Originally Posted by competes2win

I agree with all that has been said. I feel that as long as the hearing teacher is perfectly fine at ASL than she/he should be able to teach it. I just brought this up because my ASL teacher (the hearing one) said that she had actually received negative comments from another teacher who was deaf. He said that she had no right to be teaching ASL.

That said I see benefits of both a hearing and deaf ASL teacher. Of course there are many things good about learning ASL from a 'native' signer of the language. But there is also good things about having a hearing teacher. For instance, most ASL classes have a "silent policy" where the students are not allowed to speak. Well with a deaf teacher like I had last semester this policy was not at all enforced since the students could talk without the teacher even knowing when he wasn't looking. what this amounted to actually was class being easier for me, my fellow students would speak a lot of what the teacher was signing if other students didn't understand... even though it made things easier for me last semester I find that having a hearing teacher is making this ASL 2 class harder, although I am learning even more. It is also nice as a hearing student, to be able to use your voice every once in a while to the teacher to clarify certain things.. of course in a more advanced ASL class this probably wouldn't happen anymore but for beginners like myself it is nice. I guess it's kind of similiar for a deaf/hoh person trying to learn how to use speach from a hearing person... it might sometimes be easier for a deaf person to be there to help translate things and to put things in a way the deaf/hoh person can better understand as he/she is learning.