In-Depth blog posts 3 and 4
Xylia
February 24th, 2021
What skill am I learning?
For my In-Depth project this year, I am learning American Sign Language.
How have I progressed since my last post?
I had my second meeting with my mentor a few days ago, and it went great! We got a lot done, and tried some new activities. For example, we had a portion of the meeting where we could only communicate using Sign Language! Our mentor would do a sign, and the rest of us would finger-spell what the sign is. After a while, we switched roles, and our mentor would finger-spell a sign while we do the actual thing! It was a super helpful activity to practice our signs, and a very interesting experience. Once we become more fluent in ASL, we will adapt this activity so we have full conversations during this silent time! I’m excited to try this out.
We also discussed what topics about deaf culture we might want to learn more about and discuss next meeting! We ended up choosing to learn about the history behind it, which I think was a great choice. History can be very interesting to learn about, and will give a lot more structure and meaning to the topics we are learning right now. It also makes sense to start with deaf history before learning about what’s going on these days. It will be very cool to learn about this! I’m already discovering that ASL and deaf culture is a lot more complicated than I originally thought.
As for my learning outside the meetings, I’ve been practicing new signs every week. This week my fellow mentees and I are learning people and emotion-related signs, as well as reviewing the old ones! I think I’ve been doing a pretty good job practicing enough so I can improve on and memorize the signs.
How to have a beautiful mind
As for the book we’re reading, How To Have a Beautiful Mind, it talks about being interesting, responding, asking questions, and much more. I’d like to say I worked hard on all of those during our last meeting, but to be honest I could have done a lot better. It’s hard for me to talk sometimes, especially if I don’t know much yet about the subject. I want to try extra hard next time to engage in conversations with my mentor and fellow mentees, and ask good questions to further probe our conversation. If there’s one thing I did well though, it’s listening, which is very important when learning anything. I’m going to continue to work on the other elements of these chapters, and hopefully I can overcome this.
Thank you for reading my blog post, and have a great day!