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Emotions, emotions, emotions….

See more: Teaching Hearing Subjects: 12 things you should know

For some of us, learning to sign can be a very emotional experience. These emotions can be distracting, frustrating, maybe they make learning almost impossible,

For instance:

  • Parents who learn to sign because their baby is deaf, may still be in mourning, because their baby cannot hear. These sad feelings may make it difficult for them, to learn to sign. 
  • Some of us want to learn to sign, for our job. Maybe we are social workers, psychologists, or teachers. We may think that all deaf people need our help. In class, we may want to ‘help’ you, by correcting you, or by explaining things to you, or to the other students, or by acting as your ‘interpreter’. We mean well, but this is patronizing. You are the teacher, we are the learners.
  • Some of us may be so used to ‘helping’ deaf people, that we get upset when you correct our mistakes. Deaf people helping or correcting hearing people? This is something new for some of us, difficult to get used to, maybe very emotional.   
  • Some of us may SOOO love sign language, that we get carried away in our enthusiasm. We start using sign language, everywhere! We will sign to deaf people in the street, on the bus, even if we don’t know them. We start signing to hearing people. We start ‘explaining’ Deaf Culture and sign language to everyone we meet. Never mind that we’ve only had one class. Never mind that we only know 10 signs! We SOOO live sign language! If we have to, we’ll just create our own signs! 
    We don’t come to class to learn, we come because we SOOO love sign language, we SOOO love you, our Deaf teacher! We are sign groupies!  And then, when things get difficult, or when we fail a test, or when you are a very strict teacher: we will be stop being groupies, we will be drop-outs. 

 

What might work:

  • Be aware of these emotions, but try and keep them in the background. You are our sign language teacher, not our psychotherapist. You are our teacher, not our new best friend.