Sounds surprising? Yes its true and I realized this last Sunday to be precise on 20th feb2011. Aqil and I have been noticing that the Deaf cant seem to remember spellings. Our students told us too that it was difficult and they would invariably misspell even a simple word.
I spoke to them of the concept of Dictation, that I was exposed to as a kid in school. This actually got me the idea of trying to have a dictation for our English class. It was decided - this sunday all the vocabulary that we had learnt we will have to memorize and have a Dictation Test.
Everyone was ready today and we started off - for the first time the Deaf of our group who have studied in various schools in Pune gave a dictation test.
Sadly what should have been a routine at school to help memorize spelling was never done for the Deaf, and the irony is the Deaf are always blamed for not being able to memorize spelling. Not their fault is what I say.
Anyways, we managed to do just thirty words. However everyone is all geared up to do at least fifty words next Sunday :-) . I love their dedication and enthusiasm.
What we all realized that in their twenties these Deaf, stiil have a long way to go in picking up and moving on with a written language. I hope that the fire to learn never diminishes in these young minds.
Post lunch we faced a challenge. We have access to only one classroom and today we have a few new joinees. We could not stop our session and we did not want the new guys and girls to miss out on what we had done previously. Aqil and Prince volunteered to give individual attention to the new students and teach them what we did previously.
What do you think the old kids do? Nah- we didnt while away time. I picked out a few individuals who were confident of what they had learnt all this while and we set up small teams.
Task - each team picks up a few words and acts as the trainer to teach the rest.
Outcome - Train the Trainers - we may have some good skilled Deaf individuals who have good leadership qualities, some who have a lot of patience and some who had the art of getting fun into a study session. Healthy competition and a good interactive session where each group tried to outdo the other.
End Result - we are building up
- word bank
- improving leadership qualities
- getting rid of stage fear
- learning to respect the speaker
We strated off with a handful of Deaf friends at LEED Pune and at that time we didnt even have a name to ourselves. Today we have an Identity, we are growing in number and most importantly we are learning to share what we learn.
It is true we learn more when we teach others . I see this happen every sunday.
All for now. LEED Pune will be back with some more news soon.
And you guys can catch us in action on facebook. Search for LEED Pune.
Cheers
Atsy
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