New opportunities come at you like open doors. It’s our decision to go take them or not. When you think of languages to take at school, your first thoughts are Spanish, French, or German. What most students forget is sign language. It’s an active language that teaches you to communicate with others using hand motions.

Our sign language class decided to give their students a chance to participate in “Deaf Day”, this allows the students in sign language to have new experiences and perspectives. They learn to communicate with people who have hearing disabilities, so this allowed them to be in that position.

“I was very excited to do this, I love to try new things”, Makenzie Lujan, junior, said.

As the students who were participating went to class, the other students around tried to help them out with lessons, and teachers also tried to learn some signs to help them out a bit. For Lujan, communication wasn’t very difficult.

“Many of the students still talked to me, but they wrote down what they wanted to say. My friends also tried to learn sign. It was mainly finger spell, but the fact that they took the time to learn it to talk to me, and understand me made me happy,” Lujan said.

Diversity is hard for people to accept, because as humans, our first instinct is to judge each other. Accepting differences should be easy, especially because we know that if we don’t judge someone who is different they will feel accepted and happy.

“Thankfully I wasn’t treated any different as if I had my hearing. My teachers all helped me out, and the students accepted it. It felt like a normal day besides the fact that I couldn’t hear. School work was hard to understand, and keep up with, but the overall experience was phenomenal,” Lujan said.

Deaf Day had a great impact and outcome on the students of GJHS, the students who participated got to live a day with a new view on life, and had to rely on the help of surrounding students. And their knowledge to sign.