Felt Creation Update

If you like sitting around in your pajamas stabbing things with needles, I highly recommend Felt as a medium of artistic expression. You may remember various needle-felting projects of yore*; more recently I have been doing embroidered felt, and specifically embroidered felt Christmas tree ornaments.

Here we have a Maid-a-Milking and a Drummer Drumming:

These delightful designs are from Larissa Holland, who has many other delighful designs as well, and very easy-to-follow tutorials. (Mine deviate from the patterns in a few ways, most notably using felt instead of wooden beads, and needle-felted faces instead of drawing.) I have also been making assorted birds and other freestyle shapes but have given them all away without taking pictures. 

Normally, I would close this post by saying "I have a huge bin of felt! Come sit in my living room and stab things with needles with me!" but in these pandemic-ridden times I feel guilty even issuing completely empty invitations to a nearly-nonexistant virtual audience. Stay out of my living room! Maybe next year.

 

 

*The best needle-felted thing I have made so far was this pangolin, in 2016, which I seem not to have boasted about on the internet:

 

It turned out very nicely but was a little bit too much effort to be worth repeating.

Stick it to The Man (but also ask The Man to help)

The world in general seems to be disintigrating in a number of upsetting ways, so I am concentrating all of my energy on getting better early intervention services for deaf children in Montana. And ignoring everything else (which is a VERY Montana thing to do, and is contributing on some level to the pre-apocalypse. But oh well).

One of my projects is Legislation! Which I knew very little about but have spent the last few years navigating. Montana's governmental structure is a chaotic mess! But eventually I deciphered it and made a bunch of helpful diagrams and figured out the process. 

 

I am the chair of Montana's Lead-K committee. (LEAD-K is a national group working to get bills passed in all 50 state legislatures; more information below!) The ACLU is also working with state offices to provide support for Lead-K bills headed for the floor in 2021. We have been working with Connie Keogh (Montana HD91), and she has sent in a bill draft to Legislative Services. (One of the processes Montana does is that you aren't allowed to write your own bill. You send in a request saying what you want to achieve, and then the people in Legislative Services figure out how to write a bill to do it.)

My schpiel about this project: Early childhood is a crucial time for language acquisition; unfortunately many deaf/hh children end up with language delays due to insufficient exposure to accessible language in their first few years. Often no one realizes that a child is experiencing language delay or deprivation until they arrive in kindergarten, when it is expected that the children have already acquired either English or ASL and are ready to begin learning academic content. The overall goal of the Lead-K bills is to increase language access and accountability for young deaf and hard-of-hearing children. Specifically, we are working to strengthen requirements for language assessments in early childhood intervention services, with an end goal of reducing (or eliminating!) language delays and deprivation.

The bill summary we are working with right now reads:

Create statutory guidelines requiring that early childhood services provided through the Montana Milestones program include specific assessments for deaf/hard of hearing children and that the program record the results. The intent of the legislation is to have written requirements for the use of language-specific (English and/or ASL) evaluation and assessment tools for language acquisition in deaf and hard of hearing children, in place of the current unspecified "communication" assessments, and for the collection of statewide data related to language acquisition outcomes in this population. 

 

That got sent to Legislative Services and now we're just waiting for them to tell us what we can accomplish. (We're also waiting to see what is going to happen with the Montana Legislature- it is supposed to be in January and we're in the middle of a pandemic and the state is overrun with delusional right-wingers who won't do any safety measures and don't want to do a virtual session and the non-right-wingers don't want to do a super-spreading event and they are arguing about what to do.)

And meanwhile, I am still chugging along developing ways to provide language support outside of the system. Fight the power! Make a bunch of worksheets!

Progress Report

 I have been doing many things besides posting on blogs over the last six months, the most prominent of which is a sort of massive and disorganized and multivalent project about deaf advocacy in Montana, educational materials for deaf kids, and some books. I keep thinking of one more thing to add and one more way to improve something else. Finally I decided to stop waiting until the whole thing is finished and just start sharing it (and soliciting support) now.

So I made a Patreon. I have barely figured out how to use it but I'm making progress. The overall goal is to support my efforts in deaf advocacy and language access, in Montana. Here's what I said in my description of the project over at the moneymaker:

Montana is high, wide,  handsome, but we have some deeply entrenched institutionalized problems going on behind the scenes. Language access for deaf children and communication access for deaf adults are limited in quality and quanity. There are not enough interpreters in the state, and many of them are dismally underqualified.  The problems are exacerbated by the size of the state and the distance between cities. I am working to slowly improve these things. It's a big job, and I would be very grateful for your support.

What I'm Currently Working On:

I have 3 main projects in various states of progress. 

Lead-K MT

This project is a committee trying to get a bill passed. The goals of the bill (one of many in a nationwide operation) will improve Early Intervention for deaf children in Montana.

ASL School

I'm working on activities and plans for families to use at home with young deaf children. I'm working on ages 3-5 currently, with robust testing on the children in my Covid bubble.

Book

I am making a picture book. It is Animalia but for ASL, with things on the page that have signs with a particular handshape. A related coloring page gives you the idea: the signs for gorilla, girl, turtle, game, crackers and more all involve one handshape: a closed fist with the thumb sticking out.

So that's what I'M up to these days (I am also working on a quilt for someone who should not worry; I promise progress is being made). I'm doing language assessments and providing IEP support and running (in-bubble) classes and making up worksheets and activities and materials to help people learn ASL. It is fun and interesting. The patreon support goes to more better products, more (free-at-point-of-service) advocacy, instruction, early intervention, remediation, explanation, advice, testimony, and assorted other types of help. Hopefully someday in the future, it will be able to support more classes and more traveling to other parts of Montana and more training and facilitating other deaf people to become teachers. 

The lack of available services in Montana is a little overwhelming. It's partly due to funding issues, but even if the funding issues were resolved, the resources just don't exist. There aren't enough interpreters, and there isn't an interpreting program in the state. There aren't enough (any) SLPs with LSL certification.  ASL classes are only available in a few towns, and they tend to be overbooked, and they don't go beyond ASL 2. There are almost no (I think 1?) deaf TODs and the hearing TODs are overworked and the programs they work in are understaffed and Total Communication. What a mess! Obviously I am not going to fix the whole thing by myself. But I can (and am) provide expertise and services that are desperately needed, in an overall system that does a really dismal job of educating deaf children and including deaf people in the community. Baby steps, butterfly effect, you have to crawl before you can walk, and so on.

***

All the advice and manuals about setting up Patreon talk a lot about how important self promotion and networking and social media are. I assume they are right, but I don't like being told what to do and I also don't want to bother people too much. I'm hoping that families with deaf kids, and teachers who teach in bilingual/bicultural programs*, will eventually find me and begin a happy relationship where they support my project and I send them materials and activities and ideas that they can use. I'm counting on the American deaf communities' interconnectedness and dedication to improving deaf ed, not on the general public. I'm not really offering anything that the general public would care bout. Do people actually want "early access" to things, or having me tweet "thank you!" or having posts that only patrons can read? None of those things has any appeal to me, but then I'm frequently an outlier in preferences (among other things). It would be lovely to be proved wrong, but I decline to make a concerted effort at self-promotion, at least for now. I put posts on Facebook and Twitter and now I'm working on other things for a while.

That being said, here's the link if you are curious:

 Become a Patron!

I am going to use this blog for some connected ideas/resources, which might end up seeming like a kind of promotion?  Explanations and instructions and images etc that don't fit neatly into Patreon's weirdo setup. I think at this point I have about 3 followers left**; if you are among them, get ready to be swamped by a lot of posts about ASL and deaf education. I will probably figure out how to put the Patreon button somewhere, too.

*meaning, programs for children who already know ASL, that teach other subjects (reading, writing, math, science, art) IN ASL. Hearing people generally don't understand the difference between this kind of program and one that "teaches deaf kids ASL". I'm sure I'll write a blog post about this at some point.

**I wonder why? I've been posting so regularly and fascinatingly and frequently recently.

Hello, World!

This blog is still alive! barely. We'll see what happens. I started it in the first place for my grandmother, because she was a little shaky with the email skills but wanted to hear about what I was doing and how everything was going, and also I was tired of repeating how I was six times a day when my family all asked how I was doing and how everything was going. (I copied & pasted replies numerous times.) But then it turned into a place to entertain myself and show off. I still like to entertain myself and show off, but I didn't have the energy for it during cancer treatment.

Cancer treatment is over! I am officially cancer-free.

Just in time to be stuck at home because of the Novel Corona Virus. The governor ordered restaurants and bars to close exactly as I was getting over the radiation burns. So nothing has really changed for me, because I was basically housebound for the last eight months.

Anyway I assume I will resume the entertaining myself and showing off via the blog now. I'm back!