I’ve been thinking about getting a doctorate. There. I said it. I don’t know that I will.
I’m 61 years old, happily teaching high school, and have no particular desire to leave my classroom and become something else. Which does raise the perfectly reasonable question of why on earth I would contemplate doing this to myself. I don’t even think that getting a doctorate would help me up the salary scale. I’m just deeply curious about some stuff. I keep wondering things.
I’ve been writing more this year because I want to pay closer attention to my teaching. Not necessarily to become a better ASL teacher—although I certainly hope that happens—but because after spending all day surrounded by teenagers, I often find myself driving home thinking about something that happened and realizing I have more questions than answers.
And lately I’ve been wondering about what happens after my students leave me.
I teach hearing teenagers ASL. We spend an enormous amount of time together learning vocabulary and grammar and facial expressions and classifiers and fingerspelling and how to communicate visually. We learn about Deaf history and Deaf culture. We talk about what it means to enter a community that isn’t yours.
We practice.
And practice.
And practice some more.
I assess them. They pass ASL 1. Some take ASL 2. Some continue into ASL 3. Eventually they graduate.
And then…
What?
Where does all of this go?
I wish I knew how—or if—my teaching of ASL impacts the lives of my hearing students and the Deaf people they eventually meet. That’s the question rattling around in my head right now.
Maybe a student becomes an interpreter. That’s an obvious connection.
Maybe they become a nurse or teacher or police officer or social worker and someday ASL becomes unexpectedly useful professionally. Maybe they eventually have a Deaf coworker. Or neighbor. Or friend. Maybe they marry a Deaf person. Maybe someday they have a Deaf child.
But those are the big, obvious examples.
I’m interested in the tiny ones, too. What happens when one of my former students is 32 years old and standing in line at Starbucks and realizes the person next to them is Deaf? Do they remember anything? Can they pull enough ASL out of some dusty corner of their brain to communicate?
Do they remember how to get someone’s attention appropriately? Do they feel less awkward? Do they understand that ASL isn’t English on the hands? Do they know enough to recognize when communication is working—and when it isn’t? Do they know when to help?
Maybe even more importantly, do they know when not to insert themselves into someone else’s conversation just because they happen to know some ASL?
I have no idea.
And then I realized I’ve been thinking about only half of the question. Because I can ask my former hearing students whether learning ASL mattered to them. But that doesn’t tell me whether it mattered to the Deaf people they encountered.
Those aren’t the same thing.
A hearing person might walk away from an interaction thinking, That was amazing! I got to use my ASL! What did the Deaf person think? Was it helpful? Pleasant? Awkward? Annoying?
Did it make communication easier?
Did the hearing person know considerably less ASL than they thought they knew? Entirely possible. What do Deaf people wish hearing ASL students were learning in our classrooms? Maybe the answer is more language.
Maybe it’s less language and more cultural understanding. Maybe it’s humility. Maybe it’s the confidence to communicate even when it isn’t perfect. Maybe it’s knowing how to repair communication when something goes wrong. Maybe it’s understanding that knowing some ASL doesn’t make you an authority on Deaf people.
I don’t know.
And I really mean that.
I honestly don’t know.
I’ve lived in several places where I’ve had opportunities to encounter Deaf people, education and signed languages outside the United States—in Australia, Namibia and Cambodia in particular.
Those experiences gave me more questions, not fewer. Who benefits when hearing people learn the signed language used by a Deaf community?
Is wider knowledge of signed language inherently good for Deaf people?
I want to say yes.
But is it?
There are legitimate conversations within Deaf communities about language ownership and about hearing people building platforms, careers or social-media following and clout by teaching a language and representing a culture that aren’t theirs. I understand that concern.
And then I stand in my public high-school classroom teaching ASL to hearing kids. That makes me wonder about my own place in all of this. I don’t think the answer is that hearing people shouldn’t teach ASL. Public education is complicated. Credentialing is complicated. Access to qualified Deaf teachers is complicated.
But I do think I should keep asking:
Who is this education for?
My students, obviously. But is that enough?
If we’re going to devote classrooms, teachers, schedules, public money and years of teenagers’ lives to teaching ASL, I’d like to think something meaningful leaves the classroom with them. And maybe I’m defining “meaningful” too narrowly if I only think about language proficiency.
Suppose a student remembers very little ASL fifteen years from now. Was the education wasted? What if that same person remembers that Deaf people aren’t broken hearing people? What if they understand why an interpreter is necessary? What if they don’t panic when communication requires a little work? What if they’re comfortable enough to make eye contact and figure it out? What if learning ASL as a teenager simply made a Deaf person they encounter decades later feel a little less foreign to them?
Does that count? I think it does. But I don’t actually know what Deaf people would say. That’s becoming important to me.
Maybe someday this turns into doctoral research. Maybe it doesn’t.
I’m not ready to turn it into a research question yet. I’m not really ready to pretend I have expertise or answers I don’t have.
Right now I just want to notice the question. Or questions.
I spend my days trying to figure out whether students are learning what I’m teaching them.
Maybe I’ve been measuring the easiest part.
The harder question might be what they carry with them when they leave.
And whether any of it matters to someone they haven’t even met yet.
I wish I knew.
Which, I suppose, is a pretty good reason to keep wondering.
Learning is why. 