Charlie had been implanted at age three—not ideal, but still plenty of time left to build new neural pathways. By all measurable standards, her implantation was a success, and though no one ever said it to her face, she knew this meant the fact that she couldn’t hack it was a personal deficiency. Maybe she just hadn’t tried hard enough.
The educational term for her was “oral failure” (imagine the fun her classmates would have if they got wind of that), which from what Charlie could tell, basically meant she sounded stupid when she talked. Charlie wasn’t stupid. She’d just had to learn everything herself, and in an environment not at all conducive to learning: the public school classroom—endless tumult of squeaking furniture, student chatter, teachers spewing lessons with their backs to the class as they wrote on the board. Really, she thought, the fact that she could work out about sixty percent of what was going on with the robo-ear, maybe more with some good lipreading, was impressive. But in school, sixty percent was still a D.
She wished she could be rid of the implant, even as she knew the requirement that she keep wearing it was her mother’s consolation prize, a sliver of hope Charlie might one day wake up able to make sense of the relentless static it pumped into her head. But being under her dad’s governance was undeniably a victory. She’d enroll at River Valley as a residential student, and the two of them would attend community sign language classes the school offered after-hours. Things might finally take a turn for the better.
Her mother didn’t appeal the ruling, a surrender Charlie found both a relief and a little upsetting. Mothers on TV always fought to win their kids back; it was their reason for living, all that. Then again, the three of them were pretty tired of going to court.
Now Charlie was packing, shifting most of her stuff to the apartment where her father had lived for nearly a year—new construction on the riverfront with big windows and an open kitchen, right out of the dictionary for “bachelor pad,” which as a bonus made her mother, French country devotee, crazy. From there, Charlie would bring an even smaller subset of belongings to the dorm.
Two weeks before the semester began, she and her parents went to a meeting at her new school. The headmistress was a tall, shapely woman with short black hair tied back close against her head. Charlie found her somewhat formidable even after they all sat down and the distance between their heights diminished. She signed and spoke simultaneously, her arms and hands moving with the grace and speed of a much more compact person. To sign and talk at the same time was an imperfect operation, the headmistress warned, and one Charlie wouldn’t see much of at River Valley after today. Charlie longed to find meaning in the arc of the woman’s hands, but that meant looking away from her lips, something she couldn’t afford to do. Not yet.
Headmistress pulled a series of papers from the tray of her printer and laid out Charlie’s academic program. She would retake algebra and be enrolled in remedial English. She would still have to go to speech therapy.
But how will she learn sign language? Charlie’s mother said.
We’re signed up for community classes, said her father.
Great, said the headmistress. She looked back to Charlie. The _______ here at school will be key, she said. As with any language.
The what? said Charlie.
The headmistress removed a notepad from beneath a pile of paperwork.
IMMERSION she wrote.
Charlie shrugged.
To be surrounded, said the headmistress. The sign will come, if you put some work into it.
Charlie read the doubt on her mother’s face—fair enough, considering Charlie’s scholastic record. And hadn’t the doctors said the same thing about English? Just one more lesson or therapy or specialist could be the thing to tip the scale. The headmistress, though, also registered the skepticism.
It’s different with sign, she said. You’re programmed for visual language.
She smiled, and Charlie knew she was trying to be reassuring, but the word “programmed” just made her think of the audiologist. Charlie watched her mother dig through her purse for her ChapStick, a signal she knew to mean the discussion was over.
Are you okay? the headmistress said.
At first, Charlie didn’t understand why she was asking, then realized she had been rubbing the scar behind her ear again, the incision site of her implant. It had been feeling tender lately; Charlie had even made her mother check the spot, parts of which she couldn’t see well in the mirror. But everything had looked normal.
Implant’s on the fritz, said her mother with a forced brightness, and mumbled something about an upcoming appointment.
For about twelve years, said Charlie, and the headmistress tried to swallow her smile.
after the Serrano meeting, February’s mood soured. The girl was intelligent, unmistakably so, but who could say where she was academically? Her transcripts even had her failing some courses, a rarity in the mainstream these days, where teachers routinely passed difficult and underprepared students just to be rid of them, sending them forth to wreak havoc on somebody else’s state test scores.
Charlie’s behavior record was relatively clean. February found this surprising for someone so clearly bound up in frustration, but she was relieved for her faculty. There was a theory among linguists that the brain’s capacity for language learning—language as a concept, a modality for thought—is finite. Scientists called the period from ages zero to five the “critical window,” within which a child had to gain fluency in at least one language, any language, or risk permanent cognitive damage. Once the window shut, learning anything became difficult, even impossible—without a language, how does one think, or even feel?
The critical window remained “theoretical,” mostly because intentionally depriving children of language was deemed by ethicists too cruel an experiment to conduct. And yet, February saw the results of such trials every day—children whose parents had feared sign language would mark them, but who ended up marked by its absence. These children had never seen language as it really was, outside the speech therapist’s office, alive and rollicking, had never been privy to the chatter of the playground or around the dinner table.
Often the Deaf community levied their anger at implants, though in truth language deprivation had been prescribed by professionals long before that technology existed. For February, the appeal of implants was clear, but the false binary they created was the real danger.
There was no reason assistive technology and sign language should be an either-or affair; time and again some of her strongest students proved that, when it came to language, more is more. Often when she found herself in pedagogical arguments with fellow administrators across the district, she put it this way: imagine telling someone that learning French would ruin their kid’s English, hurt their brain. Usually people scoffed at her and February would nod. It did sound ridiculous. And yet, though fear of bilingualism in two spoken languages had been dismissed as xenophobic nonsense, though it was now desirable for hearing children to speak two languages, medicine held fast to its condemnation of ASL.
Perhaps it didn’t matter much. February supposed parents would dig up a reason to avoid sign language whether or not their doctors handed them the pseudoscience to back it up. Your basic shame, or fear of change or failure. Whatever it was, over the years, River Valley had received many children who couldn’t have a conversation with their own families.
So it was no surprise that students coming from language-poor environments often arrived with explosive tempers. Some were so far gone that even learning ASL was beyond them, though whether it had been their brains’ language centers or the desire for human contact that had atrophied, it was hard to say.