Day 2 – ASL
Ok, so I find myself on the third floor of the library, waiting for the class to start filling up. Granted, I am here a full hour before hand, but I am a stickler for being on time. I hate people wandering in two minutes late, you know when you need to be there, get there by that time. I take it a little overboard, I got here an hour and a half early, just to make sure that I would not be late. Call it a phobia, but that is who I am.
I think I have the alphabet sort of down, I am still having problems with the letter “P” and “R” and sometimes I get stuck on “E” but all in all the alphabet is easy. Fingerspelling from me to someone else is slow, but I can do it. The other way around though I have problems, especially someone doing it to me, that will take some getting use to. If it is a long word.. no dice right now.
It will be a little interesting to see how the class is set up today, especially with no translator. The teacher has been doing it now for 11 years, so I am sure she understands how to do it. It will just be a little awkward the first night. I guess I should go and buy the books tomorrow or Friday. One has a DVD in it, Molly and I will enjoy watching that.
Jocelyn has been a trooper this week, put up with Molly Monday when I started class, then took her to taekwondoe as I was dealing with a computer issue, and now tonight it is just her and Molly again. Tomorrow hopefully I can have the computer issue resolved so that I can go watch Molly get her taekwondoe on.
Ok, class is over. Role took 45 minutes, but I can see what she is doing, a lot of fingerspelling and also basic introductions, today was who’s name is? and Are you ____? Learned yes, no, understand, and nice to meet you. I am sure that things will pick up more as time goes, but it was a nice way to start the class off. We did some mirroring which is important when speaking with others in the deaf community. I also learned that facial expressions determine the “phrase” of the sentence. If you look at someone with eyebrows raised and head slightly pushed forward, it is a question, furled eyebrows is anger. Much more involved, but if you get right down to it, it makes sense that facial expressions play a big role, kind of like tensing.
There is also no complete sentence structure. Instead of Are you Danny? It is more like You Danny? But I am sure that as time goes on, the structure of how things are situated will come up.
