OK? Are you with me on the non-dominant hand? Guess what? Now we need to work on the dominant hand. This may be the hardest thing you train yourself to do. It took me a full year of deliberately resting my dominant hand during my work before it felt natural and I still don't make as much use of resting behavior as I actually have time for. Here is the task: when there are short moments... as short as one second... where you are not signing anything put both hands ALL THE WAY DOWN. Not clasped onto one-another, not one grabbing the wrist of the other... BOTH hands fully down to your sides hanging without any muscular strain at all from your shoulders.
Everyone stand up please. The only way you are going to work this into your life is to physically experience this so please, stand up and let your arms hang to your sides. I promise you, you do NOT look stupid doing this. Keep your hands down... balance your weight on both feet equally, feet shoulder-width apart... arms down to the sides. Bring your hands up and give me the generic INTERPRETING-ASL sign... now let both hands drop to your sides. Breath in. Breath out and raise your hands again... sign, sign sign... drop your hands and breath in. We have just practiced EVERYTHING ELSE that I am going to talk about.
But before we move on, let me give you the label that we use at NTID for letting ourselves rest our arms. We call this a MICRO-BREAK. I know you are still resistant to the idea... you are thinking that you will use this only when the speaker stops to take a sip of water but otherwise it will not be important to you. NO... I am telling you that you must generate at least one microbreak every fifteen SECONDS. These are breaks BETWEEN your sentences.
So the first objection that you have to this is that you are too BUSY to take so many microbreaks. Think about it... if you take a one-second microbreak every fifteen seconds that is only four seconds of resting per minute. If the speaker is really busy, you would only get four total minutes of rest in a one-hour assignment... even Sorenson gives you more resting time each hour than that... so one microbreak every fifteen seconds is actually a minimum.
Here's the beauty of taking a microbreak... you just put your hands down, right. Well there better be a darn good reason to bring them back up again. This means that you might actually PROCESS the MEANING of the next sentence before you raise your hands. That one-second microbreak might extend to three or five seconds because you are able to devote more mental effort into making a mental picture of the next concept... and BAM! you don't need to use so many signs to represent it and you can take another microbreak...
And here is where the next objection comes up. You tell me, "Brian, raising your hands into signing space is a way that people take turns in conversations and lowering them indicates the conclusion of a turn" and I say "Yes... that is ONE indicator, but the much stronger determiner of offering or taking turns in a signed conversation is EYE GAZE" If my eye gaze is steadily directed at a single deaf consumer and my hands come down, then I am offering that deaf consumer a turn. But if I am looking at the visual aids, the source-text speaker, or if I sweep my eye gaze across the audience then I am not granting a turn to anyone.
OK... sidebar... Let me tell you my own revelation from classroom interpreting this past year. Every year I request the opportunity to work with a particular professor who teaches Data Analysis and over five years of working with her I have learned a lot about how she teaches her subject and how she manages her student's attention. Only this last year... year five of working with her... have I finally figured out how to be equivalent to her in my representations of the questions she asks. She asks two different kinds of questions... they both sound exactly the same except for the ending. One version of the question sounds like this... "Is this data going to give us a MEAN or a PROPORTION?" and then she looks around the room for a raised hand. The other version sounds like this... "Is this data going to give us a MEAN or a PROPORTION?" and then she looks around the room and LOCKS HER GAZE ON ONE STUDENT, calls out the student's name and then ignores anybody else's attempt to answer the question.
For years I have confused my Deaf students by continuing to look around the room and often they attempt to answer the question, only to be frustrated when the instructor won't call on them. I now know that I must look to see how she is asking the question and I MUST ALSO LOOK AT THE SAME STUDENT (even though they are hearing) because the eye gaze tells EVERY OTHER student (Deaf AND hearing) that they are NOT the recipient of the turn being offered.
So if you are concerned that bringing both hands to rest in the middle of a paragraph might tempt your Deaf student to try to take a turn, then you need to pay attention to your eye gaze, but while you are working on your eye gaze, get both of those hands down.
