CONGRATULATIONS

I would like to take this opportunity to wish congratulations to all who have achieve outstanding result in SPM 2008. A reminder for all of you that SPM is not the end. It is just the beginning of a long journey that is full of obstacles. Those who failed to score well, no need to worry. I am sure if you work harder, you can perform well in your tertiary studies. A special congratulation I wish to hearing impaired N. Aghilan from SMK Jalan Bukit, Kajang (I am proud to be from Kajang!!) who managed to 10 1As and 2 2As. Your achievement proves that there is nothing can stop anyone from achieving what they aim for.

As you can see, the media have the attitude of publishing stories about achievements made by the OKU students. Back then, I used to question on the need to publicize their so called achievements because they did not even get straight A’s. The media made it as if it was a great achievement. Thanks to the noise pollution seminar that I was tasked to present about it and thank you also for the psychology lectures, I now have a clearer picture of the difficulties that the OKU have to face every day.

For those who are still wondering why the papers made it as huge issue, here is some useful information.

“The normal child will be surrounded by the spoken word and may well be processing this information from the very beginning, the deaf baby will be denied all this. The developing deaf baby child will have a greatly restricted input of verbal information. As a result, the most profound effect of congenital deafness is to be found in the area of language development.”

In simple words, deaf child fail to get enough exposure to spoken words. Failure to obtained necessary exposure (by the age of 2, if I am not mistaken), will result in failure in language development altogether. Besides that, deaf people will also tend to miss out many qualitative aspects of communication since non verbal aspects of speech such as changes in intonation and pitch can convey a range of subtle semantic and emotional information. Moreover, in studying you require all your senses to be able to digest all the information. The deaf people are lacking one or more of the senses making it difficult for them.

That is some of the information that I can share in this post. So now, had you realized how difficult they are? The media is indeed performing a good deed by publishing their stories. As a conclusion, we may regard something as not really a great achievement in a normal individual but for the OKU it is in fact an outstanding achievement for them. Second, give the OKU due respect and lastly, be thankful to Allah that we are born without any disabilities.