The first week of school usually hits me like a truck, but thankfully this year so far has been different. As a senior, I didn’t feel the same amount of anxious that I usually do in the beginning of the school year, so I hope that sticks around. I was worried about taking an AP class on top of a dual enroll course and a math class, sports, and clubs, but now that I’m a week in, I don’t know what I was so worried about. First, I have a good class. When I walked in on the first day, the only people I recognized were three or four of my friends; I hadn’t seen most of my classmates before. On the first day of class we went outside and introduced ourselves and explained why we’re here and how we got here. Doing that activity made me realize that I wasn’t in a typical AP class, and I began to regret my decision of choosing to take it less and less as the hour went on. Throughout the week, this realization occurred to me more and more as we read poetry at the beginning of class every day, which I didn’t appreciate previously but started to enjoy towards the end of the week. The most memorable thing that I can take away this week was the discussion of immersion learning. As I thought more about it and about what I want to do with my life, I was able to connect it to my own life in a way that could affect my entire future. For my whole life I’ve wanted to learn American Sign Language, and I’ve been debating on whether or not I should sign up to take a course at CMU for the spring semester, and after this week I think I’m going to. In the future I want to be an occupational therapist, which definitely means I’ll be working with children who speak ASL or are learning ASL as their main form of communication. I think it would be a huge accomplishment to be able to communicate with the deaf community and understand their culture as a hearing person, and I plan on enrolling in a course as soon as I can after the discussion today. To relate this back to immersion learning, I want to be in a position where I know enough ASL to be thrown into a school or university of deaf students and be able to communicate and learn more from them in a short or extended period of time. Maybe, if immersion learning works for me, I could end up teaching or instructing members of the hearing impaired community as a career or just being able to communicate with ASL speaking people in general. I’m glad that this class has already opened my eyes to future opportunities that I’m going to investigate more. See How Immersion Helps to Learn a Language by the New York Times.
1 Comment
Ben
9/13/2017 11:46:29 am
Hey Kayla,
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Kayla Campbell
Write something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
November 2017
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