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Good, fast, cheap. Choose two.
Best practices for building and sustaining sign language interpretation capacity: A discussion.
Scenario: A student posts a video to an online group and asks for feedback.. A commenter suggests the student should compare their videos with videos of fluent Deaf signers and note the differences.
Question: The student asks: "Is there is a more efficient way of improving?"
Response: Yes, certainly, there are more efficient ways of improving than spending countless hours reviewing videos of skilled signers and comparing what you see with your own videos.
How?
Hire and pay for a skilled ASL tutor or professional ASL instructor to analyze your videos, find the mistakes, document the mistakes for you, explain why the mistakes were mistakes, provide you examples of how to do the signs correctly, observe you doing the corrected signs, and then later review your signs with you to avoid memory extinction.
ASL as a second language learners want to learn ASL in ways that are:
1. Good (high quality)
2. Fast (efficient and effective)
3. Cheap (low or no cost)
The problem is typically you only get to choose two of the three.
Good + Fast = Expensive
● Private tutoring / instruction
● Immediate personalized feedback
● Structured curriculum with high quality materials and tools
- The negative? Higher cost for quality instruction
Good + Cheap = Slow
● Invest time to seek out high-quality free resources for self-study then study a wide and deep enough amount of those resources to eventually improve the areas you are in need of improving.
● Put in many hours watching native signers' videos to eventually be exposed to the information you need in order to improve your weak areas.
● Time and effort to attend community practice groups in person or online and sift through the range of conflicting advice to develop an informed opinion as to what is good information.
- The negative? Takes longer without expert guidance
Fast + Cheap = Poor Quality
● Watch whatever ASL videos show up in your feed (online media auto-suggested to you)
● Ask random people online for feedback
● Take low cost classes from unqualified people
● Borrow books from the library and hope that the signs are accurately shown, current, and that you are copying them correctly.
● Save money by not engaging in any formal (paid for) testing, diagnostic, feedback, and review processes
- The negative? Results in incorrect habits/usage
The advice to a student to spend time comparing videos falls under "Good + Cheap" - it improves their signing but is time-consuming.
If you want "Good + Fast" - you typically need to get out your wallet.
Hire and pay for a skilled ASL tutor.
We can modify "good, fast, low-cost -- pick two" by adding: "… or get lucky."
Good, fast, low-cost, -- pick two or hope you get lucky.
What do I mean by get lucky?
Sometimes a person who wants to learn ASL lucks into making friends with a skilled ASL user who is also skilled at teaching or explaining ASL.
Another form of luck for ASL learners is when those who have some money choose to donate it to content creators.
Person 1: Donates money to Person 2
Person 2: Creates content and gives it away.
Person 3: Gets lucky by finding that free content.
Good, fast, cheap -- pick two or hope you are lucky enough that others keep donating to support skilled content creators.
My one-on-one fee is $███* an hour. Why? Because that is the going rate for a Deaf, former full-time, tenured, full-professor, and researcher at a four-year state university who served as coordinator of the American Sign Language and Deaf Studies bachelor degree program, holds an earned doctorate in Deaf Studies / Deaf Education from an accredited university, and has over 30 years of experience instructing and providing workshops in a wide variety of settings including internationally, in-person, and online.
(*I'm not seeking private clients at this time but if you would like to be placed on an interest list and know my hourly rate let's start with you donating $100 to ASLU via https://lifeprint.com/donate/ after which you are welcome to email me at BillVicars(at)AOL(dot)com to describe your learning goals and ask my current rate.)
Can you hire a highly qualified ASL instructor or tutor for less? Yes, certainly -- if you get lucky.
Do I actually have clients that pay me that much?
A few. From time to time.
(I know for a fact that we have medical doctors, lawyers, and others in this discussion group that earn similar or higher rates for their service or products. The mechanic down the road charges $250 per hour, doesn't do house calls, and expects clients to drive there, arrange their own ride home, and leave their car overnight!)
To be clear:
I live in a very small house, do my own repairs, buy my clothes from "Ross" (a discount store), and pinch as many pennies as I can because most of my time and effort I simply share with others for free. (Similar to how I'm putting time and effort into typing this response and explanation to a question in an online discussion group -- for free.)
Why do I choose to live cheaply and give away my content? If I do one-on-one tutoring it generally just helps "one" person. If I instead create videos, curriculum, and instructional content and give it away online -- I am able to be of service to a much, much larger number of people.
Donations (from kind-hearted, generous people) allow content creators to focus on creating content.
You don't have to donate money to help others learn sign. You can be generous in other ways.
For example, to support a YouTube channel you can:
* Click the “thumb up” (like) icon on videos
* Subscribe
* Leave (positive) comments -- it helps algorithmic promotion of the video
* Click on the "bell" icon to receive notifications of new videos.
* Click the “Share” link and share the videos.
* Watch at least 30 seconds of ads or the entire ad if it's shorter than 30 seconds.
* On social media post a link to your favorite content creators and encourage your friends to learn ASL.
The more people that learn -- the more potential opportunities you will have to enjoy signing.
[End]
Notes:
* Want to help support ASL University? It's easy: DONATE (Thanks!)
* Another way to help is to buy something from Dr. Bill's "Bookstore."
* Want even more ASL resources? Visit the "ASL Training Center!" (Subscription Extension of ASLU)
* Also check out Dr. Bill's channel: www.youtube.com/billvicars
You can learn American Sign Language (ASL) online at American Sign Language University ™
ASL resources by Lifeprint.com © Dr. William Vicars