Thanks to my union, I now have funding available for professional development! I combined it with the staff tuition benefit so I could take ASL 101 this term for no cash.

It’s been a few years since I was a student– my last class was calculus in 2014. It wasn’t until I was eating lunch before the first class session that I remembered there was probably a required textbook. Fortunately, college bookstores aren’t as mobbed during the first week as they used to be in the days before Amazon, and both staffing and books were plentiful.

Then when I got to class, the first thing the professor mentioned was D2L, the online system where the syllabus, assignments, and announcements live. Other people whipped out the syllabi they’d downloaded and printed, and I was like, oh yeah…D2L is a thing.

But in actual ASL skills, I have a bit of a head start– from finger-spelling as a kid, and from signing a little with Sanguinity when she was learning, and from combining signs and Chinuk wawa with the Where Are Your Keys method. So I understood the instructions to go to the online video ASL dictionary and learn five words a day that start with A in English, keep a list, and we’d teach each other in pairs during the next class. My partner did not catch the drift of this at all, and there was much confusion when we paired off Thursday and I was merrily signing and spelling, “Aquarium! Astronaut! Athlete!”

Since it is literally a 101 class, I’m not sure everyone gets that there’s a large component of teaching yourself between classes? (The book comes with DVDs for drills and mini-quizzes.) I suppose everything will be cleared up by and by. I’m not even sure I was supposed to stay on A words this whole week. But today I learned

1. Anchor (ship, not news)
2. Ancestor
3. Ambulance
4. Almost
5. All