Blog Posting #10

 Hi, everyone! Hope you all had a relaxing weekend post- essay and anatomy exam. There have not really been any new developments in my new occupation lately. With the essay and anatomy exam and practical, I did not spend too much time working on my ASL. I also went home to celebrate my niece's second birthday and spent lots of time with family, but I did do some sign language with one of my nieces! She is just over a year old and has been working on the signs for "all done" and "more" so it was really fun to work with her on that. Even though I didn't get too much actual signing work done, I did read the next chapter in my "Deaf Community in America" book. This week's chapter was about the lives of those living in deaf communities, and covered many different aspects of living with hearing problems. My favorite part described personalized name signs, and how one can use descriptive name signs as their introduction. I thought that this was really interesting, and made me wonder how I would sign my name using descriptions. 

In terms of the article by Deci and Ryan, it talks about how humans by nature are "active and self-motivated, curious and interested, vital and eager to succeed" (p. 14). I agree with this assessment, however I also think that these traits can vary greatly depending on a person's personality. I chose my new occupation of ASL because I was genuinely interested in learning ASL and more about the deaf community as a whole, in the start of my new occupation I was vital and eager to succeed. However, as this semester has continued, I have definitely lost some of the intrinsic motivation that I had at the beginning. I think at this point, my motivation is more controlled rather than autonomous. My motivation to engage in ASL is more dependent on external factors, such as creating these blogs and being able to talk about what I did in my occupation that week in class. I think this is mainly due to how many other engagements I have going on in my life, so my autonomous motivation for learned ASL has dwindled as I view other assignments and exams as more important at this time. This does make me a little sad, because I know that in my future practice as an OT the ability to use ASL could be extremely beneficial. I am hoping that if I continue on with this occupation, I will see my progress and gain back some of the original intrinsic motivation that I had.