You pretty much described the State of New York gummit. Plus, there's lots of it. We once got a stock reminder card in the mail for some form we needed to fill out, and every other word was manually underlined and some were even double-underlined. Some bureaucrat took the time to helpfully add all those underlines. Our tax dollars at work!

Thanks to my scandalous doppleganger Alycia Lane (and Google's "helpful" spelling corrections), Google Alerts on my name are next to useless and I just now noticed this post. Thanks for the chuckle, Allison! :) I agree with you that the kid being on facebook during class is a travesty. He's not getting paid though and he's not the adult. If the teacher had not responded DURING CLASS then #1 would not have jumped out at me. I just had to comment on that! :)

MM: What about drum songs - like the Gallaudet Bison song? Definitely written by deaf people. Also have you seen performances by the Rathskellar group with Jonathan Kovacs? They do some pretty amazing, solidly deaf-centric renditions of songs. Allison: I agree that obliterating the song's imagery is not a good thing to do. I however don't think this is "getting lost in the ASL" - it's doing the ASL poorly. ASL does have ways to richly convey inferential information and can do puns, rhyme, wordplay, etc. without using English as a crutch. If someone takes some beautiful English imagery and presents it straightforwardly without an equivalent device in ASL, they're doing it wrong. Same as any other language ... you can do a "literal" (and usually boring/unnatural) translation, or you can do a "free" translation where you break away from the original form/syntax and use the fullness of the 2nd language to create an equally rich and more natural approximation. There's a great article by Roberto Santiago on translating poetic discourse from ASL into English. Opposite direction, I know, but generally the same principles apply.

Okay, 1) what is the TEACHER doing on Facebook during her class, and 2) what's with all the grammatical errors in her comment (good thing she's a math teacher, I guess?) and 3) the reference to math test scores - hello, data privacy laws?