family counseling. She keeps in constant touch with her nine children, who range in age from 35 to 18 and her 16 grandchildren.
“We’re still a close family,” she said. “I talk to the kids on the telephone very often. And they’re all doing well. I think the main reason that they’ve been so successful at whatever they do is because they were always encouraged to build their lives around their strengths.”
WRITTEN FOR PARENTS’ MAGAZINE
by Alice Roesler, 1977
In my youthful exuberance I had planned to have 13 children. Jill was my first – a beautiful child with huge brown eyes and dark hair – and with a handicap that my husband and I knew nothing about. Jill was two, and she had just had a hearing test when we heard the words, “your daughter has a moderate to profound hearing loss.”
I remembered that day with the doctor, as we watched Jill graduate from the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York last May, with a B.S. in biology. She and I learned a lot in those 25 years, and one of the most valuable lessons was finding out that Jill’s handicap was not going to determine her future. She could plan her life around her abilities, not her disability – and she has.
I didn’t have 13 children – we stopped at nine – but three more of them have the same type of deafness that Jill has, a moderate to profound loss in both ears. It is a permanent loss – nerve deafness.
My husband and I had the same questions that all parents have when they learn that their child is handicapped: What future will she have? What problems will she face that normal hearing children don’t have? What is the best thing for her?
Often in the 25 years since the first test, I have looked back at the “might have been,” and have been grateful for the educators who helped us determine Jill’s future. They were men and women who believed in the ability of the hearing-impaired to live and work and succeed in the hearing world. They looked at Jill as a child who had a serious handicap to overcome, but one who could make it in the world of hearing people – the world where she was going to live!
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But that is not the attitude of many deaf educators, and the result of this negative outlook is a lack of opportunity today for many deaf children to use the natural ability they have to overcome the problems that deafness brings.
When we began looking for a school for Jill, there were really only two methods of deaf education – oral-aural, and sign language. The oral method combines speech and lip-reading with the auditory training (using hearing aids to simulate whatever hearing is there, and training the child to interpret what he is hearing – in other words, to listen.) Jill was fitted with a hearing aid for personal use, and we learned how vital it was for us at home to talk to her about everything that was going on. When she was old enough to be in a classroom at school, all of the subjects were tools for learning language, and by the time she was ready to enter a normal school, her language skills were good.
Sign language and finger spelling were the means of communication taught in other programs. But another method of teaching the deaf has been developed, and it has become a powerful force in the education of the deaf today; called Total Communication, it combines sign language and finger spelling with speech, lip-reading, and aural training. The St. Louis public school for the deaf, Gallaudet, has dropped the oral program and adopted the Total one. This has happened in other schools, and I see this wave of “Totalism” as a tragedy for many deaf children and their parents.
Most parents and educators of the deaf have strong feelings about the education of deaf children. It is hard to exaggerate the controversy that exists in the field. The success that I have seen with my oral program is one of the reasons that I oppose the Total method for most deaf children. My four hearing-impaired children all attended Central Institute for the Deaf, and were then ‘mainstreamed’ into normal classrooms where they had acquired the skills needed to compete there. I don’t claim that it’s easy – either for the parents or the child. I’m sure it would’ve been easier for me and my children if I had learned the sign language, if they had not worked so hard to speak well, become skilled lip-readers and learned to use the hearing aids.
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I was constantly teaching at home – talk, talk, talk; and I poured in language about whatever might be going on. When Jill was five, she came to me one day and asked, “Mommy, do you like my dress-on?” Dress on? I began to question her about her clothing. Sure enough, her shoes were shoes-on; her socks were socks-on, and on and on. I realized what had happened – whenever I talked to her about putting on something, I said, “Let’s put your dress on.” Or “Let’s put your shoes on.” To her, the “on” was part of the word, not the act. It took some time before Jill unlearned that, and since then I haven’t broken the rule of grammar that says not to end a sentence with a preposition (well, almost never).
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Those who promote the teaching of sign language in the classroom, accompanied by speech and lip-reading (the Total method), claim that this is superior to just oral teaching for a child with a severe hearing loss. I have had many discussions with the supporters of the Total method, and their arguments to me have been along two lines: first, I am reminded that it is very difficult for a deaf child to speak, especially one who is profoundly deaf. Because it is vital for a child to be able to communicate his thoughts and needs, he needs a language which is easy to learn and allows him to do this early in life. The second argument, one that is insisted on by promoters of Total Communications when they have spoken to me, is that learning sign language in no way hinders the child’s oral progress.
The first claim is the more serious one, but I must answer it with a statement: DEAF CHILDREN CAN LEARN TO SPEAK, AND DO LEARN TO SPEAK. It is obvious to me that, given the options of speech in a world full of people who speak and sign language in a world almost void of people who use or understand sign language, speech is totally preferable. In a Total program, sign language is not limited to those who has demonstrated that speech won’t be successful. It is presented to all the students, and it is an effective reminder that their deafness will control their total lives, and not just their language. This is how total the program really is. I believe those who say that most deaf children can learn to use the language that other human beings use, and their educational programs should see to it that every child is given the chance to communicate as others do. This skill will open up most professions to the deaf child, not limiting communications the way sign language does. Is it hard? Yes! Is it too hard? Not if success means that the deaf can function in the hearing world.
“But,” I am told, “the language of deaf children is imperfect, and often hard to understand. And some never achieve the goal of functional language.” It’s true, most hearing-impaired children don’t have perfect speech. But I have four children who are striking out in the hearing world, and most of the problems that they face are rooted in the misconceptions that too many people have about deafness – a belief that somehow a lack of hearing has an adverse effect on the intelligence and capabilities of a deaf person. Even in St. Louis, which is a center for good deaf education, I meet many people who are surprised to learn that my deaf children are able to go to “normal” schools. (Jeanne, who is 20, attends the University of Missouri, and Ralph, 16, and Steve, 15, are high school students.) They work hard, getting discouraged sometimes – but so do my hearing children!
“You oralists always point to your successes.” That’s the comment that surprises me the most coming from an educator. It seems to me unfortunate if the goals are not set to the highest possible achievement that these children can attain, but rather down where none can fail.
If the best isn’t even asked for, it surely won’t be achieved. (That’s true of all education.) Some do better than others, and it isn’t possible to look into a child and know what possibilities are there. If we assume they will succeed, then most of them will look beyond their handicap and see themselves as many-faceted beings that they are – and other open-minded persons will see them that way, too.
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The other claim that I hear about the Total program is that sign language, when taught in the classroom and used at home, does not have a detrimental effect on the speech and lip-reading skills of a hearing-impaired child. My experience with my own children tells me this is untrue. In order for the deaf to become skilled in speech and lip-reading, and sharpen their listening abilities, they need to use and practice those skills constantly.
Dr. Audrey Simmons-Martin, director of the Early Education Project at Central Institute for the Deaf, and an associate professor in the Teacher-Education Program at Washington University (St. Louis) put it this way:
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“An obvious fact, having educational implications, is that speech acquisition is a gradual growth in which the child is engaged full-time. Speech is not something the hearing child learns in a tutoring session of a given number of minutes under stress. The hearing-impaired child does not learn this way either.
“Speech is something that surrounds the young hearing child. Speech functions for him. Speech is relevant to his manipulating his environment. Speech enables him to be a participator. Speech grown out of moment-by-moment experiences that are his world. The conditions for the deaf child must not be less.”
When we were confronted with the question of education for our deaf children, the answer was an easy one for us. We lived in a city that had superb facilities for them. I’ve met many parents in these 25 years who haven’t been that lucky. Most of them have moved to St. Louis from almost any place you can name, in order to give their child the opportunities in oral education from CID. Some have split families, one parent coming here with the deaf child, the other parent remaining at home in order to work. Some must board the child at the school, and then get together only on holidays during the summers. These hardships take place because of a determination on the part of the family to give their child the chance to overcome his handicap – to see himself and his potential as they really are. They make these sacrifices because they know that they are worthwhile – and because they believe that oralism works to make their deaf child succeed in the hearing world.
These parents make major sacrifices for another reason: the opportunities for a good oral education couldn’t be found at home. Several years ago, six families in Montreal, Canada, were determined that their hearing-impaired children would be oral. They struggled to create the Montreal School for the Deaf. In most places in our country today, that would be the only answer for parents who wanted to stay with their children and still be able to give them the chance to speak. That sort of sacrifice shouldn’t be necessary for parents who already have the job of helping their child overcome his physical handicap.
It is hard for me to understand the attitude of those who do not believe in the importance of a child’s attempting to defeat a problem that life has given him. If we find a child who walks with a limp, we don’t give up on his being able to walk and teach him to ride in a wheelchair! In fact, even children who lose limbs are fitted with artificial ones. Every attempt is made to make that child as normal as possible – and rightly so. When other handicapped children show they can overcome adversity, that makes us try harder to see others like them get the same chance. But deaf children are told, too often, that they must accept their handicap, and build their lives around it.
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With that kind of education, Jill would not have earned her degree in biology. While she lived in Rochester, New York, and attended school, she met and married a hearing man. Now they have a son, and while there’s no promise that she will live “happily ever after” (does anyone?), she has what it takes to use all the talents she was born with. Don’t all children deserve that chance?
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THE END OF THE BEGINNING
"THE STORE" (run by Central Institute for the Deaf – CID)
by Alice Roesler
It’s called ‘The Store.’ Run by volunteers, it is similar to the mini-stores in St. Louis museums, hospitals, Shaw’s Garden – almost anywhere there is a non-profit institution. But there’s a twist that makes this store at Central Institute for the Deaf (CID) unique.
It’s about 12:15 on a school day. Jan has finished her lunch and decides to visit The Store. (No student can go there until after they’ve eaten.) Two adult volunteers are working, along with two older students from the Advanced Department at CID who spend one or two days a month serving as clerks.
As Jane walks in, a volunteer standing behind the counter greets her: “Hello, Jane, you look pretty today! Would you like to buy something?” Pointing to a jar of her favorite candy, Jane shows the lady that she has a nickel to spend. “You have five cents, and this candy costs one cent,” says the worker. “Do you want five pieces of this candy?”
Jane, at four, has already learned that five cents won’t buy a Snicker’s Bar, but is more than enough for a red candy fish. She’s also learned that she doesn’t get anything until she asks for it in a sentence. “I want five fish, please,” she says. When the candy is in a small bag in her hand, Jane says, “Thank you,” and leaves.
Because she is deaf, language is hard work for Jane – and the other students at CID. Her first trip to The Store was with her class. Her teacher brought the six youngsters, all three or four years old, after giving each two pennies.
As they walked through the door, they saw a room filled with delights. One side is lined with gift items – pottery, ceramic mug and dishes, coasters – with a card rack at one end. The adjacent wall has hand-made aprons and purses, as well as gifts for infants. Best of all is the counter lined with jars and jars of candy, gum, cookies, and nuts.
Because this was her first visit to The Store, when Jane pointed to a jar filled with red candy fish, her teacher helped her. “Do you want a fish? Okay, Jane, tell the lady what you want. You have two pennies, so you can buy two fish. Tell her, ‘I want two fish.’”