Connecting with Supernatural 12x11: Regarding Dean

Watching Season 12 of Supernatural on Netflix these days, and episode 11, “Regarding Dean” comes up. Just what Sam was doing for Dean to help his memory, made me think of my own childhood. There’s Sam, writing names to objects of their hotel room onto post-it notes and sticking them onto the actual objects. My mom did this when I was a kid, as a way to help me learn the name of the different objects. Being a deaf kid, I didn’t always hear the words, and it was while I was also learning how to read too. Being able to read these words on notecards taped to different objects helped me. It helped with my reading, and it helped me learn how to identify different things. I learned how to make the connection between different words to objects.

It’s funny how something in a TV show or movie will bring back memories.



Dean: This is a gun. This is a coat. This is a…a…a… light stick.


Sam: A light st– All right. We’re gonna get you some help.


Dean: Look, we could figure this out, okay? Don’t go callin’ Mom or Cass with this.


Sam: Fine, but until you get better…(Sam puts post-it note on the lamp with the word “LAMP”)


Dean: Lamp. Right. So close.





















There was also a scene where Dean is watching a security surveillance video from when he followed someone out of the back of a bar, and he was trying to read his own lips. This made me laugh

Dean: I’m trying to read my lips. “Now salsa you mittens”

Sam: You can’t read lips.

Dean: I can’t read lips.

This is true for many D/deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. A lot of hearing people seem to think just because we're deaf/hoh, we can very easily lip-read everything. Not true. And I'm proof of that. I'm a horrible lip-reader, can't lip-read to save my life really. I can only read lips if I also have the auditory input. Take one or the other away, and I'm lost.
My teachers at the deaf school worked hard with all of us, teaching us how to lip-read and listen, trying to give us as many tools as we could carry in our toolbox for life. They wrote sentences and words on pieces of paper, laid them out on the table/desk/floor/wherever we are sitting, and they will say the sentence/words and hope we pick out the right piece of paper. For listening, they would cover their mouths; for lipreading, they turned off their voices. We had a lot of practice as kids, but lipreading just didn't stick with me. Now as an adult, even with bilateral cochlear implants, I still need a combination of tools to make sense of what is going on around me.



SPN quotes and graphic came from ScatteredQuotes.com.