 Well, I've been looking forward to this presentation. I'm quite honored. And I put my thoughts together about how I'm going to proceed. And I decided that I'm going to do it via my style. I hope you're OK with my style, which is not a formal style presentation. It's more free flowing. OK, today I looked outside and I saw that it was raining. And I recall back in 1972, the spring of 72, I was the NTID student majoring in photography. One particular morning, well, you know that Rochester's known for its overcast and cloudy daily weather. And I wasn't used to that. I'm from New England, where we get a better mix of nice days and sunny days. And Rochester is so different. And actually, it can be quite depressing. Well, one morning, I woke up and it was beautiful. Sunny and warm, so different. And I really was excited by the change in weather. And I got inspired that morning from the weather. And I wrote a poem called Bright Sunny Day. So that was 1972. But at that time, I chose not to share any of my poetry with my friends. I'm a humble person, quiet, quiet by nature. That's just who I am. I'm from Vermont. And that's the typical persona from that region. Anyway, over time, I would do my poetry to myself. And then in 1980 was my first public performance. I was so nervous. But I was happy to make that big breakthrough, that first step, and I discovered myself. From that point forward, I started performing my poetry. And people would tell me that, no, you're really good. But I wasn't as confident as I was being told I was. People would ask me, well, what is the line in your poem? Or what is the rhyme? What is a meter? I had no response. I didn't know how to respond. And so then I wasn't even sure. Am I an ASL poet? But I believe what others were telling me. I struggled a lot back in those days. And then in 1984, it was the first time that I took an opportunity to do some research on ASL poetry. I'm very grateful to Stokey's Grant that I was awarded. So with that financial support, I proceeded to do some research. And I'll never forget that time. I was telling you about my struggles. And as I started doing research, I was looking at how do I define the concept of line in ASL poetry, comparable to how it's done in English poetry. So I struggled. I was frustrated. I would watch videotapes of ASL poetry over and over and over again, hoping to make some new discoveries. And during the course of that year, I was very frustrated. And I was approaching the end of the project. I was granted that extension, but I was under the gun. It was quite stressful. And then somehow I came to a point where I realized, oh, wait a second. There it is. There's the line in ASL poetry. And I was quite disgusted with myself because it was always there, quite apparent. But I wasn't able to see it initially. And I think the reason why I struggle is because of the language oppression I experience through the course of my life. And I became extremely motivated and really delved into the area of ASL research. So from that point, I got a job at Gallaudet and they made me pursue a doctorate degree. And I didn't want to do that. I had my master's. I was quite satisfied. But I never had any ambition to pursue a PhD, but the job, the position I was in, required it. So I applied to Union Institute over in Ohio. They're a nontraditional program. I had the opportunity to design my own program. I presented it to committee and the committee approved it. Through the approval process, I was informed that I would have to instruct them on ASL poetry. That was how I would be awarded a PhD. So it was all my own ideas, my opportunity to present these courses. Now, you must know that there were no such ASL poetry courses in existence. So at this institute, I was given this opportunity. And through that process of discovery, I learned a great deal. I finished my studies in 93. And I've continued my research. So this evening, I'm going to present some information that's from my dissertation. Now, I don't have sufficient time to really explain all of my dissertation. I'm choosing a few key points. So you get a sense of what I've done and maybe where we're going from here. OK. I'm going to focus on two aspects of my dissertation. One being rhyme in ASL poetry. The second being meter in ASL poetry. There's much more to it than that in my dissertation. But we'd be here forever. We'd be here for 1,000 years. So I'll focus on those two schemes. And through my work, I'll show you what I've discovered. And in my work, I have come up with five aspects of types of rhyme screams. Hand shape, movement, location, palm orientation, non-manual signals, and handedness, whether we're talking one or two hands. And so those are the five areas I'm going to focus on. Now, I've done a great deal of work in each of these areas. And through that discovery and through my findings, I'll show you how this can be so inspirational. So first, I'll focus on hand shape. And this is the way you play with hands that includes various movements. And I'll cover more later. But first, let me talk about hand shapes and what I've identified through the rhyme schemes. First one is numerical hand shapes. You're very familiar with that. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Here's one of my favorite examples. The interpreters won't voice for this. That's an example of a numerical hand shape poem. Do the 1, hand shape, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11. 1 through 11. Middle school kids love this type of poetry. And it's not easy to get their attention. You go there and they're not really into it, but then when you present the numerical poetry, 1, 2, 3, 4, you get their attention. And the kids will say, oh, I know what that was. That was the numbers. And so you have them engrossed from that point forward. It's a way to capture their attention. Now, you can also do this with much younger children, those who are 4, maybe 3, or better yet, not 3 or 4 or 5, because most of them already know their numbers 1 through 10. So you'd ask them, do you know your numbers? And they'd say, oh, yeah. So they'd go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Then since I have their attention and they are familiar with their numbers, I would take advantage of that knowledge and then I would do my poetry, my art in front of them, show them the numbers. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, having the numbers as well as double meanings of different animals or some features of sign language that's not just numbers, but it has a double meaning and they would ask being engrossed by that. And it's important that you touch the art appreciation they have. So these are poetic forms. You may ask poetic forms. It follows certain patterns of 1 through 10. It's great for children and they can play around with it and be quite creative. Next is particular handshapes. It's very limited. You can do the one handshape, the five, like doing man, man, dress, finish, move along, all with the same handshape. Sad, using the five handshape just as an example. So that's particular handshapes. You can choose one, two, or three different handshapes to express your art. For example, cow and rooster is an example. You see? Remember I performed cow and rooster? Okay, let me do that for you. Using the sign for cow and using the sign for rooster, which is the Y handshape and the three handshape. Yeah, I see some of your audience are very familiar with this poem. And children absolutely love this and they copy me because it's so easy to access. In my dissertation, I used this particular poem to look at why it is so meaningful for young children. Here it is. Okay, did you notice the different handshapes? I used the five handshape to open and close with the poem. I used the Y handshape, the cow to play around with that and then I used the three to convey the meaning of rooster. So just three simple handshapes in that poem and that's how children can memorize this. It's so simple. The Y handshape, the three handshape, the five handshape, the opening and closing and kids oftentimes will forget the closing line where you have to again close with how you started. And when I see kids copy it, I tell them, how about the closing line and then they will remember it. But because they know the opening and closing are one and the same, it's easy to remember. It's so simple. Moving right along, the next is worded handshapes. By that I mean, for example, the word leaf. Let me show you this example. You can go L-E-A-F and so one single word that incorporates movement and signs in the performance. For example, golf, G-O-L-F, it's an example of a poem, golf. It's the word and handshape all embedded into one performance piece. And if you look up there, that's the third list, worded handshapes. I'd like to share with you this one story. This young boy, I asked him, what is your favorite TV program? He says, oh, I like this. And I knew it was Gordon Flash. No, I'm wrong, it's Flash Gordon. Anyway, Gordon Flash, Flash Gordon. Yes, it is Flash Gordon. And the kid said, that's my favorite TV show. So I said, why don't you be creative with coming up with a poem that conveys Flash Gordon? So there was a threesome working on this and I watched them and they came up with a very creative poem. They did F-L-A-S-H, the one-fail swoop. And I thought, wow, that was amazing. F-L-A-S-H, Flash. And clearly they had the art in them but I just had to challenge them with that Flash Gordon. I'll talk more about those kids later in my presentation. Next, we had the initialized sign. Using a letter, the first letter, for example, family, the F shape, group, the G shape, the idea, I, what are the letters? Oh, aggressive with the A. You see the A hand shape, so A-F-I-G. Yesterday Ella's performance, she said that we, she, look, inviting and so on and so forth about the world using the initialized hand shape. That was a great example of that. That conveyed a very ironic meaning. Another one would be, it is ASL poetry but there's a hidden meaning. There's an implied meaning. For example, let's see, doctor experiment aggressive fix. See that, what did that spell? That's spelled D-E-A-F-D-F, doctor experiment aggressive fix, def. You realize, oh, there's a hidden meaning. And that meaning is that, here's another one, education, theory, idea, opinion, no. I spelled out education, E-D-U-C-A-T-I-O-N. Again, here's another one, family, aggressive, isolated, lose, society, fails. And what's the hidden meaning? Can anybody share that with me? That def education is a complete failure and you got to know the implicit meaning. You say, doctor experiment aggressive fix, def. E-D-U-C-A-T-I-O-N, negate that, family, aggressive isolation, lose, society. The implied meaning is about the problems that we have in def education. That def education is a complete failure. So there's more than just one meaning than what you see on the surface. Next, you're all familiar with the alphabetical handshapes. Most of you know about the ABC stories, that's where that would fall in that category. So they're called alphabetical handshapes, ABC telling a story. And that's okay, that's part of the art. So we're all very familiar with that. Moving on, the next one is closed handshapes. For example, the fist. You can use the index finger or the pinky finger, the thumb in that closed handshape. It is still called closed handshapes. Next is the open handshapes, the five, the four, the three. People argue it is the three closed or open, part of its closed, part of its open. So that's open handshapes. And then we have the double handshape. An example is that it's open and closed. Like for example, this, it's one sign, but it uses both the open and the closed handshape. So the double handshape. This is another one where you open, close, open, close. It's a double handshape for this one. Those are examples. Here's another one. All of these different handshapes are considered double handshapes, both open and closed in one. And in ASL poetry, you can say, well, they're all double handshapes. Oh yeah, it can be. You can challenge yourself in some ways. So that's it. And then the open, close, open, close, alternating those. So there's many different ways of utilizing these handshapes in ASL poetry. And I'm very inspired by that. And I think there's more out there. And if you come up with some of your own, please share that. We need to add to this body of knowledge that I've just begun. So moving right along. So here's some examples of the movement right scheme. There's the movement contour, where you do an arc line, a circle, a jagged line. There's variation on that theme. For example, I go. That's what I would call a movement contour, where the focus is the movement or the sign for always it's circular. Or, you know, for example, Chicago. And this contour line, ASL has various movements. But within poetry, there's three basic movements. One being the straight line, the arc or the jagged line, those three. And you can play on those three with your movement. Now you can show a circle, you can show a square, all included in the movement, showing such square. It looks complex, but it's, you know, basically just three movement schemes. Yesterday, Ella's presentation on the, what was it, the circle of life. That was a great example of using the circular contour. Over and over again, it's quite repetitive. The shapes are there, but they're not as significant as the movement. The movement is the most important part of that piece of poetry. Then there's the movement duration. You can do it slow, fast. You have control over movement in that regard. Next is movement size. For example, you can sign rather small, sign large, sign the average size. You can use that to incorporate it in your poetry. There's also the hold, the movement hold. That is very important as well. In the course of my dissertation, I was required to attend seminars where several doctoral students would come together. I was the only deaf student, so I'd have to listen to their updates and I would share my updates and we would take turns and giving updates. There was one man, he was talking about his music research and I wasn't a fan of music. I'm deaf. I can't hear music. Anyway, he went on to talk about his work and then I proceeded to talk about where I was at. At the end of this seminar, the man approached me, this music researcher said, well, can I talk with you? I thought, what do I have to say to the guy who's research and music? So I listened to him and he explained something to me that was jaw-dropping and I'm so glad we had that opportunity. He talked about the concept of silence in music. I said silence, you know, in music, there are points where silence is really critical through the science and research of music. It's controversial, but he believes that silence is a key part of music. And I thought, well, ASL has a counterpart where you emphasize certain things and you stop and that's almost just like silence in music. And so I researched this area more and more, the hold emphasis, the last part of the movement rhyme scheme. Someone's asked me for an example. Okay, let me think for a minute. Last night I saw several examples in the performances. Ella's poetry, which one was that? When she talked about the garden and she held on to the plant sign for an extended period and then proceeded to do other lines, the cow in the rooster is another example where you say cow stay and you hold the stay sign. And then let's see, let me get it correct. Cow, you got cow stay and then fall over and you hold it. Rooster stand and you hold it. You emphasize that that's a key part of that art. If you do it in one fell swoop, it doesn't have the same meaning, the same artistic meaning. Last thing I wanna talk about location, the location rhyme scheme. So variations on locations of the body where you touch your chest, for example, my or before or feel concern, you're touching your body parts of your chest. You can also touch your arm, for example, work, sign for work. So that's body location. There's also spatial location, locations out in space. You can say that they're all out in space, like my name or this. Well, there's parts where you touch your body that you may not realize that you're doing a body location or it may be out in space, maybe all spatial locations, or you can alternate between the two. You can be very creative. And then there's space levels where you sign, for example, oppression. You know, where you're looking for distinguishing between an adult and a child or a mother and a daughter, looking up, looking down, using eye gaze, but showing different levels in space. You know, when showing people talking and you would sign at a lower level showing as a child talking, then you raise it up to showing as adult talking, you don't convey that explicitly, but it's implied in the level that you're signing, whether it's low, moderate, or high levels in space. Next is palm orientation. You have palm up, you have palm side up, palm down, and you can also use this with, say, children, babies, adults, so a child, you're palm down, baby, the palms up, adult the palms down. You see how at alternate screen, palm up, palm down, palm side? You may not realize how important that is in the poetry, but it is, it is a rhyme in ASL poetry. So now I'll talk about non-manual signal rhyme where you look directly at the audience, you look lower left, look upper right. You control your eye gaze that conveys meaning. Next is eye shifting where you shift your eye gaze. You look left saying a person is there or you show the gaze that conveys a certain meaning. Then there's also the eyebrow movement to convey questions, puzzling can be the start of a topic or asking a question or convey some emotional meaning. The eyebrow movement has significant meaning. Then there's mouth movement, puff cheeks, purse lips, the tongue, it's all part of that. Mouth movements. Next we have the head shift. You can go left, right, front, backwards. You can keep your head shift just in one location throughout the poem. It has meaning. Maybe you're ignoring someone, you're looking one direction and not talking to a person on the other side of you and then there's the body shifting again. Left, right, front and back. So those are the non-manual signal rhyme schemes. Now let me talk about handedness. You can do a one-handed sign where you don't use your other hand. You use one hand dominantly or you can use both hands simultaneously or alternately. So yeah, that's the example of handedness, different hand movements. And so looking at these different components of rhyme schemes, there's hand shape, movement, location, non-manual signals and lastly, handedness. So there's five rhyme schemes that I've done to my research. Compared to other languages, for example, English, French and Spanish, there's only two schemes in the rhyme area. There's the idea of consonants. That's called alliteration, meaning you focus on the consonants, the sound of consonant rhymes, the repetition or there's also vowels, which is considered consonants where you repeat the rhyme of vowels. And you know in English poetry, there's tons and tons of poems that have been written over the centuries and they only use two rhyme schemes. However, in ASL poetry, we have five rhyme schemes. Two and a half times what they have in spoken language. That is awe-inspiring, but there's nothing in the research. There's not much documentation. I'm hoping that at some point, we will also come up with volumes and volumes of ASL poetry using the five rhyme schemes. As well, in spoken language, you just use spoken language, but in ASL poetry, we have two hands. So it's a little more complicated and just spoken poetry. So I have found that very interesting. Okay, so that's the rhyme schemes that I want to present on. Now let me talk about the second piece of my presentation, the idea of meter. Now I hate English poems because of the meters, but I have to learn to understand meter in English poetry and how it's applied and how it's used. So once I understand that concept, then I can look at ASL poetry and see where meter plays a role in that. And I have found some findings there. Now I don't have the complete answer. I've just scratched the surface. I need your help, your future studies in this area. We needed to come together and look at meter in ASL poetry. We've just started this. And so I'm leading this discussion. With spoken languages, they emphasize the idea of certain syllables or the accent certain syllables. That's where the focus is there. However, in ASL poetry, we have comparable features of the language. It's where we put holds on how we sign things. We have syllables as well. You can look at a word or a sign. They both contain syllables. But in spoken language, they stress certain parts of the piece. They accent certain parts of poems, whereas we emphasize holds. The hold serves the point of accents in ASL poetry. So let's talk about hold emphasis. There's different types. There's three. First one is the long pause. The second hold is the more subtle pause. It's there, but it's not as clear. You have to really look closely to understand that. And then thirdly, it's the strong stop where cow stay and you stop there. You have discrete stops. It's not a hold. And so it's very different than the long pause. Next, we have the movement emphasis. You can convey something in sign language, like for example, the idea of work. And see, no, no, that's not a good idea. That's another, oh, how about discussion? Here's the sign for discussion. You can do this discussion or a more long drawn out emphasis. That's the idea of movement emphasize. And also there's repeated movement. For example, cow, you know, the sign is cow, but my poem, I said just cow, one touch, less repetition. Now you can't do the normal sign. You have to adjust it for the poem. One touch movement versus repeated movement. So that's an idea of that. Below that, we have movement size. There's the regular path. Like stand, idea of standing versus enlarge path where you sign it rather large in space and versus the reduced path where you sign the concept in a small space. Now, I want to explain about the idea of OS. O refers to unstressed and S refers distressed. If you look at English poetry and look across the lines, you'll see an O and S, an O and S scheme below the lines. Have you seen that before? If you look at a book of poems, they'll try to explain what is stressed and what is unstressed within the piece of art. That's the theory. And in ASL poetry, we have similar concepts. The OS schema. The OS is called iambic. Below that, we have SS, it's called spondaic. And below that is reversed SS, it's called trochaic. And so in looking at ASL poetry, I have discovered examples of all three of these. Where in English poetry, they measure the lines, how many notes or how many feet are within one line and they break it up. For example, there may be an OS, OS pattern. And so you say that's three feet and then you move on the next line, it could be an OS, OS and again, three feet. So it may be a three feet, three feet, five feet. That's considered a meter in English poetry. So we have the dimatter, which is two feet. Then we have the trimatter, which is three. Then we have the pentameter, which is five. There's more than that but I just wanted to share some examples of meter in ASL poetry. Then I'm gonna tell you about the cow, stay, obviously, OS. You see how the emphasis is versus OS here in this schema. So you realize where the emphasis is, the meter, there's typically two in one line for that example. And the rooster, OS as opposed to this, this is OS. So you see how there are comfortable patterns of meter in ASL poetry. We have similar meters in ASL poetry as they do in English poetry. However, we still need to do more research. I've just scratched the surface so there's not enough work. I've done my dissertation but it's a good start and now I need others to continue my work in the future. Did you have a question? O, you're just saying, what does O? That shows where you're stressing it. S means unstressed, that's O and S. So for example, cow, that's an O and then here you really emphasize a sign, that's the S. Okay, do you get the idea about rhyme schema and meter schema and where my research has brought me? Obviously there must be much more work in this area when it comes to ASL lit and ASL poetry. One thing I discovered through my work is there's one major problem. You might agree with me, you may not but in asking individuals or people at schools, different communities, whether my research is going in the right direction and it seems like I am going in the right direction but sadly there's not enough ASL linguistic research focusing on ASL grammar. Would you agree? And I'm seeing a lot of heads not in the audience so that was a discovery that I learned that we don't have enough ASL lit and one of the reasons is that we don't have enough research in ASL grammar. Now ASL lit has been studied but we need to do further work. We need to give more attention to ASL linguistics and ASL grammar. Let me give you a basic idea of some ASL grammar features. First, in English grammar, you look at the subject, the verb and the noun structure and young kids are taught that in English lessons. Why don't we have equal attention given to ASL linguistics and the teaching of ASL in schools and so I focus a little bit on different lexical categories in linguistics. Let me share my current research. This is a linguistic term, lexical categories, more or less it refers to the placement of signs, whether it's a noun, verb, adverb, adjective. Then we focus on grammar and identifying the parts of grammar and I have two different categories I'm gonna share with you. First category is the major lexical categories that includes nouns, predicates. I'll talk more about what is meant by predicates, adjectives and adverbs. So those four features are called major lexical categories and most of you are very comfortable in identifying nouns. For example, car, that's quite obvious. Friends, other obvious one. Theory, those are nouns. So you're all familiar with that, correct? Rather easy. Now, when it comes to predicates, some think they know what predicates are but sometimes you're not too sure. So I'll talk more about that as well and how they fit into ASL. Adjectives as well. Some of you think you know what an adjective is in ASL but it's very different than how adjectives are described in English. The same with adverbs. Most adverbs are conveyed through non-manual signals. There are some signs that are considered adverbs but majority of them are conveyed through facial expression. Second category is the minor lexical category. Those being determiners. In English, it's their example, the and a, my, yours. Those are determiners in English. In ASL we have them as well but they function very differently. Also, I'm gonna talk about auxiliary verbs. We'll finish, let's see, we'll finish. There's some others as well. Next, talk about prepositions. Front, back, for example. Then conjunctions but you see this is another one where you combine two sentences through the use of a conjunction and then pronouns, you know, pointing he, she, it. So those are example of minor lexical categories. Let me show you a couple of examples. First I'll sign it and if you're comfortable with that then we'll identify the different parts of the utterance. Green VW, old. Again, green VW, old. Okay, are you comfortable with that? Utterance in ASL now, let's identify. In pointing, what is this? That is the the, the determiner in ASL. Okay, good with that. Next came green VW. That's the adjective because green describes the VW. The VW is obviously a noun. Lastly, the sign old, very old. Is that an adjective? No, it functions as a verb. And that's called the predicate of that sentence. So it functions as a verb, the sign old, very old. The puff cheeks is the adverb in that utterance. So very old. You see it conveys a very different meaning. Looking at the face, that's the adverb piece of that sentence. You have a question, two questions. Describe predicate, what that refers to. Somebody's asking me, what is a predicate? Okay, give you an example of an English sentence. The car is green. Okay, let's take that for example. Is green is the predicate of that sentence. Is green. Now that's in English, in ASL, car green. You say green serves the purpose of a verb. That's a predicate. I'll explain more. So the old VW, no, let me back up again. The old VW is green, not blue. Okay, so the sign old is an adjective. It describes a VW. VW is a noun. Again, pointing is the determiner. In English, it's very structured that you can't move the determiner on either part of the sentence. In ASL, you can. Green is part of the predicate. It's not an adjective. You may be surprised by that. And then next, the negation not is negation blue. It's part of the predicate. You may be wondering, you say, well, blue should be an adjective. Well, don't take it from the lens of English. It functions very different in American sign language. You know, sign car blue. I think car blue, for example. Right, you're familiar with that, utterance. Yes, I see people nodding in the audience, car blue. You don't say the car is blue. That's not American sign language. That's an English structure. Car blue is how ASL works. Blue functions as an adjective predicate. An adjective predicate is where you can actually move the adjective either on front or the backside of a noun. Another example is emotions. You can say happy or sad, funny, angry. Those different emotions. For example, if you say this, utterance, you say, happy woman told me. That's incorrect grammar. Happy woman, you can't have it in that way. In English, you say the happy woman told me it functions just fine in English, but in ASL, it operates very differently. Woman happy, she told me. That is a correct grammatical utterance. So there's rules that function differently in English and ASL. You can't take the rules of English and apply them in ASL. I see there's many questions in the audience. Can we hold the questions till the end of my presentations? I need to get through what I wanna present and finish my topic on grammar as it's so important for young deaf children. We need to teach them ASL linguistics. How much time do I have left? Oh my gosh, we're almost out of time. Is it already 9.30? Wow, let's skip this. Let's skip this. I'm sorry, time doesn't permit. Okay, I have just five minutes left in my presentation. So let me wrap up. Now let's turn this off. So getting back to ASL grammar, it's so, so critical that we bring it to the schools. Right now it's quite controversial. There's different camps of saying we should teach American sign language. No, we should teach English. Yes, but, but, but it's very controversial and I'm seeing that in landscaping. That's very sad. It's most unfortunate. Let me share a story that there was this ASL club in Texas who invited me to come teach ASL poetry. And at first I thought I shuddered no because the members of this club were all hearing and they desired to learn ASL poetry. But my dream is to bring this to the deaf community first. And I don't mind teaching hearing people about ASL poetry but I must pursue presenting my research to the deaf community. But I didn't want to say no. So I told this ASL club, I feel conflicted because most of you are hearing and we really need to do more work in the deaf community. And they were understanding of that. But when I went to present to this ASL club, I learned something. There was this one woman who wanted to talk about her experience in creating a poem and she said, baby born, why? And I thought, wow, that was a interesting poem. Baby born, die why? And I asked this woman, is this a true story? She says yes, it's about the story of my child who was born and then passed away. And that was very touching, very touching. I thought, she's hearing, but she's able to express a piece of work in ASL poetry and there's so many members of our deaf community who are not there as she is. And why is that? And I realized that there's many reasons. Let me list those, obviously language oppression. That's apparent because of people experiencing isolation, lack of confidence. When you think about this woman, she was fluent in English poetry and having that foundation, she knew how to express herself in ASL poetry. That was quite apparent. Second reason, language abuse. Is that true? Not true? I mean, language violence is another theory that's been proffered out there. So I share that with you as one of the reasons. Next, well, let me share a story with you. I went to this school for the deaf some time ago and I was presenting at a high school when I was approached by a member of the elementary school. They were in different locations in the building. You know, while it was a school for the deaf, I thought it was strange how they had such separation. So this one deaf teacher heard that I was on campus presenting and invited me to come present to the elementary school students. The principal said no, that that wasn't something they would allow. But in the end, the principal was willing to allow me to present for a short time. I only had a half hour to present. So I went to the elementary class that I was invited to and there were three students. In the class. And I thought it was so important, despite the low numbers I wanted to present. And then there were four members of the administration, the principal, a couple of teachers and the TA. So I had, there was more administrators than there were students. So I proceeded to present my ASL poetry lesson. That's where the student came up with the idea of flash that I shared with you earlier that was so, so impressive. And they shared it with the teachers and the principal, showing the power of art within the students. The principal and the teachers were there seeing the rendition of flash. The teachers were quite impressed with it. The deaf teacher especially, but the others, the principal and the other hearing members did not think it was that impressive. I wanted to do more, but I didn't have enough time. At the same time, I was elated because I felt I had made my mark, but recall that they tried to prevent me from giving that lesson. So when I came home, I felt really disturbed by how the principal was trying to prevent me from coming to that elementary class. I chose to write an editorial to the Bicultural Center, the TBC. Well, as it turned out, the mother of that young boy in the class subscribed to the newsletter and saw my editorial. And the mother wrote me a letter and she talked to her son and how he performed that piece, the flash. And the mother didn't really understand it really well and called the school to say, what was my son exposed to? And the school proceeded to explain that. There was a deaf man who presented on ASL poetry. Well, the mother decided to contact other parents in the school. They came together and they wanted to have more deaf adults in the classroom. They wanted more deaf adult exposure to the young deaf kids. And so the school had done go some major changes. I was unaware of what was happening. And when I was told, I thought, well, these three students really counted. They left a blasting mark. So moving forward, the idea of nurturing ASL lit in its own time, refers to encouraging ASL lit and not worrying about comparing us to English. English has been around for a long time. We pay homage to it, but we really need to focus and nurture ASL lit, our most precious language, as well as ASL grammar. So that concludes my presentation. Lastly, I wanna close with an ASL poem called The Barrel. It's a brand new one that I wrote recently after giving some thought to this presentation. So let me present this. All right, interpreters, no voicing this piece, okay?