Teaching Deaf Children - Essay Example

Teaching Deaf Children Education is one of the primary factors behind the success of any individual. Education brings awareness and knowledge for a person regarding every field of life. It is one of the prime responsibilities of the government of every country to provide quality education to every individual living in the country regardless of race, sex, or religion. The governments should also take steps to provide standard education to disable children such as deaf and blind children. Providing education to disable children is a difficult task. Teachers of disable children need some special skills, knowledge, and understanding to teach the deaf children in an appropriate manner. Let us discuss those skills in some detail in order to get a better understanding of how to teach disable children. Skills of a Teacher Teachers of deaf children must possess some special skills and abilities in order to become an effective teacher for the class consisting of deaf children. These skills and knowledge make the teachers of deaf children different to the teachers of normal children. Teachers must have the knowledge of deaf children’s emotions, perceptions, and behaviors in order to teach them in a proper way. They must know how deaf children think and perceive different things. Parents and siblings of the dead children feel a lot of stress due to the inability of their children to communicate effectively with them. The teachers teach the children how to communicate their feelings and emotions to their parents that results in reducing the parents’ stress. It is common fact that senses other than hearing sense go into overdrive for the deaf children in order to compensate them for their disability. Some of these senses include higher visual sense and ability to read the expressions of faces more effectively as compared to normal people. Teachers can make use of these superior senses of deaf children in order to teach them in an appropriate manner and make them able to communicate with different people around them. Teachers also need to work on improving the behavior of deaf children and this is only possible when the teachers will have complete understanding of the deaf children’s abilities to view and perceive different things. Teachers also need to be proficient in teaching the deaf children through educational technologies such as visual telephone relay services, computer-based teaching, video tapes, and television. These technologies work as the major sources of learning for the deaf children. Various researches have proved that visualizing ability of the deaf children is exceptional, so teachers make use of televisions and video tapes to make the children learn what they do not know. For a teacher of the deaf children, one of the most important points to be considered is that the deaf children are unable to understand the noise of different things. Therefore, it is important to make the children understand the sounds of different things. For that, the teachers should make use of manipulative visual language, which assists the children in getting familiar with the sounds of different objects around them. Teachers need to understand and teach the manipulative visual language in order to make the deaf children draw pictures of sounds in their minds. There also exist dialogue journals, which can be used to promote the literacy of the deaf children. Another important point is that the deaf children possess the ability to pick up alternative methods to communicate with the people around them. Teachers should understand that children, whether normal or deaf, want to communicate with their parents and teachers. If the children are normal, they can speak easily but in case of deaf children, teachers must provide them with alternative methods of communications in order to make them come out of stress and start communicating effectively. Teachers should also understand that deaf children possess skills and abilities to carry out different daily life activities. Deaf children can also prove themselves successful in professional life if they are trained and educated in an appropriate way. Teachers should be able to identify and refine the hidden skills and abilities of the deaf children in order to make them a useful part of the society. Last thing for the teachers of deaf children is to make great use of facial expression during teaching. Deaf children learn a lot from the facial expressions of their teachers. Expressions work as a major source of social and behavioral education for the deaf children. As the deaf children cannot hear a person laughing or crying, they make great use of facial expressions in order to understand the situation. Teachers must be proficient in teaching the meanings of different expressions to the children. Areas of Potential Difficulty for Deaf Children Deaf children face many potential difficulties during the process of learning. Some areas of difficulties include social interaction, mental health, interaction with the teachers, interaction with the classmates, and behavioral problems. Another problem, which arises for the deaf children during the process of learning, is that they cannot easily understand the movement of lips of their teachers and classmates. Inability to interact effectively with the teachers and classmates create many problems for the deaf children. They feel depressed and low when they are unable to communicate effectively with the people around them. Their self-esteem and confidence level go down and they feel dejected in the society. “They do not always hear, so others have to yell at them causing embarrassment” (Bleckly, 2010). Lack of communication abilities is another problem for the deaf children. Deaf children often need to repeat themselves in front of other people, which cause an embarrassment situation for the deaf children. Key Successes in Teaching Deaf Children Some of the key successes of teachers of deaf children include improvement in the communication skills of the children, increase in their self-confidence, improvement in their mental health, and improvement in their ability to understand lips and hands movement of the normal children. Those teachers, who possess the ability to teach the deaf children effectively, not only get success in their professional careers but also prove to be helpful in improving mental health and communication skills of the deaf children. References Bleckly, F. (2010). Issues Faced by Deaf Children. Retrieved from http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art46258.asp Read More