Hi hi! This week, I am going to talk about my involvement with American Sign Language (ASL) and how this can persuade you all to maybe start learning about it to. I started learning about ASL in 8th grade when I had this project called the “80/20” project. Some of the details are blurry, but I believe this meant that this project was going to be worth 20% of our religion grade and the other 80% meant we were going to work on it the last 8 weeks or so of 8th grade before going to high school. I decided I wanted to learn One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss in ASL and my friend would read it out loud to the class while I signed it. This experience and project started to open my eyes to the ASL community and how beautiful the language really is because of its visual image and facial expressions shown to tell any story.
I continued on my ASL path at CWU with a fantastic teacher, TL (shouout to her)! She is a very understanding person and encouraged me throughout Fall 2019 quarter to do our best. Her main message that she taught me is that we do not have to be perfect, we just need to try our best. I had to stop doing ASL this quarter because of a time conflict, unfortunately. However, I will pick ASL up again next year after Gen Eds are done.
ASL is becoming more common in pop culture from models such as Nyle DiMarco from the show Switched at Birth and Dancing with the Stars. Marlee Matlin has been in a variety of shows as well. I have noticed more sign/ASL exposure through movies, shows, and media coming out. This includes but not limited to a character on the show You from Netflix. More and more videos of employees ranging from amusement parks to restaurants learning ASL to be able to serve more of their audience/customers. ASL should be seen just as important of a language like Spanish and French because the more people we meet, you never know, you might meet a Deaf person in public and are curious to start a conversation with them, and get to know them for who they are.