Justin C. – In-Depth blog post #2 – ASL (American Sign Language)
January 28th, 2020
Hello reader, thanks for tuning in to episode two of my In-Depth career.
Things I will go over in this blog post;
- Obstacles and how I overcame them
- Introduction of my mentor
- Progress Report
- How to have a beautiful mind chapters 1-3
Obstacles and how I overcame them:
The main and most relevant obstacle I faced was finding a mentor. In the beginning of In-Depth, I thought that finding a mentor would be an easy task and I was very much mistaken. I started by emailing around 5 different candidates from professional ASL interpreters to college professors at Douglas College. After a week and a half of patiently waiting I had no responses and the due date for finding a mentor was quickly approaching. My classmate Lucas mentioned to me that he saw on tv that Dr. Bonnie Henry had an ASL interpreter with her as she talked about COVID-19 cases, regulations and protocols. I told Lucas “Do you really think that he would be able to mentor me with all that’s going on in his schedule?” I then thought “What’s the worst that could happen? Him saying no?” I proceeded to look him up and find his contact information. I emailed him without much hope.
Introduction of my mentor:
Nigel Howard is an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter and has been the man tasked with conveying the sometimes complicated details around new cases and the growing public health threat posed by COVID-19 through ASL to the deaf community locally and across the country. He has been a professional interpreter for more than two decades, including 24 years as an instructor at Douglas College’s program of sign language interpretation. Howard also works in the linguistics departments at both the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia. One of his specialties is interpreting in medical settings. Nigel Howard is deaf and knows 7 different Sign Languages including Japanese, American, British, Australian, Portugues, German, and Russian which makes this a very unique experience. I am very excited that I am able to work with him and very grateful.
Progress Report:
Things I have learned to sign;
- Cool, Awesome, Neat, Fine, Good, Tried
- How are you?
- Busy
- My Name is J-U-S-T-I-N
- Your name what? (What is your name)
- Nice to meet you
- How are you
- Little bit tired
- The Alphabet (semi memorized)
- Numbers 0-10
- Teach, Teacher, Teaching, What are you teaching?
- Learn, Learning, Learner, What are you learning?
- Student
- Mom, Mother, Grand Mother
- Right, Wrong
- Good/Lousy/Bad Day
- Me Too
- Covid
Other Things I have learned;
- Use your dominant hand (the hand that you use for writing)
- ASL uses facial grammar to convey meanings, emotion (affect, tone, nuances) and also shows the size, distance, etc.
- Different hand sizes/motions are the same as emphasizing words.
- ER represents a person
- There are about (estimated) 300 signed languages around the world
How to have a beautiful mind chapters 1-3
How did my mentor and I Agree, Disagree, and Differ:
Through-out the duration of our zoom meeting we had agreed, disagreed, and differed. It was hard to communicate as my mentor Nigel Howard is deaf.
- When we were planning when to have our meetings one thing that we agreed on was that we would meet bi-weekly over zoom, and preferably a day from Thursday-Sunday.
- Sometimes when I tried to sign something new and did it wrong, he disagreed with what I was doing and corrected me to do it properly.
- One thing that differed between us was our ability to express ourselves using facial expressions and movement while signing. Nigel Howard is known for being very animated during his interpretations