Transcripts of Chris Driscoll

  We usually ask you just to start by introducing yourself, your name, the date is December 3rd, 2007. If you would say your name, introduce yourself, and perhaps your birthdate, the day, year you were born, and where you were born at. A little bit of history, where you're from. So we're starting now? Yep. Ok, that's fine. I'm not sure if I should, if you want to know exactly the town I'm born in, or just the State that's all? Oh no, town. Ok, alright, My name is Chris Driscoll it is December 3rd 2007, almost 2008, anyway. I was hearing when I was born. And I was born in Florida. In (...) Florida, that's where I was born. That's where my mother and even my grandmother were born in, so we have a lot of heritage from there. When I was born I was hearing, when I was one and a half years old, I became deaf. I'm not sure the reason I became deaf, we're not sure exactly what caused it. I became sick with a fever at the time, and I had a very high fever. Every morning we always liked to, always liked to go out to the trailer park and walk around. And one morning, I want to say very early, I'm not sure exactly what time. We were sitting out on the road, and we were playing with toys, little cars, little matchbox cars and things like this. Just little toys. and someone came up behind us and started, just honking the horn really hard. And I didn't hear them, I just kept playing, so my mother got up, and saw what was going on, and saw that we were sitting in the road and couldn't figure out what was going on, so she ran over and grabbed us, and pulled me off the road. And that's when she started to think that maybe there was something with my hearing. So we started going to the doctor and they couldn't get a diagnosis, so they didn't know exactly what was going on. It wasn't until a few years later, I was still going to the doctor at the time, that I had a really bad infection in my ear. 

So they were trying to figure out what exactly caused the deafness. They thought maybe it was the meningitis, they thought perhaps it was the high fever. What happened was that the nurse, just melt their dissolved in my ears so I wasn't able to hear after that. But we're not sure exactly what it was that caused it. What year were you born? 1975. Yeah I forgot to tell you that. Do you want me to keep going on with the story all the way up til now? Well continue now because the interview is largely about literacy practices and then also along with technology. So I think we're really interested in what memories you have, an early memory, What are your earliest memories that you have of reading and writing? And of course this would be in English, to start with, so let's start with English reading and writing. Do you have some kind of early memory of yourself reading, when that first happened, how it happened?  Well let's see, when did I start learning English? I was very young at the time and I remember buying a book, and I remember looking at the words and signing at the same time, and trying to figure that out. And as I went along I just loved it, so I bought more and more books and kept trying to read and sign at the same time. It wasn't at the time, I wasn't reading just the words though, there were stories and I was including signs with them as I read through. And still at home I have tons of books that I had when I was a kid, I kept them all these years. Do you have any sense of about how old you were, had you already started school then? And I guess also if you were doing that by yourself, or was your mother or a teacher helping you learn to read in that way?  Well I started signing when I was two, that was the first time I really started signing. My hometown, where I grew up, was very small. I would say maybe only 5 or 6 thousand people. And I was very fortunate that my mother met someone who was deaf. And who had graduated from the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind. So she was very, my mother was very interested asking this person, you know, about me, what we should do, about whether or not to get a cochlear implant. My mother was very wary of that at the time. But really wanted to make sure that she had all the research and all the information. So when she finally met this deaf woman, she was introduced to the Sign Language community and to the deaf community even just there in my small town, we were very fortunate to have that. We met some parents who were deaf and had children, and so forth. And so my mother, it was recommended to my mother that the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind might be a good option. My mother was concerned that maybe they might not have the best education but she found that they did, they had a good education there. So my mother decided after hearing all this to get a book, and to start learning how to Sign. So I'm not sure exactly how old I was when I started reading per se, but I do remember signing then, I remember signing exactly what they said in the book. Word for word, at that time. 

So I would go through stories and pick it up sign for sign. So I'm not sure if that's just signing or if that's reading, obviously I was signing at that time. But I know that that was maybe 2 or 3, I remember by the time I was 5, and going to the deaf school, I was signing very well at that time. So I'm not sure if that's based on my experience reading from books or not, but obviously I remember signing, and I remember picking that up. No that's wonderful, that's good. I think that's really important. What you're saying then is that your earliest memories of reading printed English are actually connected very strongly to signing at the same time. That you were reading. That's exactly right, I was signing, I would read the stories and I would include sign with them, word for word. Alright you just said, you just ended, to move forward, that you started school around the age of 5. Where did you go to school? I went to the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind. And how far from home was that? I would say it was about two and a half hours drive, from home. From home to the deaf school. But I lived in a dormitory there. I was going to say, so it was residential for you, you lived in the dormitory right? Went home on weekends every once in a while? I went home about once a month, sometimes two times a month. And that would just be for the weekends. We would take the bus home. And then every two weeks, sometimes, my friends who maybe lived close, I had some friends from the same town, or at least from the same area. And so we would take turns, their family would come and pick them up, and come pick us both up, and they would drive us home. And my parents would take the turn maybe two weeks later, my parents would come, and pick both of us up, and drive us back home. So, it would happen on Friday, my parents would come, pick us both up, then on Sunday my friend's parents would drive us back to the Florida School. 

And so that took place every two weeks, they had that schedule all the way until I went to High School, and then we started going home every weekend. So we took the bus every single weekend home, in High School. This was just to save money, this was for the school, it was their decision. To save money they sent kids home for the weekend. Chris, when you were there, in school, then how did you communicate between those times that you went home, did you communicate with your parents through a TTY? Through the writing of letters, did you read letters back and forth that they wrote? How did you stay in touch with your family or people back home when you were at school? Well we didn't have e-mail at the time, obviously. We had a TTY, but we didn't use a TTY to communicate with our parents. I communicated through a supervisor or dorm staff, whoever. My parents would call the dorm and then they would come and get me, and I would go down to the office, and then a person would be there, one of the supervisors would be on the phone interpreting for us saying :"Oh, your parents say 'Hi, hello, how are you doing?'" And then I would tell them how I was doing, and they would interpret for my parents, so we didn't have e-mail, and we didn't use the TTY. And that was my experience. In those early years, I asked about an early memory, like your earliest memory of reading and writing. And I thought you were very good about articulating the early memories of connecting Sign Language, particularly with spoken, with written English. 

What I think we're interested in too is, Almost everyone has specific memories that stand out for them, and if they're not early ones, they're sometimes later ones. We just interviewed someone else, and one of his biggest literacy memories was, I don't know, when he was about 8 or 10. So sometimes they're later, but most people have some strong memory around reading and writing, stories to tell. Do you have any for you? A particular memory about a particular reading experience, or a particular writing experience that stands out for you? Sure I remember a writing contest that happened when I was in Elementary School. It was during halloween. And they were giving out prizes for the winners, and I was interested in doing this competition. So, you know, the teachers encouraged all of us students to get involved. And so my story was about a ghost. And the ghost came up during a football game and what happened was someone had thrown a football, and then the ghost stole the ball, intercepted the football and then ran off, and then everybody was trying to figure out what happened to this football? Were we going to get in trouble or? Was it a ghost or was it because of halloween, what was it? And so everyone was saying :"No way, there's no way someone could have caught that." And everyone was trying to figure out who won or who lost, so that was what my story was about. And I remember that we didn't just have to write it by hand at the time, we were told that we had to type it on the computer, and we didn't know, I didn't know what that was at the time or how to do that. I hadn't had a lot of exposure to technology at the time, so that was new for me. But the teachers did their part to try to expose us, they showed us the computers and showed us a little bit of how to type, which was awkward at first. 

So I wrote my story on paper first and then I typed it into the computer. But I was curious why we had to type it on the computer, and the reason was that more people could read my story if I typed it on the computer, than if they tried to read my handwriting. Because my handwriting was just atrocious. That was the main reason, it was easier to read. So also it was easier to fix things and edit things on the computer. And then later on in school we had a computer class that we had to go to. And all we did in this class was take whatever was written on a book, which was sitting besides the computer, and then type it onto the computer. So there were games on there as well, but I was a little bit resistant to the technology at the time. My parents didn't grow up with technology, they weren't a big fan of it. So they were of the philosophy "Just keep it sweet and simple" So that was something new, I wasn't real welcoming of it at the time. So I thought it was pretty boring and a waste of time to just sit there and type words into a computer, it didn't make any sense to me. It didn't serve a purpose for me, so I wasn't a big fan of it at the time. But, you know, I didn't understand e-mail, or even get an e-mail account until after High School, but we can talk about that later. How old were you, with the ghost story?  I'm not sure... I think, I don't think it was Middle School, I think it was maybe, no I think it was Middle School. I don't know if it was Elementary School. But, no, I think I must have been around 11, 10 or 11, in Middle School at the time, I guess. That's just a guess. Do you have, it sounds like it was about Middle School, the kind of competition or thing that would happen in Middle School. I'm wondering if there are particular teachers that you remember, that stand out for you, both from Elementary, Middle, High School, College. That really helped or had an impact on you reading and writing. If you were enjoying their class, or a challenging piece of literature, or an assignment they gave you or anything?  I don't remember being inspired, but I do remember being required to do a lot. Just to graduate. It's sad that that's all the interest I took in it at the time. But I do remember a teacher, there were 2, I do remember, I remember reading and writing, and also a teacher for a dance class that I took. The reading and writing teacher was really strict and really, you know, pushed us. And what made me interested in this class in particular, was if you did really well, you got pizza from Pizza Hut. So they forced us to read a whole lot. 

Yeah, it's kind of funny. They forced us to read a whole lot. And so I would read and then sign what the story was about, and I liked to read a lot of R.L. Stein novels. They were easy for me, they were easy to read, you know. And so I was required to read all this, so I would look through all the books, and pick these R.L. Stein books to read. And what the teacher would say is :"What is your favorite story that you want to read? What kind of stories do you like?" And I liked scary stories, stories about halloween, something like that. And the teacher told me, because that's what I liked, she said "Well why not read an R.L. Stein book?" And so I did. And I liked it, and so there was a whole list of books that I could choose from. And I would read through them and then I would sign what they were about, and then the teacher would say: "Well, that's not really what the story is about." And so I would have to go back and read again and come back again, and explain the story until I got it right. And then if I did I would get some free pizza, so I would read even more. Because I wanted the free pizza. At my school the school food was lousy, the cafeteria food was awful so the best way to get good food was to read, so I read. (Laughter). The read to eat program. Yeah, the Pizza Hut was great. There's a technology of literacy. I'm going to get to the technology in a minute, but what I want to do before that... See if I can find the right way to ask this... People in the hearing world, in the English speaking world, grow up thinking about English literacy, knowing that it's important, and that you have to improve your skills in it always. And I think that happens of course to people who are using American Sign Language. So I guess I'm asking for, because especially you were at a residential school, what memories now you have of learning to improve or focus on your literacy skills in your language, in ASL. Because while all this is going on, and you're learning to read and write in English better, you're also, obviously, learning to sign better. So do you have memories of that? Of becoming aware of your skills improving in Sign Language? Well it's a little different. I can talk about maybe some of the differences.