Teaching the Deaf By Heart

by Sharon Ferranti

When I began, I only knew the sign for “beautiful.”  It’s an elegant tracing of a circle around one’s face.  It’s like you try to grasp the beauty of your own face and then toss it to the other person.  That’s the sign for “beautiful.”

And so my journey began.  For one year I’ve been attempting to grasp the beauty of writing and point it back to my students.  We have been plucking words, and signs, and gestures, and taps and thumps and pantomime… anything to communicate with each other for the s purpose of the written sentence.   

There are few things more intimidating to the deaf student than writing.  At first I thought it was simply because American Sign Language and English are two different languages spoken in differing word order.  But ASL is not simply a series of words in a particular order.  It is an intricate system of facial gestures, spatial placement, and combinations of hand movements that don’t translate naturally to any spoken language.  Sign language is not something a deaf person does with her hands.  It’s something she does with her heart.

The other day, I walked into my fifth grade class with blank drawing paper.  We were going to do the tried-and-true WITS exercise in which the student traces her hand and then writes words inside the hand – about hands.  What do hands do?  I thought this would seem like a natural way to get the students to write about their experience with sign language.  The fifth graders enjoyed the prompt and wrote lovely poems, but not a word about sign language.  Later that day I taught three other deaf classes.  Not one student wrote about their hands speaking sign language.  I mentioned this to their teacher.  Her reply: “You’re right.  They don’t even connect sign language with their hands.  It’s so much more than that.”  And so I collected another in a long list of revelations.

I discovered right away that I would not be able to stand there and talk, while someone else interpreted for me.  If I was ever going to get the students to go with me on this voyage, I had to start learning their language.  So now I sign a bit, I talk a bit, and I cover the chalkboard with words.  

At the end of the day, deaf classes are just like any other WITS class.  The most important tools for teaching writing are not similes and metaphors.  They are smiles.  Empathy.  Patience.  Perseverance.  Humility.  And love.