Hooray for School! Part I

There are a few reasons I haven't talked about my classes yet. First, I had yet to have all of my classes. Well, we're a week in, so that one is taken care of.

Second, I wasn't sure how personal I wanted this blog to be. It was originally just going to be about New York City in general, no thoughts or anecdotes about my education at all. Recently I've decided that I'd rather use it to keep up with everyone that's far away than try to be Carrie Bradshaw and create a publishable character (a girl can dream). I don't want to feel like I can't say something on here because it doesn't fit with the "theme" of my blog. So basically, screw it, I'm going to write about school. I didn't move to New York to be a writer. I moved to New York to be a student, and eventually a teacher. School is my life. My life is school.

SO without further ado, thoughts after my first week of classes:

Designing Curriculum & Instruction
The first thing I learned in this class is that my professor is a Gator, so that was pretty awesome. Apart from that, this class freekin terrifies me. There's an unwritten prerequisite (Principles of Teaching & Learning), which is also on my program's course of study. Unfortunately, that class wasn't offered this semester, so we plunged head first into this class. Almost everyone else in the class is a second year student and/or has teaching experience. I'm bound and determined to do my damnedest in this class, but that 200-page curriculum project at the end of the semester is pretty daunting. Luckily the other people in my program are all in my section, so we should be able to form a group and create an actual ASL curriculum, which will basically be the coolest thing in the world, assuming we decode the language of our crazy textbooks and actually figure out how this curriculum design stuff works.

Intellectual History of the Deaf
This class is listed on my course of study as "Psychosocial Aspects of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Part I." Needless to say, I was overjoyed when I showed up and SURPRISE it's a history class. If you haven't noticed already, I'm a total history geek. I really liked learning Deaf culture in sign language classes because I enjoyed the historical aspect of it. On our first day, we learned about references to deaf people in the Torah and Talmud, so I was basically overjoyed. Let's just combine everything I love learning about into one class. I actually liked doing the reading for this class today. I'm sure my fellow teaching assistants down in the Swamp can understand how excited I was to read about Clerc, Gallaudet, Stoeke, Public Law 94-142 and the IDEA (bonus points if you all just did the signs for those things/heard Tuccelli in your head while reading this).

We're combined with the Deaf Education students for this class, and not everyone understands ASL. My program coordinator, who is Deaf, teaches the class entirely in sign, so we have a pair of voice interpreters. They are amazingly talented interpreters, and it was cool for me to actually see a pair working together, taking turns and feeding each other things that the one currently voicing might have missed. The professor's fingerspelling is INSANELY fast, and it's usually crazy words like "epistemes," so the fact that they were catching everything is pretty darn cool.

However, as my friend Gator B over at The Boston Buzz pointed out, hearing a voice interpreter say something when you're trying to focus on the signs that you've already seen and could probably comprehend is REALLY DIFFICULT. For me, it's easy to fall back into depending on my ears to receive the information instead of my eyes, which is really bad since it's my receptive signing skills that need the most work. Unlike Gator B's ASL class, the voice interpreter will NOT be going away since some people in the Deaf Ed program here don't know a single sign. I'm seriously considering ear plugs for tomorrow's class.

Lots of words and no pictures? Sounds like a two-part post to me.