In-Depth Post #3
What did we do?
I have so far met with my mentor twice. Once by myself, and for the second time, with more than one person. In fact, with three others! To be honest, I, myself only, did not really learn or gain anything from this second meeting. We mainly just talked about questions we had about how to be respectful and origins of Deaf culture. I reviewed signs that I learned from the last meeting with my group as well. We mainly spent the rest of the time asking questions. One comment that I found to be crucial to my learning was from my mentor saying “I can’t teach you signs in these meetings”. I think that this will definitely make things harder for me to progress, but I also see this as a positive. We also decided to incorporate a time for a no talking time so that it would be more like a proper meeting. We wanted to incorporate this over time and not right away because doing that would probably be very difficult for us to do because of our lack of knowledge and signs.
Overall, during the second meeting, I did not learn as much as I would hope, although moving forward, I hope we have more chances for us to improve our learning and improve our communication as a group.
What challenges did we face? What I will do to resolve these challenges
I feel as though our group faced a few challenges during the meeting from this week. Fortunately, I think most of the problems I faced will not be hard to solve and will gradually and quickly resolve itself. I faced a big change in my learning that I think resulted to some of these challenges. Although I did suggest this change, to be honest, I did it because I did not realize that my mentor was meeting with these people separately and wanted to make it easier, for hopefully all of us. The first problem we faced was catching up. I mentioned that I did not really learn much this meeting. This was because this was the first time that other members of my group have met up with my mentor. The list of signs that were expected to be memorized was sent to all members even before the first meeting, although most had not even looked at it before this second meeting. I think now that all of us has met and our standards are now clear, we will all be on the same page moving forward. Another challenge that came up during the meeting as that our mentor said that she could not teach us signs during the meeting. This was news that I learned during this meeting and not the previous, which I found a little strange. I think that because it started to feel like teaching a class because of the large amount of mentees, she started to think of this as a teaching session rather than a mentor session. She did not directly say that it was this reason, but I remember her mentioning to me during our last meeting that she could not “seriously teach me signs”, but enough so that I would get a good understanding of ASL. Another challenge we face was participation and communication. We had troubles working together because of the lack of communication. One member barely talked, and one stayed muted during almost the entire meeting. I understand that they might have been shy, although I found it a little frustrating that the only ones talking were me and one other. We also ended up volunteering the most when we were asked to demonstrate how to sign what we learned. In order to solve this problem, I think that I will try harder encourage them and ask them to demonstrate.
Working with a group
Working with a group also was a positive. It gave us more opportunities. Near the end, I mentioned when we should meet again, and what time, and we decided together to meet the week after the following week at the same time and date. During this discussion, one group member said, “I thought that we were going to meet every 3-4 weeks” in which the mentor replied, “yeah, but that was when I had others to teach as well, now everyone is together so 2 weeks should be fine.” This also benefitted me because that way, she didn’t have to focus on many different meetings and instead could teach us all at the same time, meaning what we learned all stayed consistent. Another positive was that it was a better learning experience. I did say I was frustrated about this meeting, but I think as we progress, it will generally become easier because of the interactions we will have. My mentor even said, “yeah, it would be easier for you guys because you guys have a chance to sign with each other.” She even said that “you guys could maybe even set up one lunch break every week for only signing”. I found this to be a great idea and I think my group members did as well. We haven’t managed to decide, but I’m hoping we will be able to do this soon.
Resources and what to do next to learn ASL
I did not really mention resources that I received from my mentor last post, so I will talk about it more this time. My mentor was kind enough to create a google document that should be in use until the end of this “project” which is very helpful in keeping track of progress and trying to learn. As an alternative to not being able to directly teach ASL, we all opted to learn signs ourselves and meet and discuss and practice with each other using the google document. We also decided that if we had anything, we wanted to learn that was not on the document that we would put it on the document so that no would was behind. In the document, my mentor has listed a lot of different signs that we should learn. She even asked us what we wanted to learn and put it down along with ASL dictionaries and videos. Compared to last week, we have a lot more, and to be exact, 52 signs to learn. Honestly, I found this to be a bit overwhelming, but hopefully, my small previous experience with sign language will help me remember these signs. I don’t really think that anyone will add any more signs to this either. I want to spend more time and consistently practice ASL. I haven’t been spending as much time practicing as I had hoped, and now that I have a lot to learn, hopefully I will be motivated to spend a lot more time practicing.
How to Have a Beautiful Mind
How to listen and generate interactions
During this meeting, a sort of applied part of chapter three as well as four because they can be quite similar. I tried to be as interesting as possible by asking certain questions that would lead to a wider or more interesting conversation. I think that we all, as a group find ASL interesting so talking about anything to do with it is already interesting itself. Having the meeting be a little hectic helped me use these objectives. We spent a lot of time asking questions and talking so I had a lot of opportunities to use these objectives. We all did a combination of listening and talking. I think even though whenever I talked didn’t help my other group members have a chance to speak, I think that I did listen almost as much as I spoke which I view as progression. I did come across times where I did interrupt by accident because whenever I thought that the speaker was finished speaking, I immediately wanted to share my ideas. I have also asked for clarification as mentioned earlier, a couple times, not only to when my mentor was teaching, but also just discussing. For the questions that I asked, I actually planned them out prior to the meeting because I remembered the last time I met with my mentor, it felt a little unprepared.