In-Depth Blog Post #5
How it is going
This week was about our 10th week of doing this in-depth project. Although I did not have the greatest start to this project, I would say that it is going great. I also had my 4th meeting with my mentor, and as we keep progressing, I am learning more, and also feeling more comfortable participating during the meeting. We’ve been meeting for almost 2 hours bi-weekly instead of 1 which I don’t mind, as I am able to learn more. I am slowly starting to realize how much there is to memorize and do that’s related to sign language. We did a small discussion at the near beginning of our meeting, talking about what we learned over the past two weeks, and about a documentary that we had been requested to watch. We are starting to develop a structured meeting, where we review, have a small discussion, ask questions, practice for as long as we need to, then talk about our next meeting. We’ve started to transition into barely using our voices. During the meeting we talked about having a Deaf person come join us for a meeting, and our mentor said that we should not be using our voices as it is disrespectful, and that we should even start to not use our voices at all. We have decided to use the chat function if necessary, and only use our voices during voice on sessions. I think that the workflow is fine, and everything is mostly going great.
What I learned
These past two weeks have been great. I learned three new categories of signs, which was starting to become a lot, but I managed to do everything I was asked to do. I think that because from the last meeting, how we talked about everything that we should do, I was able to be more prepared than the last time. Over these weeks, I watched a documentary about how it feels like to be someone who is Deaf, called “Through Deaf Eyes”. We actually did not talk much about it, because I had been the only one to watch it, so we brushed through it. I did, however, learn about some Deaf historical events, such as a Deaf actor speaking the winner of an award show instead of signing, and a protest called DPN, Deaf president now. The first event was a very controversial event among the Deaf, because the actor speaking was seen as a betrayal, for making it seem like not speaking was a shameful thing. Deaf people have been able to move past it, although it is still remembered, and some are still resentful towards the actor. The DPN movement was a very historical event, where there had been Deaf candidates who were equally as qualified as the chosen president. When they announced that the Deaf candidates did not win, the Deaf community was tired of being at a disadvantage and created a protest to have a Deaf president. This event was all over the news, and this event eventually caused the current president to resign and have the Deaf candidate take over.
Like I mentioned, I learned a lot of signs over these weeks. I learned many time and calendar signs, people signs, and emotion signs. We also learned a few questions so that during the meeting, we could sign the questions to each other, and respond in sign language. I forgot to mention this last time, but we also learned a little bit about ASL gloss, which is showing what words have to be used in what order to correctly sign a question. As beginners, this is something our mentor has been using a lot. I’m hoping that eventually, we will move on from this, and learn the grammar, so that she does not have to write the gloss. I also learned about sign variations, and a useful tip to tell if the sign is in ASL or signed English. When I was learning a sign, and showing her what I practiced, she noticed that I used a different sign. When I told her, this is the way I learned it, she responded with this, “so I think that’s actually signed English, but I’m not really sure, but usually when the sign uses the handshape of the first letter of the word in English, it’s signed English. So yeah, I would just use this”.
Checking back to the learning contract
Since it has been a while, I thought that I would very briefly go through my learning contract that I made 2 months ago. This is to see how I’m doing in terms of goals. To be honest, I am definitely not even close to my initial goal, of learning 100 signs a month. I think that I was way too ambitious, and since I did not know how my mentor would teach, I assumed that they would teach me a lot. Compared to right now, I would say that I am learning around 50 signs a month, and I think part of that is because of the fact that my mentor isn’t really “allowed” to teach us any signs. I also do not know ASL grammar, so my goal of having a conversation with the signs I learned is almost impossible for me, unless I ignore grammar, in which it wouldn’t be a proper conversation. For the question that I wanted to answer, I am able to answer these:
- How do you learn to understand signs so quick? How do you understand each word signed so fast? Like English, constantly using the same language every day gives you muscle memory and practice which allows you to recognize the signs as fast as you understand the words people say.
According to my mentor, who said this, “yeah, some people who are really fluent in sign language combine the signs so that it’s easier to do the next sign” some fluent ASL speakers do a shorter more convenient sign, which has almost the same movement, but takes a shorter amount of time.
- How does reading lips help with understanding? Why do some deaf people mouth what they say and sign?
This question is not a good question. Reading lips is something not all Deaf people know how to do, and most people who do learned it by force from communities that did not appreciate sign language. We are transitioning to an era where sign language is more diverse, which means that it’s not fully necessary for someone who is I Deaf to know sign language. Moving to the second part of the question, the reason thought that Deaf people knew how to lip read, is because they do not mouth their words, they have certain mouth movements attached to the signs. The second part of this question is incorrect.
One more part that I want to cover is the end of this project. I think that I might barely reach my minimum, meaning that I won’t even reach my minimum acceptance, which also means that I will have to continue to practice on my on and also learn more signs on my own. After working on this project for 2 months, I now realize that a more reasonable level of acceptance should have been my smallest improvement acceptance and my updated smallest acceptance should have been lower than the current one. I am 99% sure that my highest goal that I wanted to reach is impossible unless I spend 2 hours every day trying to memorize 500 signs while having someone who does not have much experience in sign language teach me ASL grammar. I also now, will probably switch my end assessment to recording myself having a conversation with someone who is Deaf, as we will be fortunate enough to have a guest join us, who is Deaf.
Challenges faced
A challenge that I faced is related to zoom. Our group uses zoom, as we think it is the best platform to have our meetings on. There is a chat function which can be very useful, especially since we are starting to use our voices less, and there is an option to go into breakout rooms and record meetings. We recently found out that if you have 3 or more people in a call, it cannot last longer than an hour. I found this out during our last meeting, where it stated that this meeting would be the only exception to the time limit. Thankfully, our mentor had a student version of zoom, which we then were able to use it. However, we came across the fact that since she has the student version, it does not allow access to record meetings which is unfortunate. We came up with the solution to have someone use their phone to record the audio, which worked, but won’t be a permanent solution. It’s an hour and a half of recording to do every meeting, which can take up large amounts of storage. It’s also harder to hear due to quality, and it also doesn’t show our faces. Why it is important for me to see the person speaking is because I actually use visual context to remember where the quote I was going to use was. This no longer works, which means I have to scrub through an hour and a half worth of audio to pull a couple of quotes.
Another minor challenge we are having is our schedule. It’s not much of a problem right now, but I worry that it may soon. One of our group members is attending the meeting later than they should. This is a problem, because you need to visually see the signs to learn it or copy it, and since we can only record audio, it means we have to wait for that person to join. We also started to use another app, called hangouts. This is because one of our group members did not have the same social platform as the rest of us, which meant that they were not able to see the messages. This was an easy challenge to resolve, and I think this was a good example of being inclusive. Lastly, a small challenge I faced was that not all group members have done what they were asked to do, which makes it harder for the people who did, to progress. It can get frustrating when someone does not do what they have been asked to do, because we spend a lot of time, trying to teach them something that they should already know. I don’t think there’s anything I can do about this, as I cannot control how much time they put into something, but hopefully, as we move on, they are able to keep up.
How to have a beautiful mind
In this week’s chapter, it talks about hats. Metaphorically. This chapter made some very good points about acknowledging people’s different perspectives, while also knowing when to join them and try and view their opinion from their perspective. Although, I find that I slightly disagree with this chapter as well. I think the first part is great, although when it talks about different coloured hats, it feels like it’s suggesting that we should start to shape our conversation and ideas into roles, about how everyone should be experiencing wearing all these coloured hat, when in fact, it should be their own personal coloured hat that everyone shares, or even shoes. I don’t think it’s necessary for everyone to feel the same way. For example, with the black hat, it means that the people wearing this is the critical thinker/environmental assessor. I don’t think that everybody needs to be wearing that hat to understand what the black hat wearing person’s argument is. Not everybody has a chance to experience the same feeling as being a critical thinker or understanding what a good idea is and what is not. These hats sometimes represent skill, and I think it assumes that everyone has already built upon this skill, so rather than putting on the same hat, I think a better analogy is to make your own, same coloured hat, representing that you start to understand their perspective and slowly build upon the skill. I understand that the point is to be on the same page and replace arguments with exploration, but I think that sometimes arguments can bring up good points, and I don’t fully disagree with this chapter, although I don’t think it does a great job of showing that even after subjects are explored, one can still have a different opinion, in which can cause an argument.
I think that it’s hard to wear these hats during meetings that don’t have very much auditory thinking or any talking at all. I can, however, find a way to fit these hats onto different parts of our meeting. As I mentioned how our meetings are starting to get more structured, I think each part can be represented with the coloured hats. For the section that has a certain coloured hat, makes it so that it indicates what hat we are wearing. I think the white hat and yellow hat were worn during the beginning discussion, before we started to practice. We also wore the same hats during the end discussion, when we talked about what we were going to do for the next meeting. These hats would be considered the discussion hats as that is when they are primarily used. Along with those two, for the end discussion, we would also include the blue hat, as talking about what to do for the next meeting would fall under organization. For example, we would probably discuss something along the lines of, “do you want to do something similar to this meeting, or something different” and “there are multiple different things we can do to practice”. The red hat would fall under discussions about Deaf history and not sign language, as discussions about sign language usually are not very opinion based. We talked a lot about the bad parts of what the Deaf community has overcome, so I think wearing a red had represents that well. Lastly, the green hat, which has not been worn much. This is because this is not a project that is based on coming up with a creative idea to present your knowledge. I said it has not been worn much, because we still discussed a little bit about what to do for the end project, which requires contribution and creativity. The green hat is worn during the practice weeks as practicing during the weeks is what the expected effort is.