PJM and SW camp in Slovakia

[Lucyna Dlugolecka]

Hello List.
As you know, I participated in a PJM and SW camp organized by two Polish universities in Oscadnica, Slovakia. Oscadnica is a winter holiday village close to the Polish border. The students chose that place because Slovakia is cheap for us the Poles :-).
I was invited to the camp as a teacher of PJM and SW to hearing students of the Universities of Wroclaw and Olsztyn. The students of Warsaw were PJM beginners and the students of Olsztyn knew already some PJM. I taught the Olsztyn group, and the Olsztyn group taught the Wroclaw group with the help of a few Deaf people. There are two Deaf families, of which one has two children aged 13 and 15 (both hard of hearing). Apart from PJM lessons I a lecture on SW and two SW workshops. All the students and the Deaf were especially interested in SW. And the teenagers liked SW very much, and they learnt the SW basics very quickly, quicklier than the students did! And SW was no new to the Olsztyn group. They knew about SW from the Internet and from my friend Iwona Grzesiak who teaches PJM at the University of Olsztyn and who was also my student at the Warsaw uni. Among the Olsztyn students there was Jacek Dabrowski who learnt SW by himself and who is quite good at it, and he led one of the SW workshops in Slovakia. I encouraged him to subscribe this List. Let's hope he'll do. Although Jacek was from Olsztyn, he participated also in  the PJM "classes" for the Wroclaw group. Learning new signs, he wrote signs in his writing book. I took a photo of that :-).
Jacek has also written a small handbook for SW in Polish.
During one workshop there were an exciting discussion about writing signs. The students noticed that the Deaf sign the same signs differently. For example, the sign for HEARING is signed with the index finger bent or straight. The students argued there should be special rules established so that each sign has one signed and written version. I didn't agree but that all were new to them and the students (especially the beginners) could not understand that there were so many variation of a PJM sign.
Lucy

GG 3618151 SMS +48505273292   MSN deafie at gmx.net
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