A quick 100.00 from the ATM, and the receipt revealed over 8.000 in my acount. This represented the month's pay check and the single big lump sum payoff from Social Security. (which I hope does not also include June)...So, they were good for a bit over 6,000 dating back to January. Thank you Representatives, Senators, and yes, you Mr. President. My goal, pay off the credit cards and then keep them paid down..for ever.Can I do it ? I am already making ahoping list a new Mavica vaccum clearner...there is a Panasonic that it appears will tell you when your rug is clean, a bagless Hoover a new camcorder (The little Sony one is what I really want.)

Writing from the perspective of a day later...I cannot recall what the day was like at all. A Thursday, of course. I kept fiddling with the survey...and trying more and more items, addresses...

I was at Mercer from 9 to 6, that I know, had lunch in the staff lounge, full of staff members, Sally doing needle work on the sofa...and I read a bit from the Wall Street Journal, an enthusiastic item about the ebook..

Cabs to and from the station..more expense.

   Message From: echristian@webtv.net (Elizabeth Christian) Date: Sat, Jun 3, 2000, 7:34am To: egrosso@webtv.net (irisdestar) Cc: echristian@webtv.net Subject: If this really is a dialogue..

You might want to share my experience regarding deaf education with your other penpals....

My daughter was diagnosed when she was only 6 months old, and my first information was in a book in the library where I was working. Spencer Tracy's wife wrote of her own experience with her son John, and told of the clinic they had founded and of the correspondence course that was available. The entire approach was based on the oral system...and I bought colored twine and sat Phoebe in her highchair and tried the ""b.b.b..b ...blue"..try to tell blue by lip reading.....I was a Tracy Clinic drop out.. this still haunts me....She could not do it....It did not work like it was supposed to...

The Jr. League Speech School in Atlanta had an excellent program, the audiologist who evuated her led me to believe that she only had to turn 4...and would be accepted and we would be off...those first years so important.

In the meantime she went to regular day care, and actually probably this was a very good experience for this 2 to 4 year old deaf child. She was included in the music sessions by a local music teacher and could do the rythmn stuff...

Then...that all important day...Jr. League Speech school..the interview...I was so proud as she put the circles and squares in the puzzle....Then a terrible letter signed by 10 people...she was rejected. I sent her to Atlanta's other school...a private venture....again oral...and the teacher, told me that in fact she was the only really profoundly deaf child there her age and needed to be with other children her age...but in an oral environment.

I wrote to every school for the deaf in the country that summer of 1960....it was worse than Harvard, Yale, and Princeton..all put together. Waiting lists of large numbers....for 5 year old classes..with one exception..the Pennsylvania State Oral School for the Deaf...2 places...So I took a job on a book mobile demonstration in Allentown for a year so she could go. I immediately learned that while the preschool was "oral"..older children were signing.... I had been brainwashed by the specialists and the literature...bad, bad....

Back to Georgia...again rejected by the J. League....and this time I enrolled her in the Georgia School for the Deaf...and she started there ...actually her 2nd boarding school, and still only 5 years old...

I also met my first mother of a high school deaf child...and learned the "truth". This mother had a daughter who was succesful at the Jr. League Speech School...but when"mainstreamed" in the public schools...was not learning academically...to the better choice for academics was GSD...(This daughter graduated from Gallaudet, and I was able to arrange a 6 weeks library work experience for her in my library...she went to work for the Library of Congress)...

The GSC head of the primary school was a firm "oralist" and Phoebe received speech training but the school also included many children of deaf parents who had been signing fluently for many years....and as the years went by the movement of the deaf themselves to standardize American Sign Language changed the envirnoment.

As I saw more and more deaf children I learned that there are vaious degrees of hearing loss and time hearing is lost. Pheobe is quite different from the really hard of hearing who are successful wih the oral approach.

There is more to the story....but what is still interesting is that the two systems of teaching for the deaf is still controversial. As more and more children are "mainstreamed" the states schools are under pressure to close. There is much written about them...

Well I suppose that I was not such a bad mother. I sent my daughter off to school because it was the best solution...and I am not sorry. I think, as I said, that my reaction to motherhood is that I was not able to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish... We seem to have so much more control in our "jobs"...where we can use our skills and have more control over what happens. I think this is what I was really saying in my reaction to that original post. Thanks...

September 19, 2000

SO WHAT REALLY HAPPENED ABOUT DIANE

She interviewed at Emory, at the Florida university in Orlando, and most recently at the Gwinett school system..and did not get any of the jobs. This has really surprised me.

So last night she said that she was resigned to remaining at Mercer (well, resigned is not exactly the word), so that she will be able to finish her degree..the Ph.D. instructional design and distance learning at Nova.

THIS WAS WHAT I HAD WRITTEN FOUR MONTHS EARLIER

Diane has an appointment for an interview at Emory next Tuesday..a two day interview, intensive in length and depth. She wanted to check out the parking situation, so we drove over and then had supper at Picadilly's at Ansley Mall.

She also go a call regarding her job application at the Orlando university..the job she most favors. The head of the program said he needed evidence that she was really going to graduate, and said she had an impressive resume.

Life without Diane will be very different. Will it make a difference in my concern about retirement ? Will I want to stay if I no longer feel I have a strong support there ? Will I need to replace her with someone else. Will we continue regular emails ?