Last Thursday, September 6th, my mom, my sister, my boyfriend (Michael), and I took a field trip to the
Anybody who knows me knows that I have been fascinated with Deaf culture and sign language for a long time. And it was because of this fascination that Mom called MSBD about setting up a field trip for us tour the Deaf side of the school.
I really wanted to sit in on a class and really get to interact with the kids by trying out my newly acquired ASL knowledge. But the lady Mom talked to said she didn’t know if that would be possible, that all she could give was a tour of the facilities.
So we didn’t really know what to expect when we set out that bright, sunny Thursday morning.
When we finally figured out how to get on the grounds, and then which door to go in, we sat in the waiting area until a lady, who introduced herself as Vicky Kettleman aka our tour guide, came. She was not the original lady that Mom had talked to and, this being her first tour, she looked very nervous. Upon seeing how nervous she was, I felt quite sure that our tour would not be as exciting as I had hoped.
Boy, how wrong I was.
We started walking through the school admiring their trophies from various sports, and found our way to the gym where basketball practice had just ended. All the little girls stared at us as Ms. Kettleman introduced us to the coach. He was very nice and talked to us for a while, signing as he talked. But when I tried to talk to the girls in what little ASL I knew, they just looked at me like I had green skin and had just stepped off a space craft.
We continued walking around the school with Ms. Kettleman pointing out interesting things for us to see, until we happened upon a Science class. We popped our heads in and the teacher urged us in. She was very friendly and translated what we said to the four children in her class. They were very curious as to how I am learning ASL online. I even got to try out a little bit of it on them. And we even learned the sign for “joking”
Our tour took us around into the Blind side of the conjoined building. We walked down the hallways dragging our fingers over the signs with Braille on the bottom. We stopped in front of a Blind math class and the teacher invited us in. She then proceeded to show us how to operate a Braille typing machine. It was SO cool!
Eventually we found ourselves in the separate building for the deaf Elementary students. We saw the end of an assembly, totally in sign, and then we wandered around the building talking to whoever would talk to us. We popped into a 2nd grade class and then into a preschool class. There were three little three and four year-olds in the preschool class, and the teacher was deaf too. Let’s just say, I got to practice a lot of my signing with her! She even invited me to come volunteer with her.
After we left the preschool class we found our way to Jerri Byrd’s office, she was the lady in charge of volunteers. She seemed very eager for us to volunteer there and gave us background check forms (like we have a background that she needs to check out! J) to fill out and send back to her.
So, that was our adventure, and a few days ago Mom sent our filled out forms to the school and now we’re waiting to hear back from them, and hopefully I’ll be volunteering there once a week learned all kinds of new things!