by Laura Conaway

Lou Ann Walker has an amazing article in New York magazine about deaf culture and the growth in popularity of Cochlear implants. Something like a third of the kids at one school for the deaf in the Bronx have the implants — which, as Walker writes, are not exactly a perfect fix for hearing impairment. Deaf activists fear, with some reason, that deaf children will end up fluent in no language or belonging fully to any culture, as the teaching of American Sign Language begins to fade. She writes:

If French is the language of lovers and German the language of commerce, then perhaps sign is the language of humans connecting. You can't sign to someone if you're standing next to that person. You have to look full-on at each other, watch each others faces and necks, shoulders and elbows, hips and knees. You have to stand a bit farther backs than you do with spoken language so that you can take in the entirety of the person, and take in that entirety you must. A mother cannot stir the soup and shout over her shoulder for her child to finish homework. Instead, she puts down the spoon, goes to find the child, faces the child, and signs. She watches the child's response carefully and responds to what the child is doing or not doing, saying or not saying.