It was a little bit of a surprise (though it probably shouldn't have been) that our teacher is deaf. She can hear a little bit (was complaining about the loud music in the aerobics class next door), and can speak well enough (though I suspect she prefers not to), but for almost the entire class she did not say anything out loud. She wrote quite a few things on the whiteboard, mostly instructions about what we were going to do next, but the whole class was pretty much an immersion. I found this style very comfortable when learning signing.
So far we have learned the "fingerspelling" alphabet, the numbers from 0 to 15, and a good handful of 30 or so additional concepts and emotions. It's really encouraging to be able to learn so much in the first two hours!
