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Grade 9

110.31.b.10 

HEARING THE SWEETEST SONGS
by Nicolette Toussaint
Newsweek
May 23, 1994


1.  Every year when I was a child, a man brought a big, black, squeaking machine to school. When he discovered I couldn't hear all his peeps and squeaks, he would get very excited. The nurse would draw a chart with a deep canyon in it. Then I would listen to the squeaks two or three times, while the adults-who were all acting very, very nice-would watch me raise my hand. Sometimes I couldn't tell whether I heard the squeaks or just imagined them, but I liked being the center of attention.

2.  My parents said I lost my hearing to pneumonia as a baby, but I knew I hadn't lost anything. None of my parts had dropped off. Nothing had changed: if I wanted to listen to Beethoven, I could put my head between the speakers and turn the dial up to 7. I could hear jets at the airport a block away. I could hear my mom when she was in the same room-if I wanted to. I could even hear my cat purr if I put my good ear right on top of him.

3.  I wasn't aware of not hearing until I began to wear a hearing aid at the age of 30. It shattered my peace: shoes creaking, papers crackling, pencils tapping, phones ringing, refrigerators humming, people cracking knuckles, clearing throats and blowing noses! Cars, bikes, dogs, cats, kids all seemed to appear from nowhere and fly right at me.

4.  I was constantly startled, unnerved, agitated-exhausted. I felt as though inquisitorial Nazis in an old World War II film were burning the side of my head with a merciless white spotlight. Under that onslaught, I had to break down and confess: I couldn't hear. Suddenly, I began to discover many things I couldn't do.

5.  I couldn't identify sounds. One afternoon, while lying on my side watching a football game on TV, I kept hearing a noise that sounded like my cat playing with a flexible-spring doorstop. I checked, but the cat was asleep. Finally, I happened to lift my head as the noise occurred. Heard through my good ear, the metallic buzz turned out to be the referee's whistle.

6.  I couldn't tell where sounds came from. I couldn't find my phone under the blizzard of papers on my desk. The more it rang, the deeper I dug. I shoveled mounds of paper onto the floor and finally had to track it down by following the cord from the wall.

7.  When I lived alone, I felt helpless because I couldn't hear alarm clocks, vulnerable because I couldn't hear the front door open and frightened because I wouldn't hear a burglar until it was too late.

8.  Then one day I missed a job interview because of the phone. I had gotten off the subway 20 minutes early, eager and dressed to the nines. But the address I had written down didn't exist! I must
have misheard it. I searched the street, becoming overheated, late and frantic, knowing that if I confessed that I couldn't hear on the phone, I would make my odds of getting hired even worse.

9.  For the first time, I felt unequal, disadvantaged and disabled. Now that I had something to compare, I knew that I had lost something: not just my hearing, but my independence and my sense of
wholeness. I had always hated to be seen as inferior, so I never mentioned my lack of hearing. Unlike a wheelchair or a white cane, my disability doesn't announce itself. For most of my life, I chose to pass as abled, and I thought I did it quite well.

10.  But after I got the hearing aid, a business friend said, "You know, Nicolette, you think you get away with not hearing, but you don't. Sometimes in meetings you answer the wrong question. People don't know you can't hear, so they think you're daydreaming, eccentric, stupid-or just plain rude. It would be better to just tell them."

11.  I wondered about that then, and I still do. If I tell, I risk being seen as unable rather than disabled. Sometimes, when I say I can't hear, the waiter will turn to my companion and say, "What does she want?" as though I have lost my power of speech.

12.  If I tell, people may see only my disability. Once someone is labeled "deaf," "crippled," "mute" or "aged," that's too often all they are. I'm a writer, a painter, a slapdash housekeeper, a gardener who
grows wondrous roses; my hearing is just part of the whole. It's a tender part, and you should handle it with care. But like most people with a disability, I don't mind if you ask about it.

13.  In fact, you should ask, because it's an important part of me, something my friends see as part of my character. My friend Anne always rests a hand on my elbow in parking lots, since several times, drivers who assume that I hear them have nearly run me over. When I hold my head at a certain angle, my husband, Mason, will say, "It's a plane" or "It's a siren." And my mother loves to laugh about the times I thought I heard: last week I was told that "the Minotaurs in the garden are getting out of hand." I imagined capering bullmen and I was disappointed to learn that all we had in the garden were overgrown "baby tears."

14.  Not hearing can be funny, or frustrating. And once in a while, it can be the cause of something truly transcendent. One morning at the shore I was listening to the ocean when Mason said, "Hear the bird?" What bird? I listened hard until I heard a faint, unbirdlike, croaking sound. If he hadn't mentioned it I would never have noticed it. As I listened, slowly I began to hear-or perhaps imagine-a distant song. Did I really hear it? Or just hear in my heart what he shared with me? I don't care. Songs imagined are as sweet as songs heard, and songs shared are sweeter still.

15.  That sharing is what I want for all of us. We're all just temporarily abled, and every one of us, if we live long enough, will become disabled in some way. Those of us who have gotten there first can tell you how to cope with phones and alarm clocks. About ways of holding a book, opening a door and leaning on a crutch all at the same time. And what it's like to give up in despair on Thursday, then begin all over again on Friday, because there's no other choice-and because the roses are beginning to bud in the garden.

16.  These are conversations we all should have, and it's not that hard to begin. Just let me see your lips when you speak. Stay in the same room. Don't shout. And ask what you want to know.

NO DREAM IS IMPOSSIBLE
by Julie Adams, The Bob Edwards Show, NPR 
September 25, 2009

1. From the time I can remember, I have wanted to be an actress. No one in my entire family had ever had artistic yearnings, so they looked upon my girlish dreams as a rather silly and impractical phase, which I would surely outgrow and then settle down in Arkansas like my more sensible cousins. But the dreams were still there when I reached the age of twenty, and I came to a rather shaky decision that I had to try it.

2. In the years since that day, I've come to realize that whatever part of myself forced me to strike out rather haphazardly for Hollywood is the only real wisdom I possess. That part of me
seemed to know that no matter how difficult achieving my goal might be, or even if I never achieved it, I would be happier striving toward my dream than if I tried to find security in a life I was unsuited for. This knowledge and quiet surety came from within me, and yet seemed to have its source far beyond comprehension of my wavering and indecisive personality. It alone kept me from quitting during that first year in which I discovered how right my family was in warning of the difficulties in store for me with no financial backing.

3. I found expensive dramatic lessons and living costs left almost nothing from my check as a secretary, with the very necessary clothes for studio interviews. But of course what really made me feel like catching the next bus for Arkansas was that in all the offices I managed to invade, not one casting man had looked at me with sudden interest and exclaimed, "That girl has something." My lovely air castles were quickly shattered, and I was forced to listen to the wiser, inner voice again. This time it had a new message: "Look at yourself honestly." Well this seemed simple enough, but it turned out to be very unpleasant indeed. One honest glance told me that only by unglamorous hard work over quite a few years would this gangling, unsure Arkansas girl be transformed into my dream of a fine actress.

4. After I recovered from the first shock of this discovery, to my surprise I began to feel stronger and more hopeful about the future. Since then I've found this inner voice always spoke the truth or made me try to find it for myself. Of course, I wandered away from it at times or rebelled when it said "no" to something I wanted very much at that moment. But these excursions away from my wiser self led only to confusion and unhappiness. Strangely enough, now that I've climbed a couple of rungs of the long ladder up, sometimes I find it harder to listen to the inner voice than when I was alone and struggling. It's a very quiet voice and is easily drowned out by outside babble. But one word from it is worth a book of advice from the best intentioned friends.

5. The voice seems very stern at times, as it makes me accept the responsibility for my failures and shortcomings, instead of excusing them or laying the blame elsewhere. But while it takes away petty egotism and silly pretensions, the voice whispers of things that send my thoughts and imagination soaring. It tells me no dream is impossible because faith in my inner self will guide me to its fulfillment. This belief in my inner self banishes fear and doubt and frees me to live and love and work to the fullest.

("No Dream Is Impossible," written by Julie Adams, part of the This I Believe Essay Collection found at www.thisibelieve.org. Copyright © 2005-2013 by This I Believe, Inc. Reprinted with permission.)

HOW A DEMON IPAD STOLE MY SUMMER VACATION
by Doyle McManus
Los Angeles Times
September 1, 2013

1. I plan to remember this year's vacation season with just two words: Never again.

2. Never again, that is, will I take all my technology along. The Internet has ruined summer vacations.

3. When I first visited my in-laws' cabin in Ontario's north woods 35 years ago, there was no such thing as broadband Internet. The nearest telephone was a one-mile canoe paddle down the lake, and we were beyond the reach of television. Our media diet consisted of a battery-powered radio. I know I risk sounding like an aging crank, but it was paradise.

4. Now we're cursed with all the riches of modern civilization. The cabin is just close enough to civilization to get a strong cell phone signal, and that goes for data too, via a mobile Wi-Fi hot spot. Our little bit of isolation is no more.

5. Instead of browsing dog-eared summerhouse mystery novels, this year we browsed the Internet. Instead of long evenings of Scrabble or Monopoly, we checked our Twitter feeds and updated our Facebook pages.

6. And that, of course, is the problem with the Internet: It's so easy that, unless you're equipped with massive self-control, you use it if it's there.

7. What did we lose?

8. For a news junkie like me, being cut off for a few weeks used to be a good thing. It forced me to stop following what politicians were saying and allowed me to read novels, histories, even old magazine articles carefully set aside all year in a vacation reading box.

9. When anyone got bored with reading, we had other pre-modern forms of entertainment: hiking, swimming, canoeing, competitive baking, stargazing and card games. My daughters would never have learned the rules of Texas hold 'em if not for their father's tutelage on summer vacations.

10. The path to paradise lost has been gradual. For several years, I kept my Internet addiction under control by using inconvenient technology: a creaky laptop and a slow dial-up connection. But this year, the combination of a new iPad and that nifty Wi-Fi turned out to be fatal.

11. The demon iPad beckoned silently from the picnic table: What harm could it be to give the e-mail a quick check? But once that alluring touch screen lights up, who can resist lingering?

12 I'm not the first to stumble across this problem, of course. I'm a late adopter, even when it comes to vices.

13 As early as 2008, Nicholas Carr, author of 'The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains', was warning that broadband Internet was reducing our attention spans and making us stupid. The Web, he said, encourages us to lapse into our "natural state of distractedness."

14 Even before that, in the pre-broadband Ice Age of 2000, Harvard's Robert Putnam warned that television-and, more broadly, staring into any kind of screen-had reduced the amount of time families spent in social interactions like, well, penny-ante poker at a picnic table.

15 And last year, researchers at UC-Irvine reported that employees who were unplugged from their e-mail got more work done-and experienced far less stress.

16 Now, I'm not bemoaning the loss of total isolation or advocating unplugging from the Internet entirely. Access to the Web is unquestionably a wonderful thing. I love having a bottomless library at my fingertips; I love having the world's newspapers on my electronic doorstep. I love being able to pay bills and make airplane reservations online. And, thanks to those ugly cell phone towers in the woods, we now have a way to call for help if we need an ambulance or a fire truck.

17 It's also nice to have an app that identifies the constellations when you hold the iPad up to the night sky. But then, you have to remember to put the screen down and simply drink in the stars-the original, uncut version.

18 And that's the point: It's important not to let the convenience of the Internet get
in the way of simpler beauties.

19 That's not the Internet's fault. It's ours, for failing to curb the urge to browse.

20 I grew to envy our neighbor down the lake who opted to go without Internet access. He didn't cut himself off entirely; whenever he made a trip to town, he sat on the park bench in front of the public library to use the Wi-Fi. But the rest of the time, he stayed unplugged.

21 In retrospect, that sounds pretty good. I don't think I'm desperate enough to need a term in the Internet rescue camps of South Korea. And I'm too cheap to shell out 10 bucks for the software that turns your Internet connection off for as many hours as you want. (Bonus tech tip: You can turn it off yourself, for free. Go to "Settings.")

22 The first step toward recovery is admitting you have a problem. My problem isn't the Internet, it's learning how to limit the time I spend on it.

23 So now I have one more thing to look forward to next summer: More time reading old novels; more time playing Scrabble and chasing frogs.

24 Next year, I promise to unplug. Except, of course, when we need to find a new bike trail, or Google a recipe for wild blueberry pie or check whether "qi" is an acceptable word in Scrabble. And, while I'm online, could it hurt to take one little peek at the e-mail?

Measures 1 skill from
Grade 9
ELAR (2009)
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS)

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Measures 1 skill fromGrade 9ELAR (2009)Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS)

Our brand new solo games combine with your quiz, on the same screen

Measures 1 skill from
Grade 9
ELAR (2009)
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS)