Today I learned the sign for Osama

It was weird being in a classroom today. Most of the class was devoted to discussing 9/11, which is still strange to me, but stranger still, was that it was being discussed in ASL. ASL is, duh, a super visual language. If you are explaining a plane crashing into a building you are creating a picture of the crash in the space in front of you. If you are explaining people jumping out the windows, the people are falling before your eyes.

Adding another dimension of weirdness was the fact that most of the students (middle schoolers) couldn't provide any real details of the event. Not because they are ignorant but because they were five when it happened. When asked, they knew that it had something to do with a plane hitting a really tall building and a huge explosion-- signed with chilling accuracy-- but they could not name the structures. They also knew that it had to do something with a man with a beard. Everything they know of the event they learned from a teacher or a text. They have no first or secondhand experiences to draw upon.

Incidentally "Osama bin Laden" has his own sign, which I learned today. I also re-learned the signs for "cope" and "destroy."