Thu. Mar 28th, 2024
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AMBER MORRIS/FOR THE EXPRESS
ASL Instructor Bob Probst teaches a class at the Sugar Valley Rural Charter School as part of the school’s Community Engagement Program.

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LOGANTON — September was Deaf Awareness Month, and although it reached its end, the mission of the month lives on — to bring awareness to the reality that not everyone communicates the same. Yet communication is more important to human beings than almost anything else.

Inspirational speaker, Toby Robbins perhaps said it best: “Communication is power. Those who have mastered its effective use can change their own experience of the world and the world’s experience of them. All behavior and feelings find their original roots in some form of communication.”

The majority of us communicate freely every day by using our hearing and then our voices. Or perhaps it’s our voices then our hearing.

We don’t even need to stop and think about it. We speak, and then we hear, and then we process and answer. We don’t even have to look at the person talking to us.

However, it’s not like that for all. There are millions of Americans with some sort of hearing loss, ranging from slight difficulties to total quiet.

For those who experience total hearing loss, communication can be an issue, because while most people who are deaf know sign language, not many in the hearing community have reciprocated.

Here in Clinton County, this is where Bob Probst comes in. He was born deaf to hearing parents, who had the foresight to seek out a way to communicate with their son.

“My parents, Thomas and Dana Probst, were told about a person named Bea Hyde who could sign,” Bob said. “They contacted her, and she taught us all ASL, or American Sign Language.”

According to the World Health Organization, there are four levels of hearing loss — mild, moderate, severe and profound.

“I am considered profoundly deaf,” he explained.

The CDC defines someone with profound hearing loss as “a person who will not hear any speech and only very loud sounds.”

Statistics concerning the various degrees of hearing loss vary across studies, but licensed hearing instrument specialist, Jeffrey L. Bayliff of Hear the Birds Hearing Aid Center on Grove Street in Lock Haven, says that, “17 million Americans have profound hearing loss, and 30 million others experience some other form of hearing loss.”

These numbers are projected to substantially increase over the next 40 years. Yet the gap between Deaf Cultures and hearing is still wide, and because of this, Bob would like to build a bridge between the two that anyone can walk.

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Source: https://www.lockhaven.com/news/local-news/2022/10/bob-probst-brings-a-lifelong-love-for-teaching-sign-language-to-loganton/