I've always wanted to write a book relating my experiences growing up as a deaf child in Chicago. Contrary to what people might think, it wasn't all about hearing aids and speech classes or frustrations.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the desire to share personal experiences beyond common perceptions of living with a disability.
Marlee Matlin expresses a longing to document her life as a deaf child in Chicago, emphasizing that her experiences were not solely defined by the challenges of hearing aids and speech classes. Instead, she suggests there is a deeper, more nuanced story to tell that goes beyond merely the frustrations often associated with being deaf, reflecting on the richness of her life and experiences.
In practice
In a speech about overcoming obstacles, one might quote this to illustrate the importance of sharing unique life stories.
I'm a proud person who happens to be deaf. I don't want to change it. I don't want to wake up and suddenly say, 'Oh my God, I can hear.' That's not my dream. It's not my dream. I've been raised deaf. I'm used to the way I am. I don't want to change it. Why would I ever want to change? Because I'm used to this, I'm happy.
It was ability that mattered, not disability, which is a word I'm not crazy about using.
The only thing I can't do is hear. I can drive, I have a life with four kids, I work on TV, I do movies, so the deafness question, is it that they want to know because, what? Not sure.
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and in spite of what most people might have expected from a young girl growing up deaf, life for me was like one long episode of The Brady Bunch. Despite whatever barriers were in my way, I imagined myself as Marcia Brady skating down the street saying βhiβ to everyone, whether they knew me or not.
When I was 11, I knew that I wanted to write a kid's book and tell the world what it was like being deaf.
I like to say that the greatest handicap of deafness does not lie in the ear, it lies in the mind. I hope that through my example, such as my role on 'The West Wing,' I can help change attitudes on deafness and prove we can really do everything... except hear.
I engage my subjects in conversation, patterned after psychiatric questioning, with the aim of discovering something about the reasoning underlying their right but especially their wrong answers.
In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics - unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times!
That endless book, the newspaper, is our national glory.
In many professions, what used to matter most were abilities associated with the left side of the brain: linear, sequential, spreadsheet kind of faculties. Those still matter, but they're not enough.
Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.
Pedagogy must be oriented not to the yesterday, but to the tomorrow of the child's development. Only then can it call to life in the process of education those processes of development which now lie in the zone of proximal development
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