During the evening of Thursday, September 18th, I attended the “No Ordinary Hero: The Superdeafy Movie” showing. It was located at the Elstad Auditorium at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC. My friends Sam and Brittany accompanied me as we made the trip to DC. When we arrived at Gallaudet University, we had a tough time finding the main entrance, so we drove around the whole university until we finally found it. At the gate there was an officer who directed us to the auditorium and where we were supposed to park. The Elstad Auditorium was the very first building we saw when we made a right turn after the main entrance.
We drove past it and made another right turn into the parking lot. We kept driving down until we reached the underground parking, parked the car and then walked towards the auditorium. When we arrived at the auditorium, we had to communicate in American Sign Language as we handed in our tickets to the people sitting down on the tables and were directed into the auditorium. The auditorium was not very big, but there was a lower and upper level to sit, so we chose the seats in the lower level. We then sat down and patiently waited for the movie to begin.
At around 7:20 PM, the movie finally started playing. It started by introducing the main character, Jacob, who was a deaf student in an elementary school, struggling with being in a regular class. His hearing aid was not working and he could not hear anything the teacher was saying as the class was going on. At the end of the day while he walked home from school, one of the other boys pushed him made fun of him being deaf. However, Jacob didn’t say anything back, he just picked up his books from the floor, noticed the bruise on his knee from the fall and continued to walk home.
When he arrived home, his mother, Emily, used ASL to communicate with him to ask how his day was and what happened to his knee. Later on, after Jacob’s father, Patrick, arrived home, they all sat down at the table and started to eat dinner. In the middle of the dinner, Patrick noticed that Jacob wasn’t wearing his hearing aid and got mad. He started yelling at Jacob and Emily tried to tell him that Jacob couldn’t understand him. Patrick had no way of communicating to his son because he didn’t know how to sign in ASL.
Jacob was very frustrated because he couldn’t hear what his father was saying and tried to ask his mother but she didn’t respond. He then stormed off the table and went to bed while his father and mother argued. The problem was Patrick wanted Jacob to be “normal” and forced him to use his hearing aid instead of signing and communicating in ASL. On the other hand, Emily wanted her son to use ASL because she knew he could do anything in the world he wanted to do. She knew using ASL was the best thing for her son and that it would help him develop better than forcing him to use a hearing aid.
Jacob looked forward to watching the show “SuperDeafy” everyday after school in order to be able to make his day better and make him laugh. However, SuperDeafy decided to quit being a funny character on TV that children would watch and laugh at and decided to run for mayor and be an actual hero. He wanted to actually change the world because he knew deaf children needed someone to look up and show them they can achieve anything they set their mind to. SuperDeafy met Jacob’s teacher Jenny and fell in love with her.
She helped him with his campaign and gave him the motivation to keep trying. When SuperDeafy met Jacob, he told him that there was no such thing as “normal” because everyone has their unique talents and things they are specifically good at. By the end of the movie, Patrick even supported ASL. He signed the paper to put Jacob in the deaf/hard of hearing class, hired an ASL tutor to teach him and even attended deaf events with his son. I extremely enjoyed watching this movie and am glad I drove to Gallaudet because I learned very important lessons that I will use in my life!
