Xylia’s Blog

Reading my fellow student’s blog posts was an extremely memorable experience. All the eminent people had interesting stories, and the way my group members wrote their posts was amazing! I got to learn about Harvey Russel’s incredibly action-filled life, Srinivasa Ramanujan’s impressive journey in mathematics, Tavi Gevinson’s inspiring fashion achievements, and much more. It increased my passion for my own eminent project, and to follow along with the progress of my peers. Their posts led me to establish a connection with their eminent people, especially with Julianne’s post about Christine Sinclair. The incredibly talented women’s soccer player’s story resonated with me, because as a soccer player myself, I found it interesting to read about one as successful and influential as her! As for the comments left by my groupmates, they gave me a great perspective on what enhanced my post, and what I could improve on. Additionally, looking at other’s posts will improve my writing, as I can see the strategies used by them that made their work better and implement them into my own as well. My peer’s comments also gave me great ideas on what aspects of Malala’s life to research next, such as Julianne’s suggestion of looking into her early life, and Raghav’s suggestion of researching the details of her activism. I am very grateful for this opportunity to share my work and see other people’s, and I will utilize what I learned on future projects!

What are your thoughts on hybrid learning (in person and at home) compared to when you are in your learning groups (at school for all classes). Which format do you prefer, and why?

Since COVID happened, we have had to rethink a lot of the ways we go about life, including school learning. We have all gotten a good taste of remote learning this past year, but to be honest, I’m not sure which I prefer. There are a lot of ups and downs for each! Remote learning let me schedule work how I wanted when I didn’t have to be physically at school and was a lot more flexible, but there were some days where I didn’t do any work for the class I was at home for. Learning at school is very helpful because it’s a lot easier to get feedback from teachers and classmates, and I personally would rather do most work at school than home. That said, I do hope we keep a bit of the hybrid learning style for next year! It was very different from what we were used to, but I think it’s quite useful. I wouldn’t want to do all learning at home though; that was not very fun. I think the hybrid model was a great alternative.

How has technology benefitted you during the hybrid learning experience?

Technology was very useful because even when we were at home, we could still learn on zoom (though, two hour long zoom classes were a nightmare and I’d much prefer to do that stuff at school!) and communicate with our teachers and peers through emails, teams, and discord. Even through tough times like these, we still managed to stay connected, and technology was helpful with that.

How has technology impeded you during the hybrid learning experience?

Though technology brought us together in many ways, it still kept us apart a bit. It’s hard to connect with people solely through technology, which is why the hybrid model, being able to go to school as well, was so important this year! Also, the way some people used technology impeded our connections. I guess people might think that they need less of a filter online, and say things that they might not have in person, not realizing that their actions can still be really hurtful. Another way technology made it harder to learn is that on a digital setting, it’s a lot easier to get distracted. When you’re always doing your work on the same device that you watch YouTube and use Discord on, there’s a lot of distractions that can tear you away from your work. There’s a lot less distractions when you’re learning and doing work at school!

Is there anything that you hope remains a part of school that was new because of hybrid learning after the pandemic is over and school returns to normal?

I hope that after the pandemic is over, we might still get to do a bit of learning at home. I think it was nice to have the freedom to spend however much time we needed to on a project, instead of being in class for a long time. For some classes, like guitar, it was hard to practice guitar for a full 2 hours, especially when we were first starting out. The hybrid classes were helpful with that because we only spent as much time as necessary on it and weren’t dragging out the class!

Link to 2 Projects in school /TALONS that used digital technology, and explain how the use of that digital technology enhanced your project. Ideas include In-Depth, Eminent, Zip, individual class projects in Talons or other subjects…

Some of my favorite memories around technology this year were with Eminent and In-Depth night. It was fun to take a look at what everyone had learned, and leave comments on their blog! During In-Depth night, I also called my friend so we could look at people’s blogs together. Another project with tecnology was way back at the start of the year, when I was doing Animation class! We did all our work digitally, which I really love because you’re less limited in the supplies you use for your art (like, I don’t own a spray paint bottle or fancy pens but I use them all the time in digital art!) and you can also undo things really easily, which is extremely helpful. I posted some of my projects on my YouTube channel as well, which is great because it means I get to show my art to more people!

Here are the links to my Eminent blog post (Eliza Hamilton Learning Center) and my In-Depth blog post! (American Sign Language)

https://mygleneagle.sd43.bc.ca/xyliag2020/2020/12/11/eliza-hamilton-learning-center/

https://mygleneagle.sd43.bc.ca/xyliag2020/2021/05/31/in-depth-learning-center/

Xylia 

April 13th, 2021 

What skill am I learning? 

I’m learning American Sign Language for In-Depth this year. 

What progress have I made since my last post? 

We’ve actually had two meeting since my last post, because we had one during spring break! I’ll mostly be talking about the most recent one though, because I think that makes more sense. 

Since my last post, we learned a bunch of new signs and phrases! The signs were related to food, colours, school subjects, and filler words like the 5 Ws and “cool”. Some phrases we learned are “do you understand” and “can you type it” which could be very useful during our zoom meetings! 

We also watched a documentary about ASL and the deaf community, called Through Deaf Eyes. It was really good, and I watched it while eating chocolate chips and unpeeled carrots because they’re nice. The documentary talked a lot about deaf history, like where and how ASL began to be used, how deaf and hard of hearing kids were taught in school, and a bunch of little interesting details that I never really thought about like poetry in ASL and accents! We discussed the documentary during our last meeting. 

In my last post I mentioned a question I had about whether there’s signs for punctuation in ASL and whether you use it while finger-spelling. Well, I asked my mentor about that, and though I can’t find the exact quote, she told us that there are signs for punctuation, but you wouldn’t use them while signing. For example, instead of signing “I like potatoes (comma) they are very good (period)” you would just pause, like you would while speaking! There are signs for punctuation though, like we have “question mark” and stuff in English. 

There are many places where my project had alternative choices, that would have each led me down a different path. For example, my choice of mentor! I only really had one choice of mentor, but things could have gone differently if I’d emailed different people at different times or something. My mentor, fellow mentees, and I were faced with many alternative choices, like what signs we wanted to learn and when to learn them. We discussed whether we wanted to do certain activities, like watching a documentary and discussing it afterwards, voice-off activities, and having a deaf person join us for a meeting! 

For my learning center, I think I’ll make a website, like I did for my eminent person project. As I think I mentioned in a previous post, it’d be disrespectful for me to record myself for entertainment or educational purposes, but I think as long as I make it clear I’m not trying to teach ASL because I’m not qualified to do that yet. So I might record some videos of myself signing, whatever I think makes the most sense! Some other ideas I had is to include some deaf history because it’s pretty cool, and maybe talk about some deaf/hard of hearing characters I know of, because they’re what inspired me to learn ASL in the first place! I hope that my learning center will inspire other people to learn ASL too, because it’s a really cool language and I think the world would be a better place if more people spoke it. I’m not sure how I’ll make my learning center interactive yet. Last time I tried (it didn’t work because I didn’t realize I made it private :/) to make a Kahoot, but I don’t think that makes sense to do this time. I’ll continue to brainstorm, and hopefully come up with some good ideas soon! 

Thanks for reading, and have a great day or night! 

Xylia 

March 9th, 2021 

What skill am I learning? 

For my In-Depth project this year, I’m learning American Sign Language! 

How have I progressed since the last post? 

My last meeting with my mentor seemed to click a lot together for me. For one thing, I thought that I had memorized the new and old signs pretty well, but doing it in person with other people is a lot harder than I’d thought. I now know that I need to work harder on practicing my signs, and which aspects of ASL I need to work on the most! 

By the way, the signs I’ve learned so far are related to greetings, numbers, time/calendar, activities, people, and emotions. We’ve also been working on learning certain questions and phrases, like what’s your name? and What did you do yesterday? By learning phrases like this, we’ve also been picking up a bit of grammar. Grammar in ASL is a lot different than English, just like it would be for any language! It’s been very cool to learn all this. 

As for which aspects of ASL I think I need to work on, I noticed during this last meeting that I was forgetting some of the signs for letters. This was a pretty big problem, because reading and spelling out letters is a big part of one of the activities we do. So after the meeting, I started practicing spelling random words in sign language, and even after only 2 days of doing this I’m improving a lot! I’m planning to look for a video on YouTube of someone spelling out words in ASL to practice reading that. 

A question arose while I was practicing this yesterday. I had been spelling random objects and sentences I saw around me, and one was a Lay’s chip bag. I realized I didn’t know if there were signs for punctuation! I’m going to ask my mentor next meeting about this, and I’m very glad I’ve finally stumbled across a good question for her. By the way, my mentor is very good. She’s nice and a very good teacher! 

Another point: I know that it would be good to have some sort of visual to showcase what I’ve learned so far, but from what we’ve been learning about deaf culture, I’m not sure how I would do that. From what I’ve learned so far, I’m pretty sure it’s disrespectful to speak ASL just to show people you can. So unless you’re an expert and teaching it to people (and probably a bunch of other instances I’m not thinking of) you shouldn’t record yourself doing it. So I’m probably not going to do that, because I’m not sure how to do it in a respectful way.  

Also, we were unable to record our last meeting because of technical difficulties, so I’m not able to look back on any specific things my mentor said or talked about. 

One last activity I did after my last post was watch a short film about a deaf child. My friend sent it to me and it was very good! It was also quite sad because the parents eventually decided not to let their kid learn sign language, so she had no good way of communicating and had to learn to read lips and speak like her hearing family. Here is the short film: The Silent Child — Oscar® Winning Short Film – YouTube 

Thank you for reading and have a great day! 

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!

In-Depth blog post 2 

Xylia 

February 9th, 2021 

What’s my skill again..? 

The skill I’ve chosen for my In-Depth project is American Sign Language, or ASL. 

How have I improved since the last post? 

Before finding a mentor, I looked up some YouTube videos to try and learn some signs like that. It worked pretty well, and I ended up finding a good video that helped me memorize the alphabet! There are just a few letters I keep getting confused about, but I’ll keep working on that. 

I also just had my first meeting with my mentor, Tori! In the meeting, we went over the signs we learned beforehand, talked about our schedules, and what we might want our learning process to look like. We also started learning about deaf culture. It was really great to learn from someone in person! Or… As “in person” as an online Zoom meeting can be. Finding a mentor was a wild ride, especially during Covid, and I’m super grateful to Sinu, Jordan, and Anya for letting me be in their mentoring group! Also, thank you, Tori, for agreeing to mentor me! And Ms. Mulder and Mr. Gosselin, for helping too. Also, I think I mentioned my dog in my last post, so I guess I’ll thank him too. 

Anyways, after finding a mentor, I was able to learn a lot more. For example, greeting signs! I’m excited to look at all the resources she sent us and continue to absorb knowledge. 

How to have a beautiful mind 

I read the first three chapters of Edward de Bono’s book, How to Have a Beautiful Mind. It talked about the right ways to agree, disagree, and differing with people. There was a lot of good advice, but there wasn’t really any reason to disagree or differ with my mentor. I mean, I barely know anything about sign language, and she’s way more experienced. Everything she said sounded perfectly reasonable to me! I will try to use the book’s advice on this whenever applicable. 

In-Depth Blog Post 

 What skill have I chosen to learn? 

For In-Depth this year, I have decided to learn American Sign Language! 

Why have I chosen this skill? 

I chose to learn ASL for my In-Depth project for a few reasons. One is that I like to read a lot, and some of the books I read have deaf characters. One in particular, Hearthstone from Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, made me really interested in learning sign language! I tried to learn some sign language, and ended up almost memorizing the alphabet, but I forgot it after a while. I want to take this In-Depth project as a way to get back at it again! 

More reasons are that learning other languages lets you communicate with a wider range of people. This is the same for sign language! It also gives you a way to learn about different cultures, and of course, it expands your brain. Sign language has always interested me even more than spoken languages. It seems so different, but I’m excited to see the differences and similarities between them, and what learning sign language can teach me other than the language itself. 

When and How 

I don’t have my timeline right now so I’ll update this when I do. 

Mentor 

I’m still in the process of finding a mentor. I hope to find one at least by the 9th so we have time to do the paperwork. I have emailed someone but have not heard back yet, and I know someone else doing ASL emailed a few people, so hopefully we hear back soon, so we can get started. 

What are some questions I want to answer? 

One thing I’m wondering is what the differences and similarities between sign language and a language like English or French are. Like, how does grammar work and how is that different? 

What are my goals? 

My goal is to be able to have full conversations in sign language, around 1 to 2 minutes, but it would be better if I could have even longer conversations. I also want to be able to understand sign language if I see people speaking it on, say, the news on tv. 

What can others do to help me? 

My family and friends can help me by practicing with me (at least at the beginning, when it’s simpler), and watching me practice and giving me pointers. My mentor can help me by, well, mentoring me. My dog can help me by sitting on my feet while I practice. I can help myself by making sure to practice hopefully daily and having a good schedule. Also be getting enough sleep so I have energy to learn.  

What resources can I use to help me learn? 

My mentor will be my most valuable resource, but some extra resources I will or could use are books and YouTube videos.