My ASL road had been as short and straight as a Beatles song.
It could have begun when I was at Northeastern but I was working midnight to eight and my boss wouldn’t let me leave early one day a week to take the ASL class that began at eight. This predates my bionic ears, too. I’m left to wonder how taking the class would have affected my getting hearing aids. Would I have gotten them a few years earlier? Would I have not gotten them? But the fact remains I didn’t and now, more than twenty years later, I still know only a smattering of signs. But it’s not for lack of trying.
My first try was at a place called Communicative Health Care Associates, Inc. It was an in person class that I took in 2009. It started a trend that would continue to this day: voiceless lessons. Our teacher, Mary, would use a combination of signing, pantomiming, and writing to teach us signs and grammar. I’ve never been a willing class participant. I don’t work well being put on the spot. Being an introvert, being bullied, and being hard of hearing makes traditional classroom learning a distasteful gazpacho. I break out in a cold sweat and I forget how to properly think. Still, I powered through that class. But when it came time to sign up for the second class, life had other plans. I had to hit pause. I’d have plenty of time to pick it back up.
I found an online asynchronous “class”. It was a website, whose name escapes me, with lesson plans that allowed students to proceed at their own pace. The vocab had videos that were used to learn the signs. That part worked ok. But the grammar was beyond me. Without a teacher from whom to get clarification, I was up that proverbial creek. That said, it worked well enough for a time. In the back of my mind a voice was saying, with enough signs I could create a bastardized pidgin of ASL to communicate in a pinch if my hearing took a nosedive. But I felt that was cheating and a cop out. I felt that not learning ASL, true ASL, meant I was doing deaf wrong. Then my job’s environment started to make the Toxic Avenger proud.
So I went back to school to get my Masters in Library and Information Science.
The next few years were filled with learning to change careers and then changing careers. Since I can only do so much at once, ASL took a back seat once more. I wasn’t too concerned. I had plenty of time to learn. This made me ok with putting it off for years. Until 2022.
This time it was a virtual class through Deaf Inc. Thanks to COVID, the classes had all moved online. Perfect, I thought. A buffer of technology between me and the class would help make it less stressful. But it wasn’t the tech that made it less stressful. It was the material and the delivery of it. I’d been reading about Deafness more and occasionally poking around sites like Lifeprint.com. I knew how to fingerspell and knew a lot of the basic signs.The teacher, Michelle, continued the voiceless trend. But she made more liberal use of the chat to explain herself. That made it easier to follow along.
It also had a digital textbook/practice platform called TrueWay. I used it to practice during the week between classes. That’s where one of the cracks in the plan began to show. One of the hardest parts was that the “textbook” videos would sometimes use different signs, leaving me lost. Then, before the first class even ended, Weezy died. He was my first doggo. It’s been two years and I still miss him terribly. I were grieving hard enough that we missed the last class of ASL 1. But still, I powered onto ASL 2.
Maryln was the teacher this time. She was a kind, patient teacher. But she stopped using the chat feature to explain herself. She would pantomime and fingerspell until I understood. Sometimes I pulled the old hard of hearing trick that only fools myself: I bluffed. I felt bad about slowing the class down and just feigned understanding.
This time there was also much more class participation. Hello anxiety my old friend. It was an incredibly hard class. The different signs between the textbook and class made it that much harder. As did the feeling that I was so far behind all the other students. As the lessons progressed. there was no general decline in understanding. Suddenly I’d be completely lost. I went from getting most of the signs to getting one or none. Somehow, someway, I made it through ASL 2.
Before I started ASL 3, in the Fall of 2023, I thought long and talked hard about whether or not to continue. I’m not sure what made me decide to do so but I did. Then life elbowed its way into my plans.Things got all discombobulated. I understood almost nothing. Worse, my classmates didn’t seem to be having any trouble. As someone with self-esteem issues, this acted like a steroid for my anxiety. A few weeks in we called it quits.
The latest attempt is via an app that my library recently purchased, Mango Languages. Julie and I are slowly making our way through the course. Very slowly. It’s broken down into two courses with a number of modules made up of lessons. There are vocab demonstrations, then Deaf Culture videos, phrase demonstrations, and then role play. (I get to be a Mountie). The best feature, one that I’ve not seen before, is something called the magic mirror. During the demonstrations, the screen is split. On the top is the teacher. On the bottom is my ugly mug. So I can watch the demo and mirror the sign, seeing myself as I do. It’s pretty brilliant. And has given me a dash of hope.
My work with the HLAA Boston and my partnership with Julie has put ASL into perspective. While undeniably valuable, ASL is only one way the Deaf and Hard of Hearing communicate. Today’s technology is a cursed blessing. With a plethora of closed caption/live transcription apps and remote mics using Bluetooth as a bridge to my bionic ears, ASL seems less important. For now. I don’t want to assume my hearing will stay where it is. I need a good bit of hearing to make use of the remote mics. And the transcription services, while good, are not even close to perfect. I’ve decided to make like a turtle (Donatello) and be ok with taking the slow and steady path to learning ASL. Good thing, too, because some challenges still abound.
Which brings me back to the role playing.
The videos show two signers having simple (very simple) conversations. Then the video replays but I take on the role of one of the signers. But sometimes they use different signs than the vocab lessons. The more I think about it, the more I think the problem is me. I have to be ok with my progress, with what I can do. I’m always challenging myself, I’m always striving to learn something new. I’m also a recovering perfectionist. I don’t have to know everything. Hell, I can’t hope to. I’m working on being ok with not understanding every variation of signs. With repeated exposure to different ASL dialects, with regular practice of those signs, I believe that I’ll be able to achieve decent communication skills. If the ASL I master isn’t perfect, that’s ok. As long as I can make myself understood, that’s what’s important. It struck me that I was judging myself too harshly. Because there’s more than one dialect of ASL and there’s more than one sign language than ASL.
Being the Righteous Equality Crusader™ that I am, I took umbrage at Signed Exact English (SEE). SEE is ASL signs with English grammar. For a long while I felt it was doing ASL dirty. I didn’t see it as nefarious as the cherry-picking Baby Sign, but still, learn the dang language! Then I ran across Jessica Kellgren-Fozard. She’s British and thus uses BSL not ASL.Sorta. In one of her videos she justified using the British equivalent of SEE, Signed Supported English (SSE). I really hope you take the seven minutes to watch that video so I’m only going to say, she’s the one who taught me there’s no “right” way to be deaf.
But that lesson isn’t a one-and-done deal. As you can no doubt tell by this post, I’m struggling to remember it. I know what I lack is consistent practice. It’s hard to find the time. I know what I have to let go of is the assumption that I must learn perfect ASL. It’s hard to break that habit.
Communication
No matter what form you use
Intention matters.
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