#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

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 #Deaf #community #chicago #social #events #DeafPlanetSoul #GameOfThrones #history #oralism #LateDeafenedAdults #middleage #mortality #advice #moralcourage

[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 the day finally arrived this week; the day I finally went out and attended an event in Chicago designed specifically for Deaf people to have fun with other Deaf people. As regular readers know, I've been feeling a bit of trepidation about this, for reasons I went into detail about in my last journal entry — how although I'm proud of the surprisingly large amount of ASL I've learned in just six weeks now of studying it, I still don't want to be some beginner pest to native signers who are trying to have a normal conversation at a party, plus I want to be mindful of the history of hearing people barging into the Deaf community and forcing them to change their ways to better accommodate their “hearing superiors.”

Let's never forget, all the way up to the 1990s, not only was ASL almost exclusively known only by native Deaf people, but it was actively banned from most Deaf classrooms (but read about the shameful history of “forced oralism” for more on this subject), which means that sign language was largely an insular and secret activity that helped define the “us” part of the “us versus them” equation among the Deaf. So although I'm sure that most native signers would be patient and tolerant of my terrible beginner skills, I also want to be hyper-vigilant about the idea of barging my way into non-educational social events and being all, “Hi! My signing is horrible and I'm slow and I use the wrong grammar and word order, but I'd appreciate it if you all could modify your own speech to mollify me, the wonderful noble hearing person who is deigning to learn your language (yay me!), instead of me doing the hard work of actually learning your language well enough to speak it correctly back to you. THANKS!”

But still, there's only way to become conversational in any new language, and that's by forcing yourself into actual conversations as much as possible; so when I discovered that the local Deaf advocacy group Deaf Planet Soul (DPS) was having a Game of Thrones season-premiere viewing party as a fundraiser for their organization (something they're doing with every episode this season), I thought this would be a great opportunity for my local Deaf community “coming out” moment, not least of which was because for an hour of it, I could sit there in silence and not have to worry about chatting at all.

DPS is a pretty cool organization; founded by two people of color (Puerto Rican Gallaudet University grad Gregory Perez, and Iraqi-American Muslim Zaineb Abdulla, who you might remember from her 2016 self-defense tips against hijab-grabbing alt-righters, which became a viral hit after Trump's election), it's a group that advocates not only for Deaf accessibility but accessibility among those who typically get most overlooked by society, and they're particularly well known for traveling to refugee camps every year and providing things like hearing aids and sign-language lessons to deaf kids who otherwise live in a solitary world of silence. Usually on Sundays I'm down in Hyde Park, having dinner with my friend Carrie and her teen sons, so I will probably miss the rest of the Game of Thrones parties; but certainly I plan on getting involved with DPS's other events a lot more as the year continues, and also plan on talking with them about their refugee work and whether it might be something I'd be eligible to participate in too.

The party itself went fine, although I was surprised to see that most of the attendees were actually hearing people who didn't sign, I suppose friends of the staff who were there to help financially support the organization. Still, though, I wanted to get in at least a little conversation, so I approached Gregory and Zeineb after the show was over.

“Hi!,” I started. “I want to say hello. I'm Jason.” (I still don't know how to properly sign, “I wanted to introduce myself;” this is something I need to learn soon, if I'm going to keep going out to events like these.)

“Hi, Jason!”, Zee responded. “Thanks for coming out!”

“I want to warn you, I don't know a lot of sign language yet. I'm a student right now.”

“Oh yes? Where are you studying?”

“C-O-L-U-M-B-I-A College.”

“Oh, C-C! They're great.” (Believe it or not, this was the very first time I learned the “name sign” for Columbia College; not even the teachers there had shown me at this point.) “I learned sign language in a class too.”

“Oh, are you hearing?”

“Hard of hearing,” Zee started speaking while simultaneously signing. “I grew up in the hearing world and thinking of myself as disabled, but it was after going to fjkld ajs difl;a jfjld fjdlow jdjmdk jldkfa.....”

“Whoa, sorry,” I said when she took a pause. “Could you maybe repeat everything you just said, slower and louder? Sorry!”

The whole group laughed. “Sure, sorry!” Zee said, and began again.

This is the main problem I'm having right now at these kinds of events; although I'm meeting way more people than I expected who can both sign and speak at the same time, my hearing loss prevents me from being able to follow them in large crowded rooms, while I don't know enough ASL yet to be able to completely follow them in sign language either. It's certainly proof that I'm doing the right thing by learning ASL in the first place, but it leads to these frustrating experiences where I can't exactly communicate with anyone right now, either hearing or Deaf. I'm glad for the experience, and I can definitely feel myself getting a little better at signing after every single evening like this most recent one; but I have to admit, I still have to really force myself at this point to go out to these events in the first place, because I know in advance how difficult it's going to be for me to converse well no matter which language I pick.

But on the other hand, I've also started having this sobering experience online that, although it's kind of a downer to actually witness, has definitely been producing positive emotions when it comes to the efforts to stick with the immersion events here in the city, where I just throw myself into situations where everyone around me can sign much better than I can, and I futilely try to keep up with the few isolated words I can pick out of their conversations. Namely, now that I've reactivated my Facebook account for the first time in three years (which I had to do in order to stay in touch with my fellow Columbia College students), and have started to join a bunch of other Deaf culture groups there, I'm starting to meet more and more “late-deafened adults” (LDAs) exactly like me; for those who don't know, this is a special term within the Deaf community to describe those who grew up hearing just fine, but are only now losing their hearing in middle-age. (Here's an alarming statistic for you hearing folks — two-thirds of all elderly people on the planet are functionally or profoundly deaf, so now you know that you've got that to look forward to. You're welcome!)

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the LDAs I'm meeting online display the exact set of stereotypes that LDAs are known for within the Deaf community. Since they grew up hearing, they see their increasing deafness as something “being taken away from them,” with the resulting grieving and anger that that phrase implies. They've often spent decades now cultivating a group of hearing friends and family members, and rising through the ranks of a corporate job; now their hearing loss is putting an end to that, and at the age of 35, 40, 45, 50, they find themselves without the enthusiasm or energy to go out there and start all over again. They find sign language extremely difficult to learn in middle age, and feel despondent over the idea of putting in all that work and having no one around to use it with in the first place, so most LDAs never bother to learn ASL at all, cutting themselves off from ever being able to get involved in the Deaf community to begin with. And so most LDAs just resign themselves to the idea of counting down the clock of their elderly years in a state of loneliness and confusion, no longer able to communicate effectively with their existing social circle but not capable of making a new one either, their lives dwindling and narrowing into the space of a single room and the giant TV that keeps them constant company in the years before death.

Most of the LDAs I meet online fit this description to a T; and while it always saddens me, it also strengthens my resolve to not let this be my eventual fate too. I mean, certainly it helps that I'm a freelancer and small-business owner who works by himself from home, and definitely it helps that I have few physical friends in Chicago I meet up with regularly, no hearing spouse or children to have to worry about, end-of-life parents who I only see a handful of times a year. But part of it, I acknowledge, is that I simply work harder at this stuff than a lot of other LDAs do; I force myself at the age of 50 to see the world in a growth mindset, force myself to see my hearing loss in terms of the positive new opportunities it's presenting, instead of the negative doors it keeps closing with each successive year. I force myself to practice sign language four hours a day, force myself to stay upbeat when I can still only recognize 1 word out of every 10 when someone signs. I force myself to be this way, because I think it's a healthier way to confront a world that is often shitty and unfair, instead of crawling back into my lair with my tail between my legs, admitting that this shitty unfair world of ours has beaten me for good.

Lord knows I'm a fuck-up in many other areas of my life — just take a glance at my credit score sometime if you doubt it, or note the unending trail of failed businesses and bitter ex-girlfriends that drag behind me like tornado damage. But as I was reminded this week by one of my online ASL practice partners, a perpetually sunny grade school teacher in Texas whose name is literally Joy, overcoming the depression and stagnancy that comes with the failing health of middle age is something that takes legitimate courage and legitimate work, and I'm glad that I've somehow been able to summon up that courage and discipline when it has eluded me in so many other areas of my life. So yes, I will keep throwing myself into Deaf community events, and yes, I will keep messing up royally at them, and yes, I will keep begging for forgiveness from those bemused, exasperated native signers who must deal with my fumbling, glacially slow, mistake-riddled attempts at communicating with them. Yes, I will keep doing all of that. Because life is still worth putting in that kind of effort, even a middle-aged life full of compromises and problems and a trailer park full of destroyed dreams, strewn about like so much garbage and just waiting for a FEMA clean-up crew. I hope you too will have a chance to remember all this, the next time you're forced to confront your mortality as well.

The Complete ASL Saga of Jason Pettus 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

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.