Story of the Day 8/ 23 2011 #2

Sarah’s mission in life is to teach sign language. She didn’t choose it, but there is this plethora of over-eager Hearing people who seek her out- sometimes individually and sometimes in groups.

I have explained to her that this is the penalty of being the only deaf student in a large public high school, and at a time when a popular TV show, Switched at Birth, has brought attention to deafness and sign language via a “hot” young actor. Sarah, who knows him, will argue about the “hot” part, but she actually has hearing friends who think that. I have told Sarah not to roll her eyes too loudly.

So, Sarah was out there among the natives, today, and one of them approached her to show her the 4 signs that someone else had taught her. There was the sign for work, and the one for hot chocolate, and the one for…except that every single one of them was a vulgar sign.

While the excited youngster was demonstrating her sign vocabulary for Sarah, Sarah’s interpreter was cringing. Sarah, however, was not. She has learned these signs and many worse ones from previous interpreters who also thought they were just normal educational vocabulary or proper terms. I don’t mean that she learned these signs from them, but she was exposed to the true extent of idiocy- and in the case of the interpreters, from people who were supposed to know the correct signs. In this case, it was from a kid who had, obviously, been hoodwinked by someone who is not very nice.

This happened right at the start of Sarah’s Animation/ Film Production class.

Later, during the same class, another student came up, also excited to share the few sign language words she had learned from somewhere. Amazingly, these were also …not the right words. And again, the interpreter cringed , while Sarah just gave the student the correct signs for what the girl thought she had been saying.
And this was all just during one class.

I give the interpreter a few more weeks, and she will be used to this.