Transcripts of Chris Driscoll

Of course I remember being in a classroom, and the teacher, but ASL was never approached in the same way English was. Whereas we were required to sign correctly, and get better and improve and all that. That didn't happen til later in the classroom. Teachers would always obviously encourage our English, tell us to get better at that. You know, make sure that we're writing correctly, and if we did well we got some candy, so that was some motivation. But outside of the classroom, you know, I lived in a dorm. And if you couldn't sign very well, you were just kind of rejected from the group. And so those who could sign well were in their own little clique, and if you wanted to join the clique you had to sign ASL very well. So obviously I practiced and got better and better. And once you did, obviously, you could be in the "smart-kids" group. So that was obviously, in English, there was some encouragement to improve in the classroom. But the ASL improvement, and that kind of motivation came from outside the classroom, or social. 

Was the ASL like a vernacular in that sense? I mean, it happened among kids, outside the classroom, and inside the classroom, English was privileged?  

Well it would depend on who the teacher was. So, and my ASL would get adjusted depending on what kind of teacher I had too. So if the teacher was very, you know, strict and everything, I would sign even fancier for them, and they would think that I was just being a smartass. There were some teachers who required, maybe, stricter sign language. So there wasn't just one style for everybody. Really one signing style would adjust depending on what kind of teacher they had. So if it varied from teacher to teacher, about the kind of standards they were holding you to, even with your use and skill of sign language. 

Then did it also vary from teacher to teacher about the strictness with which they required your skills in English?  

No. I do remember, and for Elementary School, for example, we had the same teacher all day. When we got to Middle School we did change teachers. But English was basically the same. You know, when we were in Math class there wasn't really much to do with my English. Because we were just looking at numbers. In Social Studies and History, it wasn't quite as much to do with that. In Science again same thing. But in Reading class, reading and writing and some things, it was different. Obviously in Gym you're not using English in the same way. So I would say really it would depend on what I'm doing in that particular class. In gym we're just playing around, so it doesn't really apply. In Science we would have to focus on what to do with our chemistry, it was very hands-on. Working in the lab and so forth, so there's a lots of different ways, it really depended on who the teacher was, and what subject we were talking about. And that would depend on how I adjusted my English and my ASL. 

Well let's add in some technology talk now. You've already opened up one of your earliest memories, not earliest memories but one of your strongest memories when you were young, with the writing contest that you were in, was actually tied to technology. Because you had to turn that story into, had to produce it on a computer. So tell us a little bit about your relationship with technology. I'm just going to use the broad word technology and let you first define technology, and then we'll probably come back, and pick up some other ones, later maybe that you didn't include. But tell us about your relationship with technology Chris.  Are you talking specifically about computers or really just anything? My FM system or hearing aids, or what kind of technology? What I want first is for you to kind of suggest all the things that you think of as technology in your life that you use, connected to literacy, to communication. And then maybe we'll start talking about individual ones, but talk about all the ways you use technology. 

Well there was a lot of emphasis, not a lot of emphasis at first on English. Not on English per se, but a lot of emphasis on speaking. So at the time we had these old FM systems that we hung around our neck, and then the teacher would speak into a microphone, and it would be projected into our ears through headphones. And so I would want to sign with them, but they would say, "Oh no, you have to do speaking, you have to practice your voice. With sign." So we had to learn... So we weren't really learning enough at the time, because we were forced to focus only on our speaking skills and our voicing skills. So I would want to learn other things, but time was taken away from other subjects, just to focus on speaking and using our voice. So I wish I had never gone through that kind of experience when I was young. 

So what I'm going to say back, I'm going to repeat back, what I think you were discussing there, and that is that the FM system itself was a really important literacy technology. For you particularly in probably your Elementary School years, right? 

Yes, Elementary School, even Middle School. We didn't, in High School we used hearing aids at that time, they had changed from using the FM system to just using hearing aids. If you didn't have your hearing aid at the time you had to go back to the dorm and get it. They were really, really worried about my hearing, about my hearing, and making sure that I would... Rather than my learning. So that was really sad. 

Will you explain briefly how an FM system works? 

Sure, we had this big, and I mean big, box that we hung around our neck. And this big chip on the front that you could pull out and put back in. And the teacher had a cord that would hang around her neck, with a small microphone attached to it on their chest, and then she would start off by asking if we could hear her and for getting feedback. And then she would sign and voice at the same time. So, right, SimCom. And so I hated having to use my voice with sign, I would rather just sign but that's what we had to do, we had to SimCom. So when class was over we would put this back, put our FM systems back in a box to recharge. And I think every couple days we had to get them out and wash them. We had to take them all out and scrub them down and make sure that they were clean. Make sure the earbuds were clean and everything. And then we would put them back on. And I really hated it. Because every time I signed I would be hitting this box that's hanging from my chest. It would be getting in the way of my signing. It was big, I mean a big box we had to hang on our chest. So we would have to sign way out in front of us, unnaturally. It was a lot of stress you know, not the right ASL space of course. But it was very different, very uncomfortable kind of signing. Very uncomfortable way for me simply because of this box. And you know it would hang around us and get caught on things, very uncomfortable. 

With the FM system, if the teacher had the microphone, then when other students in the class spoke, you couldn't really hear the other students, is that right? It's hard to imagine... Only the teacher? 

Right, only the teacher, that's right. 

So the FM system was an obviously important technology. What about computers? When did they enter in to your life? 

The FM system is a computer of a kind anyways but... Ok, computers. I remember in Elementary School, and looking back at that time, I don't remember any computers being in the School. I'm not sure, why it's, if it was just not popular at that time, or if the school couldn't afford them. I'm not sure exactly. But I don't remember seeing them in Elementary School. It wasn't until I was in Middle School that I started to see computers and was exposed to computers. We had a computer class, and I remember my teacher talking about the parts of a computer, and talking about how important it was, it's like your brain in a way, it worked for you, all these kind of analogies and so forth. So that's the first time I was exposed to it. It wasn't really hands on in the same way. I was just seeing, I would say "Oh, well, that's a computer" And then we started practicing with the keyboard, and that was cool. And then we found out that there were games on the computer. And that was interesting. But they never talked about e-mail at that time. There was no internet, at least we didn't talk about it in our classes. It was all about word processing, you know, how to take words off of a paper and type them onto a computer. I remember games. All of the games, the games were there, basically to encourage students to get involved in the computer. To kind of, once the kids were involved with the computer, they were hoping they would get involved in other things, I guess that was their philosophy. So we had to type on the computer. We found out that we could print, which was great, it was very easy to do. But we didn't have the internet, we didn't have e-mail at that time. It wasn't until after I graduated and I was in college. I was going to St. Petersburg college in Florida. And there was about 100 deaf students at that campus at the time. So my friend and I went over to another friends house. And we heard this, our friend was talking about, you know, "You really got to get this AOL thing, this is really cool." And we were like "Oh, sure, yeah, that sounds awesome, sure, right. Ok, AOL, whatever. I've never heard of that before." E-mail, internet, all this stuff. And it wasn't until even a little later... I was, people kept telling me, "Oh yeah you're in college, you need to get an AOL account." And so I finally sat down and figured out how to do all this, and how to get on AOL, so I guess I was kind of a late learner. But I figured out how to work e-mail and how cool that was, and started using that and I would say that from college on, I used it all the time. I don't remember using it in High School. We had pen-pals in school where we would send hard copied letters back and forth. That was cool. But I wasn't sure exactly what that was for, you know, we were told that we could do that through e-mail as well. So I figured I could do that through e-mail, so that was cool. But really even at that time when we used it for that, it didn't really hit me, it wasn't really something I used everyday. It wasn't until college that I was really, really got into it and was really impressed by technology and started using it. 

We're going to get there, college, but I think I want to go back because, I think there is maybe one too, captioning, on the TV. Did you watch TV a lot, using captioning growing up? At what point do you remember using captioning? 

Movies, videos... I remember at the time you had to buy a captioning box to get the captioning, because that technology wasn't included in the TV itself. At least I don't think until 1992 was it required to be put in televisions. So before that it wasn't included as part of a television. You had to buy a separate box. So you had to get that, only certain TV channels would have them. ABC, NBC, FOX, had that technology but some other ones didn't have captioning yet. So you had to set up your captioning box. You know if you wanted to watch something, you just put it on and try to get your caption box to get it, but if it didn't you were out of luck, you couldn't watch the show you wanted to watch. So most of the time I just watched Tom and Jerry. You know, you didn't have to know English to watch that show. I also watched the Three Stooges. They had all these comical antics and so forth, they talked rarely I think. So I remember it was great to watch television shows that had a lot of body language and body movement, that kind of thing in it. If there were other shows that I wanted to watch that didn't have captioning I was stuck. But, you know, shows that have captioning I watched. But it was very limited when I was a kid. It was very limited access to captioning. So it wasn't until later on that it really started taking off, and televisions were required to have them. Most channels at the time weren't required to have captioning either. So now it looks like more and more channels have captioning on them. I don't know if that funding for that will even be cut soon. If there will still be captioning in the future. I know there's politics, people are talking about that these days. So we'll see what happens. 

You said you were born in 1975, so that means that you were born literally at the dawn of the education for all handicapped, idea. So in your lifetime you've really seen a massive amount of technology and educational changes. And I think you're talking about some of them now. Like captioning, how much it's changed, and where you had left us is college. You went off to college, to St. Petersburg, and what happens after that? You said things change then with your use, once you got to AOL, and you began to learn other technologies, so how do you use them now? Or what changes in college for you? 

Yeah I'm especially interested in technology related to language, to both ASL use but also to English use.  Well let's see. For computers... Obviously in college I really got started using e-mail. I was exposed to e-mail. I had a communications teacher who would e-mail things to the students, and that was a really cool tool. So I would have to read what the teacher would e-mail me. You know, different expectations for the class. So Middle School typing was awkward for me, but in High School... I still didn't use it a whole lot, but I was still using paper, most of the time, just writing things by hand. Even in High School. And then in college, I found out that people are using the internet and that was taking off. So there was more and more reading being required online. So we had to get more information online and so forth and that was neat. I had to start typing up papers and at that time I was, you know, if we had to write 3000, 4000, 5000 words, you know. And this was in Junior College. So I really started using technology then. And reading online. So I really like reading news and information through the internet right now. That's a good way for me to... I don't want to have to go out and buy a magazine or newspaper, it's easy for me to just go online check out what's going on in sports, you know everything is right there online. So that's really nice, everything's right there, it really helped me with reading. So it's really, really the impact came after High School. So I wish that I had been, I wish that we had used the internet early, when I was in middle school or something, I wish I would have started earlier. 

So, and you wish that because, I mean do you think it has improved your contact with English, and your use of English because you're using it more? Or it just means you're using it more, but it doesn't necessarily improve. Because there is a way to say it's improved, your skill, but there's also just using it more. 

Well my reading has gotten better. My writing is a different story. I don't write every day. You know, I have to do grading. Obviously I have to include comments on student's papers and so forth. I have to add some comments, but those tend to be a lot shorter than what I'm actually reading. I have to, I'm reading stories. I'm not writing stories myself, I'm not writing very long, the essays or anything like that. One of our participants suggested that she thought technology had in some senses, leveled the playing field of communication for deaf and hard of hearing. Do you think that that is true, or untrue, and can you talk about it?  Well I think it's true... It used to be that hearing people could call each other for free, you could make local calls for free. And talk to people all the time. But when I went home to visit my parents, to call my friends from my home, it was long distance, so it wasn't that fair. So I asked, you know, my parents for example, I wanted to be able to make calls to my friends, but we were always real limited on what I could, on what I could call and how long I could talk, because of the long distance fees and everything. If I would be talking for an hour or something like that, my mom would tell me to get off the TTY, and she would get mad, you know . "You're going to have to pay for your own bills, you're going to have to pay for your own long distance charges." And so forth. So even while hearing people could just make those calls all the time. Now it's wonderful, I mean the technology is free. It doesn't matter if it's long distance or not, we can use video phones which is fantastic. Thank God we have video phones. TTYs used to be free and you used to have to go through relay. The deaf to deaf calls though, were still, you still had to pay for. Now you can make the video phone calls for free, anywhere, anytime, to anyone. So I think communication, there's really equal, we have equal access to communication, even three years ago. You know what I mean? It's just... it's just finally become equal in the last couple years, the last three years. So, certainly not when I was growing up.