College is supposed to be all about learning things that will later be used in life, a career, or at least for useless trivia. However, we college students know that that’s not always the case. Students of all majors and minors often end taking a lot of classes that, quite frankly, don’t interest them at all. Those are called electives, and most students aren’t thrilled about them.
But then sometimes in college we get to take classes that we don’t really need to take, but we want to take, that we know we’ll actually use later in life.
For me, American Sign Language—ASL—is one of those classes.
I signed up for elementary ASL expecting it to be like every other lower division class: boring and fruitless. Little did I know that it was going to be one of my favorite classes. I was really surprised by how much I liked it and I’m already really excited to learn more.
One amazing thing about my class is my professor. She was born deaf and didn’t let that stop her from becoming a college professor and teaching ASL. I can’t even imagine, mostly because I am what the deaf culture refers to as “hearing”, how difficult it must have been to overcome such an extensive obstacle in life.
Deaf people, contrary to popular and common belief, are just as capable as hearing people. They can hold important jobs and careers, attend universities, drive, converse with others, and everything else that a hearing person can do—besides hear. Some deaf have even learned to speak, whether born deaf or after having become deaf later in life.
Deaf culture is an extremely real concept that affects the lives of deaf culture all around the world. Just as there are cultural differences between countries, there are also cultural differences between deaf people and hearing people.
ASL, however, is not an international language. There is a different version of signed speech for almost every language around the world. The differing signed languages can be slightly similar, such as American Sign Language, and the sign language used in France. It would still be hard to communicate through ASL with a deaf individual from another country.
Working at Starbucks, I get to interact with such a large amount of people every single day, and every once in a while, we run into a problem. A deaf person or family will come into the store and has to write down their order for us to understand because none of the employees at my store know how to sign.
I want to change that. I want to be able to communicate with them in their language so that they don’t have to feel uncomfortable or embarrassed for the misunderstanding.
I strongly believe that all children should learn sign language in grade school, at least for elementary levels of communication, because we never know when it could come in handy.