Every formerly "pure oral" (what we called it in the '70s) deaf person has his or her own tale to tell of how he or she came to begin using sign language. Here is mine:
Sometime in the late 1970s, I discovered sign language. Or more precisely, the sign alphabet.
My mother was working as an oral interpreter at a mainstream program in another state. Some of the kids she interpreted for knew sign language, and she told them she had a deaf daughter. One day she brought home a card with the sign language alphabet on it.
What was this? I was excited and set about learning the alphabet quickly. I carried that card with me on the school bus, where I sat alone and practiced my fingerspelling.
The kids at her school began to invite me along to their activities. They all signed and talked, and for the first time I got a taste of what my life could have been like.
When I was 14, I took my first sign language class at a local community college. What I did not know then was that the class was not teaching ASL but signed english! To this day my sign language is very "English" in nature. That class was followed by another class when I was 15. After that I had to stop because no more classes were available.
My hearing classmates found out I was learning sign language, and asked me to teach them the alphabet. I did so, only to find that they weren't interested in communicating more efficiently with me, only in being able to curse in sign language!
With no one to practice my signs with, my sign skills deteriorated. I had no sign classes the year I was 16. Then the following year I went to college, and re-discovered sign language. I still remember how it felt that very first day in the cafeteria at the Rochester Institute of Technology/National Technical Institute for the Deaf, looking around me at all the sign language and feeling as if I had entered a different world.
