apparently i've decided to go literal with this one.
in high school, i put off any sort of foreign language classes. it was an either/or situation for graduation requirements between foreign language and fine arts... well, i had fine arts credits out the wazoo with all the band & winter guard stuff i did so i pushed it off to college. i didn't want to take spanish or french anyways, which were the two languages del oro offered at the time. i wanted to take ASL (american sign language) and so that's what i did. my teacher was deaf, which made it a little difficult, but i guess that's true immersion right? i took asl 2 with a hearing professor who was fantastic. her class was entertaining and interesting, which really helped the learning process. my downfall was my third semester of ASL. I was all game and ready to go for it, but the professor I had for the class was just not my cup of tea. he was older and deaf, and his personality was a little gruff i guess you could say. that semester was a bit harder... we had video recorded finals, and did this weird model home project that i'm still not sure what it had to to with sign language at all since it was completely power point. very odd. i also took a classifiers class from him that semester, which was like a side course of different ASL things.
sad to say, i really don't remember much from those classes besides the basics. i can pick up a few things here and there when my aunt signs things - like when she said she was looking for a green shirt across the noisy dance studio the other week - but i don't think i could hold a full conversation with anyone. at least not at this point. so maybe i'll brush up on it sometime. maybe i'll refresh my memory. regardless, i am glad for the experience that i had learning ASL those semesters at sierra college. while it may not be as useful in the "real world" at this moment as knowing spanish would be, my experience learning it was great, and i would not have changed it for anything.
two movies i really enjoyed from the classes:
beyond silence
mr. holland's opus
and the not text book we read:
deaf like me
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