Analysis of Mark Drolsbaughs Deaf Again - Essay Example

The question of self-hood is an extremely important philosophical and psychological topic of discussion. In all actions one takes, we take them with a conception of our identity. Answering the question of selfhood is tantamount to answering the question of what essential characteristics there are to being you, to being me, and to being a specific person, different from all other individuals. Certainly, one can catalog facts about oneself; but these facts cannot be a sufficient condition for forming the true self. Additionally, finding the true self is especially difficult for some individuals who find some aspects of their life challenging. One kind of challenge is that brought on by disability, whether it is deafness, blindness, or psychological impairment. In the case of Mark Drolsbaugh, who gives an account of his trials in his autobiographical work Deaf Again, one’s self can only be properly found through a long ad exhaustive search through childhood and into adulthood. Drolsbaugh tries to find his identity as he attempts to enter the hearing world to be a successful and productive adult. In many ways, his quest is about seeking independence: to find a world for himself outside of Deaf culture. However, Deaf culture remains open to him and he finds himself a welcome place in it. Being a deaf child and adult brings with it many special disadvantages, including the difficulty of finding one’s place in the hearing world, which is so vastly different from Deaf culture. Drolsbaugh eventually learns to appreciate his uniqueness and takes that as a formative factor in the creation of his personal identity, which depends heavily on Deaf culture and the joys of deafness. Deaf Again, as an autobiography, is comprised of accounts drawn from Drolsbaugh’s own life as a child and young adult growing up with a disability. The story follows him from the moment of his birth to the birth of his own son Darren. As such, he accounts for his experiences in deaf and hearing schools in detail, and possibly provides insights to individuals with children who might experience the same kinds of troubles. Of course, a major difficulty for children with special needs is precisely their uniqueness. The question of the self clearly revolves around the question of uniqueness: what makes this individual unique as a human being? A deaf child in a hearing school evidently then is quite unique as a human being, but children typically find this situation troubling. They are quite often concerned only with being as everyone else is, and being “unique” or “different” in any sort of evident way is shamed. This may have something to do with how children tease each other and that having uniqueness gives additional opportunities to others to exploit that difference for their own gain. One sees less teasing among human adults, and so individuality is a valued possession. Nevertheless, for a young Mark Drolsbaugh, being different from his peers was unbearable. During the third grade at Plymouth Meeting Friends School (PMFS), a small private school in Pennsylvania, Drolsbaugh felt the pain of uniqueness. On a winter day, playing tackle football, a tackle knocked his hearing aid out of his ear. The battery was lost in the snow. According to Drolsbaugh, “It was a quick and sudden reminder to everyone that I was different” (29). In this case, his deafness made him feel too unique for comfort, as if all of the class’s attention was on him. For a young, disabled child, this can be traumatic: being the center of attention for so many “normal” people. Drolsbaugh felt embarrassed about his special equipment, and felt especially discomfited about Quinn, the class clown who Drolsbaugh was especially paranoid about, and suspicious of, in terms of teasing. Nevertheless, contrary to his own suspicions, Drolsbaugh found himself comforted by the fact that his classmates were so attentive to his own problems, and showed tremendous amounts of concern. Drolsbaugh says, “A number of students were standing around [the teacher], showing as much concern as she was” (29). A number of students proceeded to look for the lost battery and actually found it. “It was none other than Quinn who rushed in, smiling proudly, handing me my one hundred-dollar battery” (30). The lesson Drolsbaugh takes from this anecdote deals with friendship, something he says is “worth a million bucks” (30). The “hearing aid incident”, as he identifies it, serves as a trans-formative moment in his young childhood. No longer does he seem to dread the fact that he is unique and different. He embraces it by receiving additional help and support from his peers in the small class sizes of the private school. His lesson in friendship stands to mean that personally relating to other people is worth more than its weight in gold; a hearing aid, which he incorrectly appraised at one hundred dollars, became found in the spirit of altruism and friendship alone. Quinn, who took every opportunity to make jokes at others’ expense, took this opportunity to lessen his classmate’s troubles. In doing so, he made the young Drolsbaugh feel more at ease with his uniqueness as a human being. Quinn facilitated this transformative moment in his peer’s young life and helped him realize that being unique is precisely what one needs to develop a conception of the self so essential to a human individual’s social existence. This gave the narrator some of what he would need to continue his education amongst hearing students, in an environment designed for hearing students. Moving forward, Drolsbaugh gives an account of his life in a high school environment. At Germantown Friends School, he came into a highly competitive, demanding academic setting. The difficulty for Drolsbaugh was high, especially when it came to his disability. Many students capable of hearing the lessons did not succeed in such an environment. Thus, Drolsbaugh faced a distinct challenge: one that concerned both him and the school administrators. The challenge was to adjust to the demands of an exclusive high school without being fully able to understand the instructors or their lessons. Another difficult aspect of the new school was its size. It was difficult for him to retain his place as a respected soccer player or a respected student. As he writes, “These are normal frustrations experienced by anyone who moves to a bigger school… but for me they were magnified, as my deafness made it so much harder to adapt” (46). The difficulty posed by Drolsbaugh’s deafness was not so much in his ability to fit in; in fact, quite the opposite. He felt like one more face in the school, one more face in the class, and one more face in the crowd. Rather, the problem lay within the fact that he lost his individuality, something that he learned to accept and thrive with upon the “hearing aid incident” as far back as the third grade. This problem of transitioning to a larger school ultimately affected his academic pursuits. Such an effect, however, was not negative. His grades did not suffer because of a disability, but instead the disability forced him to adjust in how he learned the material and succeeded in his classes. Drolsbaugh found himself forced to make it seem as if he knew what was going on in his courses, only to learn the material himself later. His procedure for success lay within his ability for self-directed learning, or, as he describes it, “the essence of my seventh and eighth grade education” (47). This process consisted of trying to “bluff my way through class, run up to a student I knew I could depend on, and ask him what the homework was. With that information, I could go home or to the library, where I could read more and brush up on all of the information I had missed in class” (47). During the early part of his high school, he was nearly completely self-educated. Even though, for Drolsbaugh this self-education came to him naturally and as something he decided upon by himself, not all deaf children possess this same kind of ability or drive. Thus, not all children in that situation would be capable of “self-education”. This anecdote summarizes quite nicely the unique problems that deaf children face in environments designed primarily with hearing students in mind. Looked at from an optimist point-of-view, this situation helped connected Drolsbaugh to a special few of his peers and friends who gladly helped him with the homework. A recurring theme from Death Again, and Drolsbaugh’s stories about his young adulthood, is that of friendship: how extremely important it is for deaf people to evolve friendly relations with hearing people. Hearing people provide an additional resource that the deaf do not have; the deaf provide the hearing with an entirely new perspective on life where they are not reliant on what they hear. Much of friendships for deaf people arise out of necessity and dependency, especially for Drolsbaugh in schools designed for hearing people. A problem, as Drolsbaugh would later come to see later in life, is how deaf schools fail to meet the standards set by those for hearing students. Hearing students receive a better education in terms of developing their language skills. Thus, it is necessary for many deaf schools, in seeking the highest quality education, to go to schools intended for use by hearing students. Nevertheless, special help is necessary for disabled students, even in high school, as Drolsbaugh’s stories communicate. Mark Drolsbaugh’s Deaf Again is an autobiographical account of one man’s journey towards self-realization as he attempts to find his selfhood within Deaf culture. Many of the events of his life, as told in the book, revolve around the lessons he learns as a deaf person, which he means to contrast or compare with the reader’s unique experience. Themes looked at previously involve friendship based on necessity and the insight that discovering one’s own personal uniqueness and identity is the key to understanding the perspectives of others. Drolsbaugh’s life took shape with his experiences inside schools for the hearing, amongst his hearing peers who helped him realize his potential as both a student and a human being. A challenge for any person in coming to grips with his or her self is in knowing how much of an effect others have on oneself. Although we can be unique as individuals, we must not learn to be too dependent as individuals on others. By avoiding such strong dependency, Drolsbaugh retained his residency in Deaf culture, but also found his self in the joys of deafness. Bibliography Drolsbaugh, Mark. Deaf Again. 4th Edition. New York: Handwave Publications, 2008. Read More