My education in American Sign Language began with a Summer School ASL course at Bishop Macdonell, though strangely not recorded in my OS Transcript. I came in with a history of using hand gestures to enhance the spoken word. Seeing ASL for the first time and learning how it uses gestures to communicate without speaking was like magic. What a shame there was only one class.
My dictionary already has a graduate for the ASL hand sign for LEARN, so I turned to sports to represent the high school experience. A handsome football player with a cheerleader’s pom-pom shows the ASL hand sign for HIGH SCHOOL. Drawn in 2017 for the dictionary, I updated the hand sign after a 2022 ASL class taught me the Canadian variant. For fans of the book, I’ve placed both versions of this sign in the animation. The H hand sign quickly changes into an S. The starting position is higher for the Canadian region, at the shoulder instead of underneath it.
* I also corrected the fingerspelling direction of double letters.
#ASL #signlanguage #footballplayer #highschool #cartoon #myasldictionary
