deafdyke,
You're missing my point. I am not saying let's strive for perfection. I am not perfect myself, but all that helped me to focus on English to be able to go to go to college, write my papers without assistance besides editing.
I agree with Tousi. If it creates confusing and not the best literacy for English, then we have a problem. I think all deaf children should learn to do the best they can writing English like everyone, so that they do not have restrictions where to work--be an author, work with an insurance company, be a scientist to write reports, etc. I was almost going to be working in a lab (that requires written reports), be psychologist, etc. Their dreams should be limitless. If a deaf child with really poor English wants to do that--that would just be a dream for them. You could be a lab assistant washing the the equipments if you're lucky to find that.
Many of the people that writes well are those who used SEE, oralism, those who learned ASL later, etc. I am not seeing anyone whose primary use of ASL writes well. sthiessen is one of the late ASL learner who is sad that it is not used. My question is, would he have done okay writing what he is doing now? The way that I see it, you need to understand the English concept until you're old enough to understand that ASL is another concept. It's all in the brain stimulus. It's complex. I believe in starting out with SEE. Why do we have so much problem with ASL and English deaf schools literacy? I see theories, but none of that is reaching the schools already. It's only an experimentation, which seems that there hasn't been a true proven method still having ASL in their classrooms. All I see is that they don't want to let ASL go and teach it later. They are too afraid to let go of something so proudly used for years. My point is, people learn it later. They chat with friends, interpreters learn it later, and I think that's going to be fine.
