Favorite student stories

I've been reading a fascinating book that was suggested by one of my students in my adult online Human Development class at Granite State College. It's called, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language:  Hereditary Deafness on Martha's Vineyard, by Nora Ellen Groce.  It's about hereditary deafness on Martha's Vineyard, but most remarkably, no one thought of them as handicapped, AND it seems that everybody knew sign language.  This hereditary deafness affected hundreds of people on Martha's Vineyard for about 250 years.  The last deaf person in that group died in the 1950s.  

Here are some statistics: In the United States in 1854, only one person out of every 5728 was deaf.  But on Martha's Vineyard, an astounding one person in 155 people were deaf.  At that time, no one knew what caused these people to be born deaf.  Theories abounded, from the "unusual geography" of the particular part of Martha's Vineyard where these people lived (around Chilmark) to their mothers being frightened when pregnant. Of course, all of these explanations were wrong.  The real reason was that there was a recessive gene for deafness that showed itself when both mother and father had the gene.  And since the island of Martha's Vineyard was small and, at that time, relatively isolated, people who were even distantly related, married and gave the gene to their children.

But the most wonderful part of the book was summed up in this quote by the author:  

"Perhaps the best description of the status of deaf individuals on the Vineyard was given to me by an island woman in her eighties, when I asked about those who were handicapped by deafness when she was a girl. 'Oh,' she said emphatically, 'those people weren't handicapped.  They were just deaf.' "

This is the kind of thing we learn about in the adult online class I teach at Granite State College.  And I love that it was one of my adult students who told the class about the book, and I went right out to get it!