July 8, 2007
Breaking through the dark silence
Zoë and the miracle worker
For deafblind girl, learning to communicate takes a special teacher
By JEANNIE KEVER
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle
Zoë Dunn is out of the bath and ready for mischief.
Two of her sisters – Zoë is one of a set of triplets – are at school. A third sister is with their mother at a neighbor’s house, so Zoë and Mackenzie Levert have the place to themselves.
Levert watches as Zoë moves unsteadily across the hall and clambers onto the seat of a rocking chair.
A few minutes later, she urges Zoë back to the bedroom.
“You need to get dressed,” Levert says, speaking out loud but also using sign language.
“Chips,” the 7-year-old responds for the fifth time this morning, using the sign for her favorite snack.
Levert has spent the past 4 1/2 months standing sentinel in a world that Zoë can neither see nor hear, and she easily deflects the demand for chips and leads Zoë to the bedroom, where a series of cubbyholes is stocked with everything from socks to hair gel.
Zoë flops to the floor as Levert hands her a sock.
“Finish it,” Levert signs.
Zoë pulls off the sock.
“Again,” Levert signs. “Try again.”
Finally, Zoë has her socks on.
They dive together for a celebratory hug.
Dressing herself is progress, but Levert wants more for Zoë. She still resists new foods. She can’t say whether she is lonely or name a favorite toy. She isn’t potty trained.
But one change, Levert finally decides, has been huge.
“She listens.”
Not literally. But where Zoë first ignored the teacher’s attempts at signing — Levert uses a method known as “tactile sign,” performed directly into the hand so the person can feel the movement — she now reaches out to see what Levert might be trying to communicate.
Looking for Anne Sullivan
For Zoë, success comes in small steps.
She and her sisters, Emma and Sophie Dunn, were born more than three months early. The girls were discovered to be blind shortly afterward and were profoundly deaf by the time they were 2, complications of the premature birth that left them the only known deafblind triplets in the world.
It is a rare condition — just 45,000 people in the United States are both deaf and blind — but for the triplets’ mother and stepfather, Liz and George Hooker, and their older sister, Sarah Dunn, this dark and silent world is simply a fact of life.
(The girls also spend time with their father, Francis Dunn, who is divorced from their mother. Dunn did not respond to a telephone call for this story.)
Emma and Zoë are totally blind, but Sophie has limited vision and can see about 4 feet with her glasses. All three girls have had cochlear implants, electronic devices that can provide sound to the profoundly deaf.
Sophie’s vision helps her to identify where sounds originate, allowing her to hear and understand language through the implant, and she can communicate through a mix of sign language and speech.
Emma and Zoë appear able to hear sound through the implants but for now, at least, can’t process it as anything more than background noise.
Texas has 733 school-age children who are both deaf and blind, according to Cyral Miller, coordinator of the Texas Deafblind Project. Unlike the Dunn triplets, most had other physical or cognitive disabilities as well.
These children are eligible for special-education services from birth, including programs like one for deaf children that the Dunn triplets attended at Hancock Elementary School in the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District. But although the state offers teacher certification in both visual impairment and auditory impairment, there is no certification in deafblindness and Miller said the disability is so rare that few teachers have experience with it.
Liz Hooker, 32, wanted more.
Raised on stories of teacher Anne Sullivan’s work with Helen Keller, Hooker thought that is how all deafblind children are educated.
It is not.
“I always assumed we’d get a teacher like Helen Keller had,” she said. “The Miracle Worker was my favorite movie when I was a kid.”
The Hookers, who had a video production company, formed the Deafblind Children’s Fund to raise awareness and money to hire specially trained teachers known as intervenors for their children and others.
Liz Hooker continues to run the video company while her husband devotes his time to the fund. A golf tournament last fall raised $50,000, according to George Hooker, enough to cover one year’s salary for an intervenor.
They just had to find one.
Taking the crusade public
The teaching style the Hookers envisioned turned out to be more common in other countries than in the United States.
Texas schools have no job classification for intervenors, Miller said, although some districts use the term, with training varying widely.
Eventually the Hookers discovered George Brown College in Toronto and the 27-year-old Levert, who graduated from the school.
They thought all three girls needed a teacher like Levert, but Emma and Zoë most of all. “If you had three people drowning, who would you save first?” Liz Hooker asked. “The one who can kind of swim, or the two who can’t swim at all?”
Emma, at least, seemed happy. Zoë was often frustrated, and she was also the least independent of the triplets.
Levert was asked to work with Zoë, while Emma and Sophie remained at Hancock Elementary.
By the time Levert arrived from Canada, the Hookers had embarked upon another project to draw attention to their cause.
Houston-based filmmakers Cory Hudson and James Paul met the couple last summer and were intrigued by the triplets’ story. Their film, Through Your Eyes, is almost complete, and Paul said all profits will go to either the Deafblind Children’s Fund or to a trust for the triplets.
The filmmakers also pitched the story to the Dr. Phil show; an episode aired last spring focused on the strain three disabled children placed upon the Hookers’ marriage.
Humiliating, Liz Hooker decreed.
Worth it, said George Hooker, 35, as donations rolled in from viewers and from a foundation controlled by Phil McGraw, the psychologist who hosts the daytime talk show.
The Hookers say they don’t yet know how much money the fund will receive through the show, but they have extended Levert’s contract for a second year and hope to hire two additional teachers: one to work with Emma and a second to work with a child who will be chosen from applications submitted to the fund.
Teaching, with endless patience
Some mornings Zoë jumps out of the bathtub and dresses herself without complaint. Other mornings, everything is a struggle, punctuated with discordant moans and dramatic flopping on the floor.
Either way, Levert is unflappable.
She had worked with several deafblind people since graduating from college, including a young girl and a middle-aged woman. But the girl had limited vision and hearing, making it easier to communicate, and the older woman had more life experiences.
With Zoë, everything was new.
She already knew a few signs to indicate her needs: Drink. Eat. More. But Levert thought she seemed unconcerned about what other people might have to say to her.
“She is so used to it being about her,” Levert said. “Her language is what she’s been shown, which is food and drink. The only time I see her communicate with her sisters is when one gets in her space and she goes, ‘Whack.’ ”
Sophie, able to see and understand language, is far more independent than Emma and Zoë, viewing herself more as a surrogate mother or older sister.
“Are the babies going to the park?” she asked one afternoon as they set out.
The triplets were evaluated in May at Boston’s Perkins School for the Blind, providing inspiration for Levert, as well as confirmation that their IQs are normal.
Levert’s primary tool — boundless patience — remains unchanged, as does her philosophy that Zoë should participate in everything from making a grilled cheese sandwich to washing the dishes and sweeping the floor.
But she also has begun using traditional preschool toys to help Zoë recognize shapes and build manual dexterity, important for learning to read and write Braille.
Now, after getting dressed, Zoë moves across the floor of a bedroom converted into a “learning room,” furnished with a child-size table and chairs, a small rocking chair and some classroom tools. Hands in front of her, she slides onto the rocking chair, ready for the first lesson.
Levert helps Zoë flick on a radio, allowing her to rock as an Avril Lavigne song drifts from the speaker. Levert snaps off the radio, and Zoë stops rocking.
Zoë points to her ear — the sign for “listen” — to indicate she wants to resume.
This lesson, teaching Zoë to signal when she hears something through the cochlear implant, is a precursor to decoding sound and, someday, perhaps understanding when other people talk. That’s also why Levert and the Hookers speak out loud in addition to using sign language to communicate.
Next Levert hands Zoë a card.
Work is written in raised letters, in both the English alphabet and in Braille.
At the table Zoë sorts blocks and rings into two boxes, good practice for recognizing shapes.
“Finished,” she and Levert sign when the task is accomplished, brushing their hands together.
Simple tasks can build dexterity, but another goal is just as important.
“She doesn’t have the ability to mimic other kids. ‘Oh cool. I want to do that,’ ” Levert said.
Zoë is learning to play.
One sign at a time
For Zoë, trapped for so long in her insular world, almost anything can be a form of learning.
Even kicking off her shoes as she walks across a parking lot.
It’s not just contrariness. “I think she’s using her feet to feel things,” Levert says as they move slowly from the car into The Woodlands United Methodist Church.
The church offers a play room for children with disabilities, equipped with giant balls, an inflatable boat, a rocking chair, swings and other toys, and it is a favorite destination for Zoë and Levert.
Zoë heads immediately for a carpet-covered rocking horse, an indication that she remembers previous visits.
“Swing,” she signs, moving her hands in a swinging motion.
Zoë loves movement — a rocking chair, jumping on the trampoline, swinging in her family’s backyard — and she smiles as she drapes herself over the horse.
Levert, however, is working.
“Gallop,” she says aloud as she moves Zoë’s hands to mimic the motion.
“Swing,” Zoë signs back.
Levert is undeterred.
“Gallop,” she repeats, again moving Zoë’s hands in an attempt to expand her vocabulary. “Gallop.”
Zoë ignores her, leaning across the horse’s neck and cawing softly as she rocks for a few more minutes.
And then she extends her hands to offer a sign.
“Gallop.”
Link: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/features/4946594.html
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