This is the exact lesson we are currently on in my ASL class. It’s the unit on story telling, and this first example story had me in stitches upon first viewing.

Laughing is one of the things I enjoy most about sign class. Two hours every week is quite a commitment, but once I get there, there is always laughing.

We laugh easily at ourselves and each other, but feelings aren’t hurt. We all know that we look equally ridiculous and just go with it. There will definitely be tons of giggling when we have to get up and tell a story like this one for the exam at the end of the section!

ps. No, she is not exaggerating. All those facial expressions and pretending like she’s talking to someone that isn’t there and gesturing is part of the language. We feel like we are in drama class sometimes.

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I’ve passed two tests and gotten great marks. I’ve found my favorite weekly session to attend out of several possible time slots. As a class, we have loosened up and are having a grand time, laughing and making sign language bloopers while we study and practice together. I particularly enjoy improvisation to take the lesson that much farther. So far so good. All expected outcomes within normal parameters of a learning environment.

However there has been a quite unexpected outcome so surprising that I’d like to share it with you. Learning ASL has been quite a boost for my emotional health.

It had to have been one of our very first classes when the teacher corrected one of our mistakes and in the process taught us the sign for “wrong” or “incorrect.” Visit the ASL pro visual dictionary and search for wrong to get a sense of the sign.

Signing ASL with your hands but without corresponding facial expressions is incorrect. Imagine the difference in your voice as you tell someone about your day going just ok versus your day going absolutely swimmingly and everything happening just as you’d hoped and better. The inflection and volume of your voice on your words in those two different statements corresponds in ASL to the “volume” of your facial expressions.

Getting back to the example of the sign for “wrong,” you can imagine that it carries an unpleasant facial expression to go with the manual sign. I was the first to comment but we were all thinking it. I told the teacher in my best stuttering sign and alot of finger-spelling that it looks like you are being mean and/or are angry at us when you use that sign. No, no the teacher insisted. Wrong is just wrong, there is no anger or meanness.

Immediately I thought… isn’t that the most emotionally mature thing I’ve heard in a long while. It really is. No emotional wounds need cleansing out with peroxide or ignoring for the time being. It is what it is and you aren’t a bad person because you made a mistake. This is the way to do it right, there ya go, good for you.

That is just unspeakably clear-cut clarity. I LOVE it.

So the time for our second “test” came around and we learned that it would be a presentation that we stood up in front of the class to give rather than a pen and paper sort. And I have this terrible stage fright. I perform better at my job and most things when I’m on my own. The anxiety of living up to someone else’s expectations and worrying about their judgment of me causes me to question my every move and thereby stumble much more often. I was not excited about standing up in front of everyone.

But then I remembered this simple lesson. I am me and so is my signing. Without bragging, I am a good signer — probably due to having a deaf partner at work everyday and being forced – though happily – out of need and compassion to learn how to communicate.

I decided. I had to decide to simply be who I am. And I am not right and I am not wrong. I signed my way through with shaky knees but tried to leave all – my own and the ones i imagine from others – judgments alone. I did well. And I’ve remembered this lesson alot lately. Especially when someone thought they were funny and assigned me a PSW student to follow me around all day.

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Can you see what he is signing?

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You enter the room and leave your voice at the door.

Today was the big start of my formal American Sign Language classes, short form being ASL, and the outlook is promising. Our teacher turns out to be lovely, funny and blessedly patient.

I was surprised by how little I knew about American Sign Language. It became apparent, as we went through the introduction into ASL’s heritage, etiquette and community that is both unique and, in particular, distinguishable from the English language. In fact, with this course, they are hoping to beat the English out of us. Having picked up a little sign while working, it turns out that we are using it incorrectly because we are signing with English grammar and sentence structure.

Get this: ASL is used only in America and Canada, not internationally and not even in Mexico. Its inception was the brain-child of an American that he in turn developed with the help of a French man. (The British, interestingly enough, had declined to help.)

So when they teach you to ask someone for their name, “What is your name?” is incorrect. Rather, the proper order to sign is “you name what?” Granted I know virtually nothing about French, but I do know their sentence structure is backward from English and that is exactly how ASL works. And it is that way because a Frenchman helped an American build the language.

Another oddity, strange things are polite and polite things are strange.

If you were to come across two people in a hallway signing to each other and you had no other way to get around, what would you do? Your nature is to do something: excuse yourself, duck slightly out of the way or perhaps stop and wait until the signers give permission to cross. But the polite thing to do is walk straight between them without saying a word. To a hearing person that is immensely rude.

And pointing! Goodness. I am a natural pointer and I have all my life been told it was rude to point. Not so in ASL. It is essential to proper signing. Whether comparing two actual objects or two referenced but imaginary objects in front of you, pointing is how you talk about two or more of anything. I was so happy. My fingers are free!

Last week’s lesson really felt like a photograph coming into sharp focus. I realized that ASL is definitely not a way of speaking English with my hands, but a language all its own, that its people, the Deaf, are immensely proud to have and use because it is the key, the framework, the building block, the something that gave them a voice.

My own hope for the course is that signing will become mostly second nature and that my hand will not to get tired so quickly. Considerably lesser ideals – lol – but significant nonetheless to this little Cajun girl that always spoke with her hands anyway.

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but that’s a good thing.

It was an assessment test to see how well I know sign language. Failing means that I get to start in the beginners, level 1, from the ground-up, don’t know squat class. Which is exactly where I need to be.

The commitment is two hours a week and will garner me a certified – hopefully gem-encrusted – certificate at the end. Learning sign-language – in this case, ASL or American Sign Language, the standard in North America – is something I never would have considered on my own, but it ties directly into my current work and my future profession and so am going ahead with the class with bells on.

As a full-fledged Cajun, talking with my hands is nothing new. Although it does have the downside of rewarding me with coffee in the lap on long drives when I don’t have a change of clothes. Learning more hand-signing may exponentially increase the frequency of these episodes, but at least a deaf person happening to be driving by will be able to understand the swears. Yes, learning sign language is absolutely identical to learning any second language. You have to double check strange, new randomly seen words with someone you really trust lest you say condom instead of appointment, for instance.

As I use it and learn more words and actually converse, my love for the language grows. I only get to work with the deaf patients on occasion but I puff up proudly when I manage haphazardly to get my meaning across. Turns out that the signed alphabet is absolutely essential to master first because even if you do make a mistake like the one I mentioned above or don’t know the actual word, at least you can correct the hysterically laughing person by finger-spelling the word you really meant. Or at least that’s what I hear.

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