No hablo ingles

What a wacky day today at school. So, I work for a large urban school district, which means that there are a lot of weird/horrendous/don't-even-want-to-dwell-on-what-goes-on-at-home kind of families in the area. This, unfortunately, is a label that can be applied to some of the deaf and hard of hearing students with whom I have contact. One such student was removed from his mother's custody and is now residing with his grandmother and has a very messed-up home life. Anyway, he attends out of school counseling sessions and has also been speaking with a counselor at school, but not a school counselor. Our school has a community-based agency that houses someone in our building. To make a long story short, we interpreters are not to interpret these counseling sessions because of the conflict of interest. (Seriously, who wants to be sitting in math class trying to interpret a lesson on circumference when you just finished interpreting a counseling session with the same student and heard his real-life horror story, which I hear enough of during the course of a normal day?)

So anyway, I'm walking into the dreaded study skills class (which is not as horrible as the beginning of the year, but still quite unbearable--on a side note, the HI teacher literally snatched my pencil out of my hand today so that she could write a student a pass. I was thisclose to snapping and having an aneurysm to prevent myself from doing something drastic in front of the students. I mean, what adult grabs something out of another adult's hand while she is working, without saying anything? Just thinking about it is making my blood pressure drop (yes, drop, not rise, but that's another story)).

Anyway, back to me walking into study skills class...I see the pastoral counselor attempting to communicate with this deaf student. She actually pulled out a piece of paper and was writing a note to him. Writing a note to him. I bit my tongue and held my hands down and continued walking into the classroom. This deaf student can barely read and she was trying to communicate with him via the written word? It made me wonder how much they really accomplish in their "counseling" sessions. It wasn't my business and I didn't want to make it so, so I left them out in the hallway. But, when the student came into the classroom a few moments later, I asked him if he understood what the counselor was trying to say to him.
***Signed communication is notated by the use of italics***
"Oh, yeah, I understood. I can read her lips."
"Really?" I signed back, "You can read lips?"
"Yeah."
"Okay, what am I saying right now?" I asked, without signing.
"What? I don't understand."
"You don't understand? But you just told me that you can read lips. If you can read lips then why can't you understand what I'm saying?"
Confused look on the deaf student's face.
"How do you communicate with your counselor? Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"I don't know Spanish."
"Spanish? What? I didn't say anything about Spanish."
"I don't know Spanish."
"Spanish? What are you talking about?" I said, as I reverted back to signing.
"I don't know Spanish and you were speaking Spanish."
"I wasn't speaking Spanish. I was speaking English. I don't know how to speak Spanish."
Disbelieving look on the deaf student's face.

The phrase, "do you understand?" is probably one of the most used phrases around the deaf students. For this student to not be able to recognize that common, common phrase when I vocalized it without signing is pretty astonishing. Yet, somehow he is supposed to be solving his personal, familial, and home problems with a counselor who writes notes back and forth and relies on lip reading. Yikes!