Does a bump in the road ruin the journey?

“Our patience will achieve more than our force”

Edmund Burke

This blog post may wax a bit philosophical, and for that (and for readers who are not interested in that), I do apologize. However, I think it’s important to be aware that every learning journey, project, new language, or whatever, is never a linear progression of skills. I started on my ASL journey just two weeks ago, and in my perfectionist mind I figured “Hey, can’t be too hard, it’s just a school assignment, right?”

Well, that attitude is definitely not helpful. In only the third week of working on ASL for this course, I have already experienced blips in the road (hence the cover picture and title). Mainly, a lack of dedicated time towards the project. I haven’t spent much time practicing my finger spelling as I would have liked to, and my goal of trying out sentences and working towards numbers was never really in my thoughts during the past week. So as I’m writing this post, surrounded by my colleagues’ tales of success and how their learning projects are progressing, I feel kind of glum.

Now, this is where I started thinking, “I mean, it’s only a course project, right? It won’t really matter after June anyways, so just fake it”. And I have an issue with that, because if I would have selected a project on something not directly applicable to something I can use or teach or transfer to future students, I probably would have thought along those lines. But ASL is something I am currently using in my job now, and I see the joy that communication has on the kids I work with. Imagine not being able to express your emotions, your frustration with schoolwork, your happiness at doing well; it would be so exhausting. And I’ve experienced that! I lived in Serbia and Croatia for two years with the expectation of becoming fluent in Serbian and Croatian, after only 9 weeks of training. Not being able to be understood was so debilitating, and this gives me some more food for thought about this project. Perhaps I should think of it more as a teaching resource, or a way of connecting with my students, rather than an assignment.

All of that being said, I do not have a progress video to report for this week, as I feel like I haven’t made any progress. My goal is still to finger-spell complete sentences and learn my numbers up to 50 for this next week, and I’m hoping I take it a bit more seriously this time around. A bump in the road does not ruin the journey, but just makes the journey that much more memorable (unless we’re talking about sinkholes in Saskatoon, in which case yes, it very much ruins your journey).

Instead of me attempting to fake my learning, I’ve attached some resources below that I am hoping to dive into in the coming weeks for my ASL project. Click around, explore, and if you’ve made it this far, thanks for bearing with a more profound post than I originally intended. Next week can only go up from here!

• Handspeak, an ASL dictionary that I discovered and will most certainly refer to
• An article on some tips for learning a new language
• A TEd talk by John McWhorter that gave me some motivation to keep trying
• And finally, another article that explains why learning a language is so hard, and reminded me that “You are probably just being impatient”