In-Depth blog post #4
This week for me, has been off to a great start. I think that the pace that I am learning ASL at, is enough for me to reach my goal, depending on how consistent we will be with our signs. When we met this week, we were missing a group member, because she was away taking a covid test. I thought that it would impact the number of subjects we would talk about, but it ended up great, and the meeting actually lasted over an hour because of all the practicing and discussing we were doing.
We mainly practiced, meaning for 50 minutes, we were practicing signs and asking questions. The reason why I think we spent so much time on this is because half an hour before the meeting, because of a slight lack of communication, we realized that we were also supposed to cover the time/calendar section. For context, our mentor wrote down a lot of different signs for us to practice, and out of those, we were supposed to choose a category to practice. I originally thought that we were supposed to practice all of them, but soon I realized we were just going to practice 1 category a week. To make sure this miscommunication does not happen again, I made to ask a lot of questions for what to do and we spent a lot of time going over and following our mentor do the time/calendar signs. Surprisingly, no questions came up during this time, probably because it is just practicing and the only questions we could have really asked were to repeat or show the sign again.
We also spent a good chunk of our meeting having our voice off. Our mentor showed us the sign for voice off, which I will not be demonstrating, for a purpose of remaining respectful to the Deaf community, which I will explain more about soon. During our voice off section of our meeting, I think that it was really great. I found it to be super helpful, a lot more fun, engaging, and felt like maybe what I would learn if I had a mentor who was Deaf. To be more specific, our mentor suggested that we during our voice off time, she would sign us the signs we learned, and we would fingerspell it, and vice versa. The reason why I thought this was such a good way of learning is because of the way we were fingerspelling. Normally, just practicing by saying signs would lead to no fingerspelling practice. Usually, this wouldn’t really matter, because when you’re more experienced, you end up not really fingerspelling, but because we are beginners, we probably will end up fingerspelling a lot during voice off time by asking how to sign certain signs by fingerspelling that sign you want to learn. Near the end, I shared my thoughts with this, asking whether we will consider this to be a voice off time, or if eventually, we will also move to having conversations voice off. Our mentor said that we would transition more into that, but because we don’t really have experience with grammar, we wouldn’t be doing that until later on.
During our time when we were discussing, we basically only talked about what to do in the future. Our mentor, who is a Talons Alumna, talked about her experience for when she did this project. She didn’t choose sign language as her topic, although she shared other ways for us to possibly present this learning. This brought me to my idea in my learning contract, where I said that I would probably try and have a conversation in ASL with my peers. My mentor actually told us that she might be able to get someone who is Deaf to join our last meeting with us and have a conversation with all the signs we learned. This is great for me especially since this is similar to what I was going to do originally, except with a more real experience.
An important question came up regarding our future posts. We are now suggested to include a video of us practicing our signs, which one of my peers mentioned, could be disrespectful to the Deaf community. This is because this video would include us signing and show which signs mean what, which could be used as a video to teach signs, and because the video would also be public, we were wondering if it would be okay. Our mentor, not being Deaf, did not really know, but she said, “I think because it’s a school project, and you need to show your progress, it would be fine”. I think that as an alternative that would still show my progress, I would just include a video of me practicing my signs and not include captions that say what the sign is. I think this would be a lot better in general and because it doesn’t affect the way I’m practicing it is okay.
How to have a beautiful mind
For this week, covering post #4 was a little bit difficult for me. I think with sign language, because it is a non-verbal language, it’s hard to provide supporting quotes, and especially because this week, we didn’t end up talking a lot about questions. The only questions we really were able to cover were about the project, or Deaf culture, which we didn’t create beforehand which meant that our mentor did not have time to prepare for those questions. I asked a question regarding our communication for what we were learning, and in response, my mentor said, “yeah, I think that would be a good idea to establish what categories we want to learn, just so we’re all learning the same thing for the next two weeks”. I think that asking this question is something I should have asked sooner just so that we could’ve moved faster learning signs. We also clarified what part of Deaf culture we would expand upon, and my mentor replied with, “we could learn about history or modern-day culture, but I don’t really know much about history so I would have to prepare that if we do that”. This also cleared up what we would learn. We did not decide this last time which lead to us not learning about Deaf culture at all this week. We talked also about learning more numbers because we only learned up to 20, and one of my peers asked if it followed the same pattern for double digit numbers or if it was something else, and she replied, “it’s sort of similar except for repeating numbers like 22 you would do it differently like this”. Keeping this answer in mind, I now am able to learn numbers easier because I already know that similar pattern. Other than that, I would say that there were no other questions that covered this part of how to have a beautiful mind. It was unfortunate that we all didn’t really have much time to explore this part of the chapter but moving forward I want to make sure to prepare more questions as I am practicing, as that may give me more ideas.
Here is a video of some of the signs that I have learned over the past weeks. (click word “video”)