Ok. I have gotten behind again. Aside from class starting and trying to run/walk daily, I have been spending some quality time trying to recruit people for the Relay for Life and sending out emails about my participation. But that is another story I will hopefully get to later.
When I returned from the visit to my parents the weekend after Easter, my computer started acting up again. One day it was shut off completely and would not come back on! Harley had to switch it around with another machine we had lying around. Then it was incredibly slow and kept locking up. Harley informed me today after tweaking it, that the memory chip had to be replaced. Then last night for some unknown reason the keyboard stopped working and my attempts to plug it back in proved futile. I still am unsure how he got the keyboard to work again.
Without my keyboard I am up a creek without a paddle as I cannot type on a laptop or standard keyboard. I use an ergonomic keyboard. So if you got a very strange email from me this week which was garbled and had numerous typos, you know the reason why. I tend not to type or email much when that happens. And yes, I have lost dexterity due to the NF2. My fingers don't function as well as they used to and my fingertips are numb. It has been posed that this may be due to some nerve damage in my brain or neuropathy as a long term side effect of the chemotherapy I had when I was 21. Today I noticed blood on various things and discovered that I had cut the tip of my thumb somehow and did not know it.
I am seriously considering auditing my final ASL class. I made the decision this week when things started becoming more frustrating for me. I am sure I could somehow muddle though it and get a decent grade but it would involve more work and time than I really want or have to commit.
I am beginning to feel kind of like the odd duck as everyone else is hearing and most are in the interpreter training program. There is one other guy who is deaf but he went to a deaf institution and is very fluent in ASL. He is taking the class because he wants to become a teacher and transfer to Galluadet (the exclusively deaf college in the US).
With my lower visual acuity, dexterity problems, and hampered memory, it is very hard to keep up with the other students. I felt like a total fool the other day in lab. We had another instructor filling in and I misunderstood what he was asking me. I was very concerned about rerecording my signed version of the pledge of allegiance. Thus I confused the sign "copy" with the sign "record". I know the signs but sometimes my brain has a hard time sorting out things if the signing is quick or I feel somewhat stressed.
I thought he asked "who needs to record still?" when he was actually asking "who needs to copy still?" I raised my hand and then turned to figure out how to turn the video camera on at the desk. I was a little frustrated because the buttons were small and I could not shove my head back there enough to read them.
Finally I figured out what must be the logical button to turn the dang thing on. I looked at the TV screen to see if it worked and I did indeed find myself on the monitor. Then I needed to angle it correctly so I was centered on the screen.
All of a sudden I felt someone tapping me on the shoulder and the person asks in sign "Why are you recording yourself?" with a very confused look. I turn to see everyone looking at me. I had a moment of confusion as I looked around and nobody else was recording themselves. Then I noticed that it appeared everyone was waiting on me.
I can't remember how, but I realized that I misunderstood and everyone was waiting for me to get my tape ready because they thought I had to copy the video that plays on everyone's tv (our assignment which is the same but there are not enough vcrs for the whole class to tape the assignment the first time through). Talk about feeling like a boob!
Anyhow, each week we watch what is called a "receptive translation" or RT where we have to interpret a story that a deaf person signs in ASL. Last quarter I could do fairly well on them after watching most videos over and over again. However, the stories have been short until now. Last Monday I watched the RT over and over again in slow motion and I was still not able to answer all the questions about the translation.
This week I felt like my eyeballs were going to fall out of my damn skull! My biggest weakness is trying to read deaf fingerspelling. I can sort of figure it out if I have lots of context, watch it repetitively, and logically figure it out using the topic and whatever letters I can read. Wouldn't you know it? The darn translation this week is about FINGERSPELLING! The lady in the video fingerspelled numerous words and of course the topic was FINGERSPELLING. We were supposed to create a mental map to have stamped but the instructor wrote on the board the only things I actually understood! Further, this seemed to be the longest signed story we ever had to watch. I just could not handle watching someone fingerspell things for that long. To watch it in slow motion over and over again would take up hours! I did not have that kind of time to figure it out and make a map in the last few 10-15 minutes of class.
Other people can watch it once and pretty much get the gist of most of it. I on the otherhand, have to watch it again and again and for each fingerspelled word I have to keep repeating the video in slow motion.
This is what it is like: pretend you are listening to a cellphone message from someone who speaks German. You only know German you learned in high school which is not the fluent use of the language. Then the person on the other end is not only fluent in German but speaks at the speed of lighting! Ah but that is not all! Your further complication is that you have a bad cellphone connection and pieces of your conversation keep getting cut out. Your job is to decipher what the German person is saying (and NO you cannot speak to the person on the other end. You can only listen to the recorded message over and over again).
I still want to stay in the class I just do not want to stress over the competition of a grade. The frustration of worrying over a grade and comparing myself to the other students I think will make me resentful of my deafness. To be honest I sometimes pity myself or get angry that this is not my choice. All the other people taking it (for the most part) still have their hearing, have an absolute love of the language, and posess very good receptive skill and dexterity. I don't have any of those. If I was hearing I would not be going to school to become an interpreter (not because I don't like the language but because it is not my forte). People who become interpreters SHOULD be very good at it as interpreting is a VERY important job.
I don't want to have a negative attitude about it or to start getting in a mood of feeling sorry for myself. That is my main reason for wanting to audit. In addition, with spring here, I have several things that I need or want to commit to (keeping myself healthy with daily exercise, running or walking in what I see as good causes in the community, helping Harley with priorities we need to accomplish, helping with our remodeling and yard projects, and of course all the things that I was responsible or did before these new tasks).
That is what is on my mind right now.
No comments:
Post a Comment