Boring Does Not Equal Bad

   After all the mistakes from the past four meetings, I meticulously prepared for this week's, in hopes that it would go without a hitch. I had created the slideshows well in advance, I reviewed the slides the day before, I printed the vocabulary sheet I would need for the end-of-class game, and I had even downloaded the slides onto a USB in case the wifi was down (this was a serious possibility as the school wifi had been completely down more than twice in the past couple of weeks).

    But as I rushed over to Ms. Nguyen's room to grab the projector at 2:45, I couldn't stop myself from expecting something new and unexpected to go wrong.

    By the time I had wheeled the projector cart to the Student Lounge, there were about eight people waiting outside.

    I still can't believe how many people are in the club. Considering that most clubs in our school have about 10-15 members, I think we're doing pretty well!

    After fiddling with the projector for five minutes and then realizing with a laugh that I hadn't plugged it in, I turned around to see about 15 people sitting down with their ASL alphabet sheets out and practicing. Not gonna lie, I was pretty proud.

    At 3 pm, my USB was plugged in, the slides were up, and there were 19 pairs of eyes on me.

    We started with a review game that I had come up with the week before. I (very slowly) organized everyone into four groups (with a lot of help from Ms. Nguyen) and explained the game. It was basically broken telephone, alternating between fingerspelling and signing (giving the 'action' for the word) until the last person. The teams with the right word got a point.

    The first round went absolutely terribly, but that was to be expected. It was the practice round! From there it only got better, just slow. I think next time, I might have smaller groups so that people don't have to spend three minutes just waiting for their turn. But other than that, people actually liked it! Point, Julianne!

    After everyone sat back down and the scraping of chair legs on the floor had died down, we started our lesson on "Learning Vocabulary."

    Turns out, downloading the slides as a PDF wasn't such a genius idea. You see, I like to put GIFs of each sign on the slides so that everyone can see from all parts of the room. But it didn't occur to me that GIFs don't work on PDFs...Ah, well! I knew all the signs so I just demonstrated for everyone as each word appeared on the slides. No biggie!

    Actually, I knew all but one sign. This is a job for Superwoman! I rushed over to Ms. Nguyen who was doing some work in the corner and she searched up the sign for me. Crisis adverted!

    Otherwise, things went perfectly as planned. We finished the lesson, we played a vocab game, and everyone was out the door at 4 pm. It had its hiccups but, overall, it was a pretty mundane meeting.

    And as odd as that sounds, that lack of surprises proved to be surprising in and of itself.

    But for once, I'm not complaining about this subversion of expectations. This week's ASL Club meeting showed me that boring does not always translate to bad. It may not seem like it at the moment but, held up against poor times, uneventful times can be more than welcome.

    Sometimes, boring is just fine.