#asl #signlanguage #class #course #lifeprint #startasl #columbiacollege #aslinstitute #chicago #Deaf #community #culture #teenagers #fiftysomething #sadgrandpa #mortality #growthmindset

[Need to get caught up on the entire saga of me learning American Sign Language (ASL) and getting involved in the Chicago Deaf community this year? The complete set of links is at the bottom of the page.]

So if I haven't made this clear yet, let me explain that I'm mostly learning ASL this year through self-study at home from two websites, Bill Vicars' Lifeprint.com and Michelle Jay's StartASL.com. Both have paid versions if you're looking for the full academic experience of graded tests, teacher feedback, connection with your peers and more; but what's cool about both of them is that they offer the actual lessons themselves completely for free, meaning that you can become conversational in sign language at them for no money at all, which is the way I'm doing it.

It turns out, in fact, that in the thirty years since the 1988 student protests at Gallaudet University, a three-semester “core curriculum” has been developed to teach ASL, presented as ASL 1, 2 and 3 classes that correspond with traditional Spanish 1, 2 and 3, French 1, 2, and 3, etc (and in fact is the second most studied foreign language in America, right after Spanish); and that this three-semester track has become pretty standardized in the ensuing decades, which means that everyone pretty much learns the exact same thing from these three classes, no matter what school or textbook or teacher they have. And so it is with these free classes from Lifeprint and StartASL too; they also present their courses in a 1, 2, 3 format, broken up respectively into 45 and 37 lessons (15-15-15 for Lifeprint, 14-12-11 for StartASL). If you aim for getting through a lesson a week, then, you're essentially looking at one year to complete the three-course track, which pretty neatly corresponds to taking such classes at a community college over a fall, spring and summer semester one academic year.

Of course, the online classes are missing a crucial element of learning ASL, which is the chance to actually practice conversations in real time with other human beings; in fact, this is how most Deaf people learned ASL in the years before a standard academic curriculum, simply by conversing with other Deaf people and learning by example, which is the same way children learn a spoken language long before they enter school and learn a written one. One of the ways I've been doing it, for example, has been by attending an evening workshop at Chicago's Columbia College; called the “ASL Institute,” it meets once a week for six weeks per course (so 18 weeks total if you attend them all), essentially a shortened version of Columbia's normal daytime class, but one that only costs $100 instead of the daytime class's $800 (plus of course the need to enroll in that case; for the Institute, you simply Paypal the money and then just show up).

In fact, Columbia College offers an entire four-year “Deaf Studies” degree, and is apparently one of the more prestigious programs for that in the entire Midwest, which makes students flock from all over to attend; one of the things these students have done is create a social “ASL Club” for themselves, and so I joined that as well in an attempt to meet more signers and practice more ASL conversations. I finally had a chance this week to attend my first event of theirs, a pizza night to celebrate the end of the school year, where I was greeted with a shock; that just like my experience a few weeks ago at the “ASL Game Day” at the Chicago Public Library, the pizza night at the ASL Club this week consisted of me (a 50-year-old man), and a roomful of twenty teenage girls, with not a single other male in sight besides a professor who popped in for five minutes and then left again.

In fact, once I thought about it, I realized that this has mostly been my experience at the various Deaf social events I've been attending around the city this spring; nearly all of them have been completely dominated by women, and for the life of me I don't know why that is. Maybe something to do with different empathy levels between the genders? After all, one of the other surprising things I've discovered at these Deaf community events is that the majority of attendees so far have actually been hearing people, who like me are in the process right now of learning ASL, but unlike me are not planning on it being their main form of spoken communication in the future, but are learning it as part of eventually becoming teachers or interpreters or church volunteers. Maybe this kind of calling simply appeals to women more than men? Maybe men are just not as social in general as women, and it's simply reflected in this specific context? Or perhaps I've just been attending things so far that naturally appeal to women more than men, like arts conferences and library game days and academic pizza parties? I'm not sure, but it's certainly a subject that's worth more pondering this year.

This week was the final workshop of the ASL 1 Institute session; and I'm tackling lesson 12 this week at both Lifeprint and StartASL, which means that I'm very close to “graduating” ASL 1, however you want to define that when it comes to someone self-studying at home, taking no tests and receiving no grade. The good news is that it's been pretty successful so far, and this week I anticipate finally memorizing my one thousandth term in ASL (and currently with a 91% retention rate on the rest, whenever I spend a day running through all 950 flashcards); but the bad news is that most five-year-olds typically know about 5,000 words in their given spoken language before ever going to school for the first time, so knowing 1,000 isn't nearly as impressive as it sounds at first. In fact, it turns out that even dogs can typically learn about 400 different human words and keep them all straight in their heads; so when you learn 1,000 words yourself, what you're really saying is, “I'm slightly more than twice as smart as a chihuahua!”

I kid, of course; in fact I'm extremely proud of how much ASL I've learned in only 62 days so far, and am pretty flabbergasted that in a mere two months, I can already hold entire conversations in ASL without saying a single word out loud. Granted, they're simplistic, fumbling, error-filled conversations, in which I have to spell out every third word I want to say; but that's still better than I ever got in German when doing my book tours in that country back in the early 2000s. But that said, one of the main observations I had during my evening workshops at Columbia College was that, by the end of them, both the teacher and the younger students were fingerspelling at a rate way faster than I could keep up with; and while I'm pleased that I have the ability to fingerspell back in any way at all, absolutely I do so at a speed equivalent to a stroke victim trying to talk again, with there being a fairly good chance that I will never get faster than this for the entire rest of my life.

I've talked about this before, but it bears repeating, that it's an inherently humbling thing to learn sign language for the first time at the age of 50. Hell, it's humbling to pretty much learn any new thing for the first time at the age of 50, which is why so few 50-year-olds ever do. Ever since aging into my fifties earlier this year, I've been intensely aware of how, for example, I can't even really call myself “middle-aged” anymore; the fact is that I'm now closer to being elderly than I am to being thirty, which makes me less middle-aged and more a “gentleman of a certain age,” the polite term for, “You ain't an old man yet, but you're freaking close.”

This comes with certain funny/dispiriting aspects just on its own, away from the challenge of learning a new language at this age; for one hilarious/depressing example, at the ASL Club pizza night this week, I actually ran into one of the teenage girls who had been at the Chicago Public Library game day the other week, at which point I learned that the girls at that had not been high school students at all but rather college students, most of them from the nearby Moody Bible Institute. I don't need to tell my fellow fifty-something brothers and sisters what a depressing thing it is to realize that you're now too old to be able to tell the difference between high-school students and college students; it's essentially exactly as depressing as the first time you hear that someone in your high school's graduating class has officially become a grandparent for the first time.

I suspect it's a pretty common experience, the first time you hear of someone your age becoming a grandparent, to find it impossible to think of yourself as old enough to be a grandparent, which is then the catalyst for a bout of cognitive dissonance; for me at least, it's triggered a whole reckoning this year about age and mortality, desires both professional and sexual, and just how little time I have left to explore any of these topics. I mean, sure, at this point in history, there's a decent chance I could live to 100; but it's much more realistic to expect that I'll kick off sometime between 70 and 80, and if not that than at least that this will be the last age I'll be completely healthy and mobile, which means that in all practicality, I have the shockingly short amount of 20 to 30 good years left in my life, which once you're 50 seems like the blink of an eye.

What do I want to do with these last 20 to 30 years? Who do I want to be? What kind of example do I want to set? When my friend Carrie's twin sons are middle-aged themselves, what do I want them to think of me when they look back at these years? All of these questions have come flooding into my life for the first time this year, when in fact I didn't really ponder them that much even at 49, which proves just how powerful arbitrary symbols are in human existence.

Certainly I want to go out having had an opportunity to embrace messy humanity in all its intimate, social glory, after a twenties and thirties that was mostly inwardly focused, two-plus decades where I went through and survived some very dark times indeed, and have now earned the right to celebrate that survival. This is the main reason I'm learning ASL in the first place, after all, because it's becoming harder and harder for me to interact with the human race through spoken English, and I don't want my functional deafness to imprison me away from humanity like it does for so many late-deafened adults.

And certainly I want to go out while continuing to embrace the growth mindset I've always had as an adult, an incessant and obsessive curiosity about the world that has compelled me to always be trying new things, not really worrying about individual successes and failures as long as I was always learning new things along the way. And this is yet another reason I'm learning ASL, because it pleases me to take on something so big and challenging and full of new insights about the world that I had never thought about before, at an age when most people are opting out of ever learning anything new again, content to officially start spiraling in on their existing lives like a snake eating itself, chomping up more and more of their psyches until eventually nothing is left but a hard, bitter little apple core, sitting in their recliner watching 16 hours a day of television and griping about The Kids with Their Facebooks and The Rubik Cubes.

So in this respect, I'm very proud to be graduating from ASL 1 in a couple of weeks, even if I turned out to be the slowest student in the entire class; and I was the slowest student in the entire class, make no mistake about this being false modesty. The way I look at it, the important part is not that I'm slower than everyone else who learned with me, but that I'm faster than all the people who never tried in the first place, and those are odds at succeeding that I like a whole lot more than directly comparing myself to a bunch of 22-year-old girls. Um, a bunch of 16-year-old girls? Sigh. I started my first-ever ASL lesson on March 6th, the day after my 50th birthday, and I'm looking forward a year from now to looking back on my 51st birthday, and hopefully seeing a fully conversant signer with a new batch of friends in the Deaf community, happy and social and perhaps even no longer fingerspelling like a stroke victim. As always, I deeply appreciate you taking this journey with me, and I encourage you to drop a line with comments, questions and requests any time to ilikejason@gmail.com.

The Complete ASL Saga of Jason Pettus 4/24: Deaf culture primer: The “Deaf President Now!” student protests of 1988. 4/23: It's been harder than I thought it would be to find good sign language partners. 4/19: Book review: A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles, by William Stokoe 4/15: ASL Adventures: “Game of Thrones” night at Deaf Planet Soul. 4/14: Book review: Inside Deaf Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 4/8: ASL Adventures: The Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival, and my first “signing in the wild.” 4/4: Book review: The Mask of Benevolence, by Harlan Lane 4/4: Book review: Train Go Sorry, by Leah Hager Cohen 4/3: He speaks! He speaks! ...Er, he signs! He signs! 4/1: Book review: Seeing Voices, by Oliver Sacks

3/31: Book review: The Other Side of Silence, by Arden Neisser 3/28: Those sexy deaf teens sure are courageous! 3/27: Book review: Shouting Won't Help, by Katherine Bouton 3/25: Book review: Deaf in America: Voices From a Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 3/22: Book review: A Deaf Adult Speaks Out, by Leo Jacobs 3/22: Book review: Don't Just Sign...Communicate!, by Michelle Jay

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#asl #signlanguage #chicago #deaf #community #fieldreport #inclusive #dance #festival #mayors #office #people #disabilities #kineticism #art #therapy #MOMENTA #AnitaFillmoreKenney #TheProblemWithNormal #ColumbiaCollege

[Need to get caught up on the entire saga of me learning American Sign Language (ASL) and getting involved in the Chicago Deaf community this year? The complete set of links is at the bottom of the page.]

So for those who don't know, in the last five or six years I've started attending more and more dance recitals here in Chicago, as my hearing continues to get worse and it becomes more and more difficult to attend my previous Saturday night events like movies, plays and rock shows. I'm not a dancer myself, and know almost nothing about the activity's history or theory; but I first became fascinated with the connection between movement and creativity in the 1990s while dating a woman who worked as a “kinetic art therapist,” i.e. someone who helps others work through psychological problems via movement and dance, and since then I've discovered a real joy in attending creative movement pieces here in the city. And better yet, much like the “storefront theatre” community for actors in Chicago, the city also has a network of indie spaces for startup dance companies and independent choreographers, meaning that it's entirely possible to go out every weekend and see an amazing dance recital for only $10 or 20, versus the often $100 tickets for downtown shows at the Joffrey Ballet and the Harris Theatre.

A few weeks ago I attended the spring recital of Oak Park's MOMENTA, which is basically a professional company that was established by the prestigious Academy of Movement and Music; the academy itself teaches students from grade school up to the age of eighteen, but MOMENTA is specifically a professional showcase for their older students and the academy's faculty, many of whom have longstanding ties with the Martha Graham Company, Julliard, the Kennedy Center, and nearly all of Chicago's local universities. The recital in general was great, but what really floored me were two pieces that night that were specifically written for people in wheelchairs, something I had never even thought about when it came to dance until witnessing it for myself. The dancers involved were adept movement artists, and in one case (with dance veteran Kris Lenzo) buff as hell too, using his athletics-optimized wheelchair as essentially an extension of his torso, able to twist and lean and spin and fall as easily as someone with physical legs.

The choreography for that particular piece was by retiring MOMENTA Associate Executive Director Anita Fillmore Kenney; so on a lark, I dropped her a random email the day after the recital, telling her how moved I was by seeing these dance numbers that had been specifically written for people in wheelchairs. And this emotional stirring is of course just a logical extension of what I'm going through this year in general, as I burn through a ton of books about the history of the Deaf community, and come to realize with some horror just how much discrimination and abuse deaf people have gone through in the last couple of centuries, and have frequently been moved to tears by the stories of resilience and progress you find within this community despite all this. It's been a really eye-opening experience this year, and is starting to profoundly and permanently change the entire way I even think about concepts like “disability” and “accessibility” in the first place. I'll explain...

Like most people, I've been raised to look at the US population as basically existing in two general groups: there are the “normal” people, who constitute the vast majority of our country, and then the “not normal” minority (currently known by the politically correct term “disabled”) who have something wrong with their bodies, whether it's that they can't see, that they can't hear, that they're missing arms or legs, etc. Looking at the world this way doesn't necessarily mean that you're thinking any less of the minority in the “not normal” group; but certainly it trains you to think that our goal as an enlightened society should be to provide special, attention-calling options for letting this “not normal” minority exist within the world of the “normals” in a better and more complete way.

What I'm coming to realize this year is that it's much more accurate to instead look at the world in this way — that there's a theoretical model of a “perfect” human being that exists on paper, but that not a single one of us actually lives up to that model of perfection, meaning that every single human being on Earth deals daily with some kind of imperfection to their system (and most of the time several). Some of these imperfections are very easy to see when you glance at a stranger — like people who can't hear, people who can't see, people who are missing arms or legs — but the vast majority of bodily imperfections are invisible to the naked eye, and most often incredibly easy to hide from strangers. Some of us have high blood pressure. Some have low blood sugar. Some are dyslexic. Some are autistic. Some of us have uncontrollable anger. Some of us have a predisposition towards addiction. Some have brittle bones. Some people have epilepsy. Some are color-blind. Some people have attention deficit disorder. Some have one leg that's shorter than the other. Some people are farsighted. Some are nearsighted. Some have acid reflux syndrome. And on and on and on and on and on.

So our goal as a society, then, shouldn't be to provide outlandish alternatives, handed on a silver platter like a benevolent gift from the “normals,” for “allowing” a small minority of people to be “like the rest of us;” the goal should be a constant series of small, manageable changes so that all of us imperfect humans can live in an environment that provides as equal an opportunity as possible for us as individuals to succeed or fail based on our own actions. Think, for example, of how in recent years, fast-food restaurants have started offering more and more “heart-healthy” choices for those who have imperfections with their hearts and blood. It didn't take a lot of effort for these places to offer these kinds of choices (it mainly just consisted of tweaking a few menu items so that they no longer contain salt, sugar and carbs); it didn't take a lot of effort to convince these places to do it in the first place (just a gentle but insistent demand from their customers); no one's forcing you to buy the heart-healthy versions if you don't want (by all means, libertarians, keep shoveling those Big Macs into your pre-diabetic system if that's what you choose to do); yet the addition of this option has meant a world of difference for those who do want to keep careful track of their salt, sugar and carbs, who before recent years simply couldn't eat at any fast-food places at all, making simple things like highway road trips or a day of tourist sightseeing an exercise in frustration.

This is what most people in the Deaf community want as well, I'm coming to realize this year — they don't want you to make a big deal out of their situation, they don't want to feel like you're doing them some big favor that they need to show subservient gratitude towards, they don't want you to somehow feel like you're being “forced” into some big obligation in order to accommodate them, but they do want some simple changes that better allow them to compensate for their own particular version of physical imperfection. I'm becoming convinced that our society will be a lot better if more and more of us can begin to adopt this mindset — that the goal isn't to create a world where “they” can become more like “us,” but to create a world where all of us have an equal chance to succeed or fail based on our own actions, no matter how close or far away we are from “perfect.”

In any case, Kenney nicely wrote back to me and let me know about an event coming up that she thought I'd find interesting — the 2nd annual Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival, sponsored by the Mayor's Office for People With Disabilities, and held down at that organization's headquarters on the Cook County Health campus (more familiarly known as “Cook County Hospital” and the buildings that surround it). And she was right — I did find it interesting! It wasn't really a “festival” per se, but more a series of workshops, film screenings, and panel discussions, devoted specifically to the challenge of incorporating disabilities into the field of dance, but more generally dedicated to the subject of disabilities within the arts overall.

Like I said, I'm not a dancer myself, so I skipped the movement workshops at the beginning and end of the day, and instead sat in on the films and discussions that took place between them. Some of it was a little too academic for my tastes; but there was certainly a lot of food for thought that was thrown out during the day, most intriguingly on the subject of “interaccessibility” in the arts, not just the challenge of providing access to the blind or deaf but of the intriguing possibilities of combining access to the blind and deaf. (As one example, a recent Steppenwolf production was highlighted during one talk, in which a French poet was first translated into English and then further translated into ASL, with all three performing on a stage at the same time, and with projections of each version showing on overhead screens behind them.)

As longtime readers know, I myself have been mostly involved with the literary community over the years, and all of this is starting to really make my gears turn as far as how I might be able to help provide more access for the Deaf at Chicago's various live literary and theatrical productions. After all, Chicago has one of the largest live literary-performance communities in the world, is the city that birthed Steppenwolf and a hundred other indie theatre companies, and is also the city where the poetry slam was invented; if there's one place that could benefit the most from incorporating ASL interpretation and live captioning into such events, that would be here, which has me thinking a lot these days about the subject and what I could possibly do about it.

And then of course there was one other big reason I wanted to attend the Inclusive Dance Festival, which is that this would be my first opportunity since starting ASL classes to be around a professional sign-language interpreter, as well as native Deaf people relying on this interpreter for their comprehension. Regular readers will remember me talking about this subject in my last blog entry, about how I've recently started the process of trying to throw myself into as many real-time opportunities as possible to witness and maybe participate in ASL conversations, now that I've been doing sign-language classes by myself at home for a month, and am just comfortable enough now with my skills to know that I can at least sign things like, “I'm a beginner,” “I understand very little,” “I'm here mostly to just watch,” “Oh Lord I'm so horrible at sign language” (not a joke, I actually know how to sign this), etc. I don't necessarily feel the obligation to be particularly good at signing to at least attempt to communicate with others, but certainly I feel the obligation to at least be able to express that I'm not particularly good at it, and to thank others for being patient with my slowness and rookie mistakes.

Watching a fluent ASL interpreter sign in real time was both an enlightening and frustrating thing; frustrating because, as you might expect, I couldn't follow the vast majority of what she was saying, but surprisingly enlightening because I could actually catch about one out of every ten words. I have to admit, that kind of amazed me, given that I've only been studying for a month now, and don't really have any experience yet at trying to follow a native speaker at full speed, and it gave me a lot of confidence in the idea that I'm actually starting to absorb some of this stuff. Then during a break, I decided to introduce myself to her, so that I could say that I had officially had my second-ever ASL conversation, after the one on Tuesday with my teacher at Columbia College.

“Excuse me,” I started to sign. “I wanted to say hello.”

“Hello!” she replied. “I saw you watching me earlier.”

“I'm learning sign right now...”

“Oh wow! That's great!”

”...But I'm just a beginner. I only understood a few words you said.”

She laughed. “Yeah, well,” she made clear through gestures instead of sign. “Where are you studying?”

“Um, three places,” I indicated through counting on my non-dominant hand, a new technique in ASL grammar I recently learned. “Two of them online. The third, a school in the city. C-O-L-U-M-B-I-A.”

“Oh!” She got excited. “That's where I go to school!”

“Oh! Is Deaf Studies your...major?” I signed with trepidation. (This is a sign I recently learned, but wasn't sure if “major” as in “not minor” also translated as “major” as in “main concentration in college.”)

“Yep.”

“Are you hearing?” I asked, which I immediately realized was a stupid question, in that she had been interpreting the hearing speakers of the conference for the last two hours.

“Yes. You? Do you want to talk out loud?”

“Yes. I'm hard of hearing. I have a hearing aid.” (A sentence I'm already saying so often that it's starting to effortlessly roll off the fingers already.)

At this point we switched into pidgin-mode, signing and talking at the same time. “My dad's hard of hearing too,” she said. (This makes her what's known in the Deaf community as a “CODA,” or “child of a deaf adult,” a very common classification among hearing people who are good enough at ASL to become professional interpreters.)

“I don't know very much sign yet, but I'm trying to go to as many events like this as I can, and just throw myself into it.”

“Oh, you should come to our ASL club. It's run through Columbia. Just a bunch of us in the department who get together socially once every couple of weeks, to have fun and practice our signing. Here, I'll give you the contact information.”

Well, what do you know — officially one more step inwards towards my gentle introduction into Chicago's Deaf community! This is exactly the kind of group I'm hoping to get involved with right now, one that's made up of ASL teachers and students who will be tolerant of a slow, mistake-riddled beginner like me. Eventually my goal is to more and more immersed in just the general community of Deaf people in Chicago, but as I mentioned last time, I'm wary of doing this too soon — just like anybody who's a native speaker of a language, I don't want to be a pest to such people while I remain a beginner who can barely speak it, and I also don't want to come across as the “rude hearie tourist” who's trying to barge his way in and stomp around within a community that by necessity over the years has been quite insular and protective of its own. With any luck, the next blog entry I'll have for you will be a report from the club, and at the very least I'll get an update posted in a few weeks about how my evening workshops are going. Talk with you again then!

The Complete ASL Saga of Jason Pettus 4/4: Book review: The Mask of Benevolence, by Harlan Lane 4/4: Book review: Train Go Sorry, by Leah Hager Cohen 4/3: He speaks! He speaks! ...Er, he signs! He signs! 4/1: Book review: Seeing Voices, by Oliver Sacks 3/31: Book review: The Other Side of Silence, by Arden Neisser 3/28: Those sexy deaf teens sure are courageous! 3/27: Book review: Shouting Won't Help, by Katherine Bouton 3/25: Book review: Deaf in America: Voices From a Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 3/22: Book review: A Deaf Adult Speaks Out, by Leo Jacobs 3/22: Book review: Don't Just Sign...Communicate!, by Michelle Jay

Receive an email every Friday with the latest announcements of new blog entries, new photos at Flickr and Instagram, new book and movie reviews at Goodreads and Letterboxd, new rare books at eBay, new handmade notebooks at Etsy, and the most interesting Twitter news links of the week, by signing up at bit.ly/ILoveYouRobot.

#asl #signlanguage #lifeprint #startasl #fingerspelling #ASLInstitute #ColumbiaCollege #chicago #Deaf #community #culture #history #ToiletWhere #oralism #AlexanderGrahamBell #LipReadingMyth #Gallaudet #DeafPresidentNow #LateDeafenedAdult #Hogwarts #Magic

[Need to get caught up on my saga this year of learning American Sign Language (ASL) and getting involved with Chicago's Deaf community? The full list of links is at the bottom of the page.]

So after a month now of self-studying ASL at home through two different websites (Lifeprint.com and StartASL.com), and building up a decent but not impressive vocabulary list (around 700 terms at this point, plus I can fingerspell at a rate of around two letters per second), the time finally came last night for me to go out into the world and interact with other signers for the very first time. And that's because it was time for the ASL Institute, a six-week series of conversation workshops sponsored by Columbia College here in Chicago, and taught by their award-winning Deaf Studies faculty as part of their nationally admired academic program.

There's a ton of undergraduates all over the Midwest who come to Columbia to study ASL; but apparently the school discovered that there are also a ton of people like me in the general community who want to learn ASL too, but who don't want to make the financial or time commitment of full-time enrollment. So they now offer this $100 workshop that meets once a week in the evening for six weeks, actually a series of three workshops that last 18 weeks if you go through the whole thing, and which very roughly correspond with the ASL 1, 2 and 3 classes the school offers during the day as a sort of core curriculum for gaining conversational fluency. (For what it's worth, my online classes are structured under a three-semester 1, 2, 3 curriculum too, a fairly standard practice among groups that teach ASL.)

That's an important thing to understand about sign language, that like any foreign language, the key to becoming conversational is to throw yourself into actual conversations with actual humans as much as possible; so while I've been happy to discover that you can actually get a fairly decent education on ASL just through solo home study alone, I knew there would be something missing if I didn't challenge myself to get out into the real world as much as possible too, which is why I signed up for these workshops. Plus, as regular readers know, the whole goal of me learning ASL in the first place is not as some academic experiment, but because I plan on transitioning my social life into the Deaf community more and more as I get older, and continue losing more and more of my hearing; so I figured that a fairly safe way of gently entering this community would be by starting with people who professionally teach the hearing how to sign in the first place, and becoming friends with those people first before then slowly branching out into the city at large.

After all, a very real fear of mine — and something that should be a legitimate concern for any hearing person learning ASL — is throwing myself into the local Deaf community too early, making a jackass out of myself, and alienating everyone involved before I've ever had a chance to make any friends. Like any population of native speakers, no matter what the language, most Deaf people will be bemusedly tolerant of someone like me who's just starting to learn the language, but will quickly grow annoyed with my fumbling attempts interfering with their desire to simply talk with their friends at a normal pace. (“So I was at Tom's party, and you'll never guess what happened...” “Me go now toilet! Where toilet where? TOILET WHERE???” “[Sigh] Anyway, like I was saying...“)

And now add to this the special situation when it comes to the Deaf community and ASL, which for those who don't know was a language that was quite literally outlawed among most Deaf schools all the way from the 1880s to 1980s, when a noble but heartbreakingly misguided competing theory about language called “oralism” instead became the new norm. Championed most notably by telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell (spoiler alert: don't bring up his name at a party full of Deaf people), and aggressively pushed by the same repressive Victorian Christians who also banned Welsh in the same time period, it was basically a two-pronged attack against sign language: the first argument being that it's better for the deaf to learn how to speak and read lips, because this helps them integrate back into “normal” society better than learning their own special language that no hearing person understands; and the second argument being that ASL is not actually a language at all, but rather a series of crude pantomimes that is unable to express abstract concepts like the future and past or philosophical thoughts, something that will never be able to hold a candle to the rich and sophisticated possibilities of English. And this is not to mention (the Christian oralists argued) that ASL is an abomination against God, since the Bible clearly states that the difference between humans and animals is our ability to speak, meaning that any Deaf person who refuses to do so is essentially spitting in God's face.

But there's one big problem with all this, which is that oralism simply doesn't work, or at least not the way that oralists used to claim that it does; for while functionally Deaf people with some hearing can eventually after years of intense study come to speak and lip-read fairly well, a century of scholarly studies has proven over and over that even in the best-case scenario, the most adept lip-readers still only catch about 30 percent of a hearing person's conversation, the rest basically guessed at through context, gestures and facial expressions. And that's best case; for most people who can't hear, reading lips is a complete disaster that never works, which then in the repressive 20th century got these people labeled by their hearing caretakers as mentally challenged, and relegated to remedial classes and then factory or farm work for the rest of their life. This is how we got the outdated and now shameful term “deaf and dumb,” because for a long time it was just assumed by the hearing world that most people who were deaf were also “mentally retarded” (another outdated term I'm deliberately using here to prove a point about its awfulness), and that the few who thrived at oralism were the rare genius exceptions that proved the rule.

As recently as the 1980s — i.e., as recently as me and my peers already being in college — it was still quite common for Deaf elementary schools to literally tie their childrens' hands behind their backs during class, so to force them through tear-filled eyes to practice the largely useless oralism instead of signing to each other; and so this led to ASL becoming a secret, contraband language that the Deaf used with each other only when no hearing people were around, an underground railroad of communication that tightened and solidified the insular intimacy of their community. So yes, when you're a hearing person in the 2010s learning ASL yourself, you drag this entire luggage rack of baggage behind you wherever you go, which is why so many in the Deaf community are suspicious of you when you show up to “their” events and try to speak “their” language and fumble around and get “their” words wrong. You can complain about it if you want, but that won't do anything about getting rid of that century-old luggage rack of baggage you unconsciously drag behind you at all times; so it's better to simply acknowledge the luggage rack and try to be as empathetic as you can about learning ASL, for example by paying Deaf teachers to gently and slowly tutor you into fluency, instead of just showing up to a Deaf dinner party one night and start barging around yelling, “ME GO NOW TOILET!!!”

My instructor for the next six weeks is A., who surprisingly turns out to be a graduate of the prestigious Gallaudet University, a school with a fascinating history: first authorized by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War in the 1860s, to this day it still remains the one and only accredited four-year liberal-arts college in the US to cater exclusively to Deaf students, and it was the 1988 student protests there over the lack of a Deaf president that kickstarted the modern Deaf Pride movement, “Stonewall”-style, which makes me feel lucky to have an instructor who comes out of that environment. But man, am I glad I decided to start studying ASL on my own for a month before showing up, because she just threw us into the heat of things with no warning — after repeating the fingerspelling alphabet just three times, she was already spelling out entire words in class and expecting us to comprehend, and literally covered close to 50 ASL terms in two hours, which would've had me dumbfounded if I hadn't already practiced most of them at home over and over and over for the last four weeks.

This is something I first learned when attending a computer coding bootcamp back in 2015, neither a good nor bad thing on its own but simply an objective fact that exists — that in late middle-age, my brain simply can no longer operate at the same speed as someone in their twenties (the age group that constitutes most of the other 30 people in my workshop, who seem to mostly be undergraduates taking this evening course for extra credit), and that I have to work harder and longer than everyone else if I expect to keep up at their pace. And in this I take inspiration from the Deaf community itself, as often expressed in the Disney Family television show Switched at Birth I became an obsessive fan of earlier this year (but see my blog entry specifically on that subject for more); how at one point in the show's run, the main Deaf character Daphne decides to major in pre-med at college, gets frustrated by a series of hurdles that develop around her (technical terms with no equivalent signs, surgeons wearing masks that cover their lips, doctors who dismissively scoff at the very idea of her interning for them), and is reminded by her peers and family that if she wants to do something ambitious like that, she simply has to work harder at it than hearing people, and that there's no point whining about it because complaining won't change the situation. It's a powerful example of why Deaf people hate being referred to in victim terms like “disabled” or “handicapped;” they don't see themselves that way, no more than we would consider a person with high blood pressure to be “disabled,” but rather as someone with a bodily imperfection that can be easily compensated for through intelligence (less salt), discipline (daily exercise), and community involvement (convincing restaurants to offer heart-healthy menu items).

I'm what's known in the community as a “late-deafened adult” (LDA) in that I grew up as a hearing person, think in the word order and grammar of English, and see my hearing loss as something “being taken away from me,” with all the resulting emotional grieving that that statement implies. In addition to studying the Deaf community, I've been doing a little bit of studying about the LDA community in the last month too, and have quickly come to learn that most late-deafened adults never successfully learn ASL or transition into the Deaf community; they simply count out the clock in their old age within a world that becomes increasingly narrower and lonelier, unable to make new friends and with it increasingly difficult to communicate with their old ones. I'm determined that this will not be my fate, because the very thought depresses me to a point of despair; but that means I simply have to want it more than the people around me, have to put in the extra work, have to put in the extra time, have to practice four hours a day like I've been doing this month, have to burn through a book every day or two like I've been doing this month.

The workshop itself last night mostly consisted of A. instructing us through Powerpoint slides and demonstrations of individual terms, which we basically practiced as a group without actually having any conversations; but still, I was determined to have at least one back-and-forth talk with someone before I left, so I approached her after class. “Excuse me,” I started in sign. “I wanted to say hello and thank you.”

“Oh, you're welcome,” A. replied.

“For a month I've been self-studying at home online,” I continued. “But this here is my first time chatting people. Or, er,” I corrected, “chatting with people.”

“That's great,” she said. “You're good! You said you're hard of hearing?” (This came up earlier in the evening, when she played a DVD and I had to request that she turn on the closed-captioning.)

“Yes,” I confirmed. “I have a hearing aid, but my hearing is decreasing each year. This ear” — I pointed to the left one — “surgery, year 2000. This ear” — pointing to the right — “Too much music when younger.” I paused, then spelled out “P-U-N-K,” and we both laughed.

“Okay,” I concluded. “I see you...L-A-T-E-R?”

“Later,” she showed me in sign.

“Great. Later!”

And there it was — the first-ever ASL conversation I've had in my life. And I have to admit, it felt like freaking magic, like I was a Hogwarts student and had just successfully performed an Expelliarmus spell for the very first time. The moment I got done with my first-ever ASL conversation, the thing I most wanted to do was immediately have another ASL conversation, which made me profoundly appreciate the stories in these Deaf culture books I've been reading this month (especially the ones written in the 1970s and '80s), relaying the stories of Deaf kids who grew up without knowing that ASL even existed, and how they went through a lightning-fast explosion of intellectual curiosity the moment as adolescents that they learned how to sign. That's simultaneously the most heartbreaking and the most uplifting thing of all about the shameful history of forced oralism in the 20th century; when so-called “dumb,” so-called “retarded” Deaf kids were finally allowed to learn ASL, most of them blossomed within literally months from a remedial learning level to above-average, yet this wasn't seen by their hearing caretakers as proof that everyone should learn sign, but rather they were considered “rare miracles” that merely proved that not every single deaf person was fated to be a janitor or a maid.

At the age of 50, I'm starting to get a taste of what this so-called “miracle” must've felt like; and I have to admit, I want more. EXPECTO PATRONUS!

The Complete ASL Saga of Jason Pettus

4/1: Book review: Seeing Voices, by Oliver Sacks 3/31: Book review: The Other Side of Silence, by Arden Neisser 3/28: Those sexy deaf teens sure are courageous! 3/27: Book review: Shouting Won't Help, by Katherine Bouton 3/25: Book review: Deaf in America: Voices From a Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 3/22: Book review: A Deaf Adult Speaks Out, by Leo Jacobs 3/22: Book review: Don't Just Sign...Communicate!, by Michelle Jay

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