Doing It Wrong On Purpose
sooo. today's lesson is a little different and some of you are gonna think i've lost it.
we're gonna do every sign wrong first.
on purpose. all of us, together, out loud, in front of each other.
here's why. i've watched this class for years now, different faces every session, and the thing that kills people isn't the handshapes. it's the fear of being watched getting it wrong. you freeze up, your hands go stiff, you start signing like you're defusing a bomb instead of talking to a person. and then you decide you're bad at this and you quit coming.
so we're gonna torch that fear right now.
the drill
pick any sign we've learned so far. bathroom, help, thank you, i'm sorry, whatever.
now do it as wrong as you possibly can. flip the handshape. sign it upside down. do it in the wrong spot, up by your ear or down by your knee. make it ridiculous.
everybody does this at the same time, out loud, on the count of three. i'm doing it too. i'm bad at looking silly on command — always have been, it feels fake to me even though i know it works — but i do it anyway because if i'm not willing to look dumb first, why would you.
then we do it right. same sign, right handshape, right spot, and i want you to notice the difference in your own body. your shoulders drop a little. that's the whole point of the exercise. you just proved to yourself that wrong doesn't kill you, and now right feels like relief instead of a test.
why this actually works
toni and i have a signal we use at parties. i taught her the sign for "i'm done, let's go" a while back so we could bail without doing the whole loud goodbye lap around the room. works great. except now she's the one using it on me, usually when i've wandered into my third side conversation of the night and lost track of time. she'll catch my eye across the room and give me the sign, flat and small, barely a movement, and i know exactly what it means because we practiced it wrong first. we did it big and dumb and obvious in our kitchen until it stopped feeling weird. now it works even tiny and half-hidden across a crowded room, because the shape is locked in.
that's the whole idea. you don't get to small and natural and half-hidden — which is how real signing actually looks — until you've done it big and wrong and obvious a few times first.
my opinion on this, plainly
i think a lot of beginner classes are too polite. everybody's scared to correct each other, scared to look silly, so people just quietly do it a little wrong forever and never find out. i'd rather you embarrass yourself in my class than freeze up in a real conversation later because you're worried about getting caught. useful first, pretty later. that's the whole pitch of this whole course honestly, and this lesson's just that idea turned into a game.
try this at home
- pick a sign you already know. do it wrong in front of a mirror, exaggerated, silly. then do it right. feel the difference.
- if you've got a kid or a spouse around, get them to do it wrong with you. it's a genuinely fun five minutes and it takes the pressure off everybody.
- don't do this with fingerspelling yet — we're not there, and honestly reading fingerspelling back is its own beast we'll get into later. this drill's for whole signs.
- one real caution, not a big deal but worth saying: some of these exaggerated versions get you swinging your arms wider than normal. if you're near a lamp, a drink, a kid's head, give yourself some room before you go big.
kade still brings up the time i tried to fingerspell "peterson" fast to impress him and butchered the double-t so bad he couldn't breathe from laughing. i keep that story around on purpose. wrong is where this stuff actually starts sticking.
before next time
next lesson we're building on this and adding a couple new signs, so come ready to feel a little silly again. it gets easier every time, i promise.
~terry