5b Lori, Ly, Frank

REFLECTION
Choose any 3 classmates of project 5a. Read each of these 3 essays.

Create a blog post with the classmates names as references. Tell us one thing you learned from each classmate.

I chose Lori, Ly, and Frank to write about for this component. I found all of their essays to be interesting to read, and learned something new from each of them. Finding new information was somewhat difficult as we all read the same story for this project. I found for each of the essays that my learned information came from the last section, five facts about Deaf culture or American Sign Language.

While reading Lori's essay I learned that she is a hearing student. I read in Lori's essay that while there are over 2 million hearing impaired individuals in the United States, only about two hundred thousand people are culturally deaf. I love the quote that was included in her essay about ASL, "Its very existence is a testament to people's will to communicate. It pays tribute to our determination to make connections in the face of incredible odds" (page 274).

Ly is also a hearing student in our class. I know from her essay that she had a cousin named Quang, means the Sun. When he was three years old his dad changed his name to Xau, which means Ugly. In old Vietnamese culture, it is believed that if the children’s names are not nice in meaning, the evil spirit wouldn’t want to take them away. Even after Xau had his name changed, the bad spirit did not go away, and Xau was gone shortly after that. The hospital had advised treatment, but the child was taken to a village medicine man for treatment. He died of malaria when he was 3. I did not know that in Vietnamese culture changing a name to a not so nice meaning is believed to keep an evil spirit away.

Frank is a hearing student in our class as well. He had many interesting facts about Deaf culture and ASL. The fact that stood out to me the most is that bacterial meningitis is a major cause of deafness in children.