Post #4: Final Reflection on Learning

When I chose this module, I already knew that my weak point would be presenting in front of the class. And that was exactly what happened: I didn’t prepare well enough for the mock peer teaching and this, paired with lack of sleep, resulted in a rather bad performance from my part. I was speaking about eye contact while breaking all the rules I was trying to teach.

The problem with me speaking in front of a group of people is that I stress myself too much. I think that everything I say needs to be of extremely high level content and language wise as to not waste the audience’s time. I thought this was what the audience expected and so I put too much pressure on myself making it impossible for me to relax.

The actual peer teaching was already better than the mock one: I was more prepared and tried not to be as stiff as before. However, I still had the feeling that the quality of what I was saying did not meet the audience’s expectations. And I was intimidated by how well my classmates were presenting.

So I put a lot of work and preparation in the proposal presentation. I was determined to improve. I wanted to do well. I think it also helped that we learned about how to present and how it is different from writing an essay. I realized that no matter how good the content of what you are saying is, when no-one can understand, because for example the sentences are too long and complicated, there is no use in having a presentation about it in the first place.

I got my priorities straight and started to speak more freely. I am proud of how much better I got, but of course there is still room for improvement and I hope that with every presentation I am going to give I am going to be able to relax a little bit more.

When I chose this module, I already knew that my weak point would be presenting in front of the class. But I was ready to tackle this problem of mine and I am confident that I have improved a lot and will keep improving with the background I’ve gained from ES2007S.

Post #3: Reflection on Project Proposal

Working on this proposal was the first time I was involved in such an extensive group project. And after having finished it, I can say that it was a lot of work but everything turned out well.

I must admit that we started fairly late and hearing that other groups had already finished more than half of their proposal made me feel quite nervous. And there was also something else that added to my nervousness: I feel extremely stressed when I have to talk in front of a group, so I knew that I would need a lot of practice for the proposal presentation. So all in all, at this stage I wished that we had started earlier.

However, starting from our first project meeting, a good dynamic between all three members started to develop. Everyone brought up valuable points to discuss and together we managed to find an agreement to all of the issues that arose.

We were still all very busy with lots of other assignments and projects, but we started to do our research and get familiar with the issue of youth in Singapore being over-reliant on their mobile phones. As I am neither from Singapore nor a smartphone user, I found it very interesting to get an insight into this part life here. I started being more observant towards how people interact with each other, how smartphones take up their attention even when they are talking to friends.

After feeling intimidated by all the other groups being much more prepared for the mock presentation, we invested even more of our heart and energy; group meetings got more frequent, emails more detailed and specific. We spent a lot of time discussing new issues that had come up and how all our ideas were going to meet where they were supposed to. I think we were all supportive towards each other which helped a lot. I think had there been some sort of aggression between the team members while everyone was stressed already due to other obligations it would have been much more draining and we might not have been as productive. But we managed to get it all together early enough so I could prepare for the presentation in time.

Looking back, starting a bit earlier might have taken some of the pressure off our shoulders. But since the external stress was not reinforced by internal stress, I didn’t mind us having to do a lot of work later than expected. I enjoyed getting to know the other group members also on a personal level and I think this greatly increased the quality of our discussions and made this experience a good one.

Post #2: Evaluating Intercultural Behaviour

When I was 7 years old, my family and I went to Indonesia on holidays. My dad had to fly back to Switzerland earlier because he had to start working again. So on the day I am going to write about, it was just my mum, my brother Daniel and me. We had just touched down on Swiss ground and wanted to take the train back to our hometown. The railway station at Zurich Airport is right underneath the airport, which is very convenient. Less convenient is the fact that trains only stop for about 2 minutes.

So there we were, waiting for the train. Our baggage consisted of three heavy big suitcases and our carry-on luggage. When the train arrived, everyone was lining up in front of the doors and waited for the people from the inside to alight. When finally everyone had gotten out of the train, it was time to board. Everyone was rushing inside and my mum was struggling with handling the luggage and two small children at the same time. She told me to go inside and look for places to sit and take my little brother with me. I was too young and shy, so all I could manage was go inside and ask my mum if I could help with the suitcases as I didn’t want to be surrounded by all these strange people alone. Daniel stayed outside. My mum was extremely stressed and trying to carry the suitcases inside, but as more and more people were streaming inside, this turned out to be an extremely difficult task. Everyone was watching her. Everyone saw her struggle. But no-one attempted to lend her a hand.

So the inevitable happened: the doors closed with my 4-year-old brother still standing on the platform, 2 big suitcases next to him. The train started moving and my mum screamed and cried: “No! My little boy is still on the platform!” And finally, some of the passengers approached us and helped. They tried to calm my mum down and got the ticket inspector. Then my mum explained everything to him and he arranged for us to get off at the next station, take the train back and meet Daniel at the lost-property office.

The problem in this case was that my mum and the other passengers had different understandings on how people should know when someone needs help. Brought up in Indonesia, my mum comes from a high-context culture where you are not comfortable with asking for things directly. Rather you expect people to work it out from the nonverbal communication. The boarding passengers on the other hand came from a low-context culture; they expect people to actually ask for help when it is needed.
 

Since then, my mum is more likely to ask for help directly in tricky situation – she has assimilated to the Swiss culture. This experience has been stressful for everyone, but luckily there was a happy ending. My brother wasn’t too traumatised and who else can tell the story of how the train left without them and they’ve had to be picked up from the lost and found?

Post #1: Resolving Interpersonal Conflict

Everyone has already been in conflict situations and there are always good ways and bad ways to handle them. When people are not able to communicate with each other, the situation is usually destined to get worse. This is the story of an interpersonal conflict where everything went wrong.

In fourth grade, my childhood best friend and I used to write letters to each other. Although we were neighbours and we also talked a lot, writing letters came to be a special element in our friendship. It was like giving and receiving little creative gifts every now and then.

But our peaceful little world was shaken, when my friend lost one of the letters at school and, as chance would have it, it was found by one of my classmates. This classmate then read the piece of paper, recognized the names of other classmates mentioned in it and handed it to our teacher. The teacher then called me to her desk after school and confronted me with the content.

At this point, I should probably specify what I was writing about in this unfortunate letter. As these letters were not meant to reach other people’s eyes, my friend and I just wrote about everything that came into our innocent 10-year-old minds. In this case, we were corresponding about who we like and who we don’t . My words were something along the lines of: “From my class, I like A and B the most because they’re good friends. Everyone is very nice but I like C and D the least.”

So to get back to me standing in front of my teacher, she wasn’t very pleased. She scolded me and demanded that I find a good way to apologize to C and D. Of course, I was not prepared for that and as a first reaction I got mad at my friend whose carelessness had gotten me into this situation. When I met her in front of the school building, I shouted at her and then refused to talk to her for weeks. In these weeks, the distance between us grew wider and we could never go back to the closeness we shared before.

The day after my teacher talked to me, I apologized to C and D who haven’t even heard about this letter yet. I tried to explain to them why I was doing this, but they completely misunderstood. From this day, they started to dislike me and the general atmosphere in class became quite tense. It was so bad that I was relieved when I could finally enter grammar school in year six. Until the present day, C still doesn’t even say hi to me, when I see her around town.

In my opinion this is a case of how interpersonal conflict completely got out of hand. Strong emotions prevented everyone from actually talking about what was going on. Personally, I think making me apologize could not have been further from the right path. There is nothing wrong with not being equally fond of all of my classmates. I can’t think of any person who likes everyone on the planet the same way. However, I understand that the teacher couldn’t just ignore the letter as the finder might spread rumours and make things even worse. All of the people involved were young children, so I think the teacher should have taken the role of an intermediator; she should have made us talk about the contents of the letter and guide us with her experience, preventing the wall of emotions from forming. 

Or can you think of any other way that would have made the aftermath of this incident less stressful for everyone?