Sandra Murray appears to be just like any other student at Texarkana Community College, but her plight is different because she is the first deaf person ever to enroll at TCC.
Using sign language and lip movement to convey her thoughts for this interview through interpreter Loretta Hartshorn of Texarkana, Sandra is a 20 year old Texarkana, Ark. resident.
“Dr. Rolfe Wylie is usually my interpreter and he goes to class with me,” Sandra said recently. “If Dr. Wylie cannot interpret what the teacher is saying, then the teacher usually writes it for me.”
A graduate of the Arkansas School for the Deaf, which is located in Little Rock, Sandra believes that she is learning more at TCC than she learned at the school for the deaf.
“I wish the deaf school would make the lessons harder because they are not the same as the hearing schools,” she noted.
Majoring in elementary education, Sandra is receiving financial aid to attend college in the form of a grant award from the Texas Education Agency. This grant is offered to any handicapped student attending TCC, and furnishes interpreters for the deaf, readers for the blind, as well as tutors and note takers.
Sandra is also receiving a federal Basic Education Opportunity Grant (BEOG), and she is involved in the work study program as a part-time teacher’s assistant to Dr. Wylie.
But it is in the classroom where Sandra said that she encounters her most serious problem – that of understanding the transferral of spoken English into the sign language she has become accustomed to. She said the school for the deaf teaches a much easier vocabulary.
Explaining the major differences between sign language and spoken English, Sandra said the deaf tend to look at English as if it were a foreign language.
“This doesn’t mean deaf people are stupid, it is just that ideas are expressed in totally different manners.”
When she was four years old, Sandra said she first began learning sign language after enrolling at the Arkansas School for the Deaf.
Generally, when a child is determined deaf, Sandra said “there is a big emphasis on learning to use not only sign language, but voices. But when I was 11 or 12 years old, I stopped using my voice because people were unable to understand me. I remember when I was seven or eight years old, I felt badly about being deaf because I wanted to hear music,” she added, gesturing with hands and facial expressions. “I used to think, ‘I can’t hear! I can’t talk on the phone! I can’t hear!’
But Sandra gives her mother, Mrs. Iris Murray, the credit for helping her understand that deafness is not really important in a person’s life.
“I’m patient because I know God made me deaf, and since then, it’s really never been a big part of my life,” she said.
Moreover, Sandra said communicating at home with her mother is no problem, because she uses sign language and her voice to talk. She went on to say that communicating with those who don’t use sign language is usually not very difficult “if they don’t speak slowly and overexaggerate every word.”
When these activities aren’t keeping her busy, Sandra enjoys swimming, basketball, reading and cooking. But she said, however, that studying for her courses at TCC is highest on her priority list of activities.