In-Depth Blog Post #3
Justin C.
February 11th, 2021
Hello reader, thanks for tuning in to episode three of my In-Depth career!
Things I will go over in this blog post;
- Obstacles and how I overcame them / What did I learn in week 3 and 4 of in-depth?
- Recap of my Mentor
- How to have a beautiful mind
Obstacles and how I overcame them / What did I learn in week 3 and 4 of in-depth?
I didn’t have many obstacles but the main one was finding a time and a way to practice. I came up with a few strategies that I can use to help me practice and maintain my skills in ASL while improving my ability.
- Recording my meetings
- Rewatching them and practicing along
- Practicing in front of a mirror
- Teaching what I learn to my family “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” -Albert Einstein
I found that if I record my meeting it can help me to go back and remember what I had gone over in my meetings.in my 2nd meeting I found that it was very important that I had recorded my meeting as there were many visual graphics that would help me practice. My Mentor had a powerpoint prepared as he also teaches ASL courses at UBC. It included a variety of activities that I could use to enhance my visual, mental, and physical skills. I can use this in the future on days I don’t have meeting to practice and get more fluid and fluent in ASL
One of the first activities that we did was a letter transitioning warmup to get my hands moving and my signing more fluid.It had a series of pair of letters that I would go through and try and do it as fast and accurate as possible.
New signs I learned during my meeting this past week.
- School Subjects; Math, Photography, Leadership
- Letters, Numbers, Shapes
- Shapes; Circle, Square, Diamond, Triangle, Heart, and Moon/Cresent shape
- Bless you (My Mentor sneezed during our online zoom meeting so I quickly learned how to say it)
- The two ways to say Zoom
- Where is mine?
- Water
- Letter (Mailing)
- See you later
Other things I learned this week
“In ASL we have different levels of intensity, you can use your face combined with your hand gestures to show meaning. In English you would speak louder or change your tone instead.”
Recap 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.
Process and Timeline
So far I am very far ahead of my timeline and have impressed myself and my Mentor with the amount of things I have learned and how fast I was able to do so. A bit of dedication will take you a long way. I have Learnt the Alphabet and have it 80% memorized, know a decent amount of grammar and basic communative sentences aswell as some random words that I threw in.
| Plan: An outline of methods, activities, strategies, people and resources you can use to meet your challenge | Timetable: The specific dates or times when you will accomplish the steps in your plan |
| Research for someone who could be my mentor, telling them about what I am doing | 1st week |
| Choose a mentor out of the people above^ | 1st week |
| Email them again asking for them to be my mentor (including everything I would be asking from them) | 1st week |
| Schedule to meet with my mentor and have an introduction | 2nd week |
| Meet with my mentor for the first time (possibly with my peers also doing ASL) | 2nd or 3rd week |
| Learn the Basics | 3rd to 7th week |
| Continue to have meetings | Every two weeks or so throughout the remainder of In-depth |
| Begin learning the alphabet | 8th week to 10th week |
| Learn some basic grammar | 10th week |
| Communicate with my peers also doing ASL, and check in with their progress, practice together. | Throughout January to the end of In-Depth |
| Eventually be able to communicate via spelling slowly or using words I learn | I hope to be able to do this as soon as possible |
| Do the finishing Blog post/conclusion | May |
How to have a beautiful mind
Edward De Bono (The Author of “How to have a Beautiful Mind”) continues his discussion of how to have a beautiful mind with the prompts “how to be interesting” and “how to respond.”
How to be interesting and Respond
During my meetings with my Mentor I have learned that In American Sign Language, facial expressions are an important part of communication. The facial expressions you use while doing a sign will affect the meaning of that sign. For example, if you sign the word “quiet,” and add an exaggerated or intense facial expression, you are telling your audience to be “very quiet.” This principle also works when making “interesting” into “very interesting,” or “funny” into “very funny.” Facial expressions are an example of a set of behaviors called “non-manual markers.” Non-manual markers include facial expressions, head tilt, head nod, head shake, shoulder raising, mouth morphemes, and other non-signed signals that influence the meaning of your signs. Using this principle it can allow singing to become more interesting and not as basic as some might think. I responded in a variety of ways that the book had mentioned such as asking for clarity in ways such as “I’m not exactly sure what you said, could you please repeat it for clarification?”
If you read this far, Thank you for reading and stay tuned for more In-Depth posts to come!
-Justin C