| Summary: | Newsletter of the North Dakota School for the Deaf. THE NORTH DAKOTA BANNER GLite ^xxxih J&mxiitx. D. F. BANGS T. SHERIDAN Editors. Published every other Saturday during the School term at the School for the Deaf at Devils Lake, with the following objects in view: 1. As a means of teaching language to the pupils in connection with the printer’s trade, 2. To keep parents or guardians of pupils, posted as to the doings of their children here. 3. To make the public better acquainted with the deaf, and the School in particular. Contributions of interest are solicited. They must be accompanied by the name and address of the writer as a guarantee of good faith, but not necessarily for publication. Address all subscriptions and communications, to THE BANNER Devils Lake, N. D. Entered at. the post-office as second-class matter. Saturday, March 26, 1910. The Arkansas School will close on May 1st on account of insufficient funds. Consider ins: the fact that the School has keen open since September, it is thankful for small favors. An item in one of the State papers under the heading: “Twenty Years Ago” calls attention to the fact that the Legislature at Bismarck passed the bill creating the School for the Deaf at Devils Lake. The Ohio School received a severe shock March 5 when it was Warned that one of the boys, fourteen years of age, fell from a window on the* fourth floor, sustaining internal injuries which caused his death three hours later. A couple of months ago when we were in the clutches of a little Arctic breeze, we would think of our Southern friends and envy their luck. But since then a great change in atmospheric conditions has taken place. Last Wednesday it was 81 degrees in the shade right here in Devils Lake. Are we to conclude from this that our friends in the Sunny South especially Bro. Tracy are just now trying to keep cool in a tub of ice with the mercury above blood heat'( >s • ' » • ". Mr. Veditz must be a very busy man these days, contributing considerable material to the newspapers in the interest of the N. A. D.' and otherwise, at the same time bestowing fatherly care upon 600 newly hatched chicks, and a lot more in the incubator. The appropriation of £5,000 asked of Congress for the “World's Congress of the Deaf” to be held at Colorado Springs is still warm and safe in the shell, but Mr. Veditz is not in the habit of counting his chickens before they are hatched. An item in the press warns us against handling $1 bills, that microscopic examination reveals the presence of 92,- 000,000 germs of a great variety on the bill. We have a receptacle for such bills should they be rejected by our readers and sent to our sanctum. A teacher of the deaf who is able to accumulate as many as 18,400.000,000 germs a month has no kick coming in regaid to salary, and there arc some of us who would be thankful for a few more germs provided 92.000,000 of the bacteria go with each dollar bill. We are in receipt of the Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Pennsylvanian Institution for the Deaf and Dumb for the year 1908-1909. Superintendent Crouter has a large family of 768 souls (pupils, teachers, instructors, officers, and employees) to look after. It Lakes $160,694.53. a year to run the School, “including expenditures of every character—tuition, board, clothing, heat, light, ordinary repairs, salaries and wages.” In the baking department 7,270 dozen biscuits and 125,674 pounds of bread were baked for the family table in one school year—from good North Dakota Hour, no doubt. Provision has been made for the education of a little blind-deaf girl at this School. She is like most of the other blind-deaf children we hear of, bright and promising. The Annul* for March contains the address of Superintendent C. E. White of the Kansas School, delivered at the Pifih Semi-Annual Conference of Superintendents of State Institutions of Kansas held at Topeka, February 9, 1910, on “the Future of the Education of the Deaf.” Much of the address is devoted to the feeble-minded deaf who are refused admittance to some of the Schools for the Deaf, and have no place in a School for the Feeble-Minded. Supt. White strongly urges the establishment of a special school for these unfortunate children, and in conclusion says: “There ought to be a suitable place for them and I would like to urgo the importance of doing something for them and doing it at the first opportunity. Here is a chance where our State mav take the imitative in the solution of this important question.” Mr. J. Schuyler Long's “The. Sign language—A Manual of Signs,” the first installment appnring in Ncm»rnber 1909, is concluded in this number. The signs as used by the deaf are not exactly alike all over the.country, but one is easily understood hy another although they come from widely separated localities. Mr. Long is a clear and forceful sign maker himself and considering the source from which he absorbed his knowledge of signs, he is considered good authority on the sign language, We understand that Rev. Philip J. Ilastenab. of Chicago, another master of the.sign language had given his “stamp of approval" before the manuscript was sent to the A finals for publication. Mr. Long has done a good piece of work to aid in preserving the beauty of the sign language, as such a manual is likely to accomplish if given a wide berth. Another interesting article is “School Farming: As a Craft and as a Discipline,' 1 by Weston Jenkins, instructor in the Alabama School. The pupils in Mr. Jenkins’ class took up the study of farming and worked it out on a small scale last spring—one and one half acres with good results. The lesson in »re important to them than that of teaching the use of farm tools, was the selection of seed corn and the preparation of the soil: there being two of three patches treated in as many diff erent wavs. The object is to show the pupils that large ami sadsfactorv returns have much t*. do with tin* right selection of seed an l the proper treatment of the, soil. We are father surprised that the editor of the Tennessee Sileut Observer, who is a college graduate. should advocate the general use of the word “Mutes” as a class name for the deaf. Seeing that the schools are more and more coining to be called, both official and otherwise, “school for the deaf,”' and that a number of papers, ours among them, have discarded the word mute from their title, the attitude of the Observer man seems to be of the retrogressive order. One reason he advances is thalt the use of the word ••mute*” instead of “deaf and dumb,” would tend to do away with the use of the word “dummy.” We doubt it, but all the same, we would rather be called a dummy than mute. The word “mute” savors too much of the hired mourners at funerals in bygone days, and of the mutilation practiced by eastern despots in order to. surround themselves with slaves who could not. divnlge state—or other—secrets. “The deaf” is the proper and universal term to use in describing the class. They are deaf; they are not mute by accident or disease, but merely from lack of development of the vocal organs. In the attitude we take on this subject, we belieue that weshall, for once, And ourselves in perfect accord with our friends the oralists.—the (mtxn. ) compaction:’
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