Reaction of Sign Language at Starbucks

Starbucks On Friday April, 25th I attended the meeting at Starbucks. When I got I didn’t see anyone I knew (because it was people from other classes) and I sat down without ordering. We were greeted by a man (I think his name was Juan but I didn’t get to ask him to sign his name again) and we started adding numbers +3. I was enjoying watching people think “How do I sign that again?” and signed my numbers well. People were doing the sign for plus wrong so we had to be told how to do it correctly. The next exercise we did was fingerspelling the alphabet backwards. Honestly I thought this was the hardest because I can’t even do his in speaking. Luckily the girl next to me helped me out because it seemed like an algebra problem in my head (I had just come from an eleven hour shift at work). The next thing was doing the alphabet normal ways (at this point some people from my group showed up). The last exercise was fingerspelling a color that started with what alphabet you got. This was harder and took some time because not every color was easy to think of. Luckily I got O (orange). Professor Sibley was telling the nice man a joke, I didn’t catch it from the beginning, signing that the man had a gut and signing that I was thin. The meeting ended afterwards. I really enjoyed this one because it was a bunch of students doing exercises with each other and the man and professor helping those who didn’t know what to sign or to help correct sign right. At the end of the day I’m happy I got practice and reviewed the fundamentals so it can help me on my test and in real life applications. I wish I knew more so I could sign with but I didn’t want to mess up and have him not know what I am trying to say. I am glad though that I am learning and am able to understand most of what I see fluent signers sign and can kind of fill in the blanks I don’t know.