Critical Reflection on Learning in the course

At the beginning of this course, I identified my objective of this course is to be more confident when I speak, give the presentation in English and to know my weakness better. During the course, I was given enough chance to give the presentation to my peers and teachers, I now feel much better when I give a presentation to someone, especially when the thing I present to others is something I will feel excited for. What my real problem with the presentation is not that my English is bad nor I am too introvert and couldn't give a presentation, actually, I learned that introvert can also present well. What my real problem with giving the presentation is that I am not prepared enough, I did not do enough research and sometimes I am not enthusiastic about it. That's my weakness that prevents me from presenting my idea well. I like the video presentation( the one talk to my peer about my dream) the most because when I was presenting what I want to do in the future, I was really excited, engaged and enthusiastic and I think I did pretty well for that video.

During the preparation for the final presentation, out team is not very enthusiastic about it and we did not prepare very well. I was in charge of opening the survey to the public and I waited for two weeks before I actually start to do it because I felt prepare for a presentation was really dull and boring, there aren't so many things to do. However, as I finished the survey and put everything up together and start to present it to my teammates and classmates, I felt "wow, so smooth" because that's what I did for a few days just to message ppl and ask them to do the survey for me, and I know what I am presenting well because I watch the survey statistics grow one by one. I start to know my weakness in the presentation. Usually, I treat the preparations as something not very important, the content is more important than anything, but now I start to know the preparation is equally important because that makes one person confident when he is doing a presentation.

I really like this course, although it is on an early Wednesday morning and it is pretty long, but I enjoyed it a lot. I know myself better and start to be confident when I am presenting. What I had learnt will be with me for the rest of my life.

Interpersonal Conflict Management

Many people fear conflicts with others, yet conflicts are common for people. As we proceed with daily life, there is always something that will trigger us, and a conflict will happen. Interpersonal conflict, as for how it is called, is the conflict between two people. How to manage interpersonal conflicts becomes one of the most important skills for workplaces. 

I personally had a terrible experience about interpersonal conflict during my polytechnic school time. It was my year 2 and I was studying Diploma in Information Technology. We had a year long module that we had to find someone to team up and do it together for a year. Someone, I should address him as A want to join my group because we were short of one person so we agreed. So there were 3 people in the team, my friend, A and me. Then...A disappeared.

I was shocked when I heard A was under medical care at home to the extent that he cannot come to school, yet I saw him playing DOTA in steam( I added his steam account). He could not come to school so he was always absent on project meeting, so my friend and I had to do the year-long project by ourselves. I was really upset when I saw him playing games in steam yet giving excuses when we invite him to the team meeting, however, I am really bad at managing conflict so I chose to avoid conflict by ignoring him and take on his job. After three months he was completely MIA from the project, and we nearly forgot about A. Of course, at the end he failed this year long module which has 10 credits. Both my friend and A got A for this module. 

However, I felt bad because I could have helped him to pass if I have a good interpersonal conflict solving skill or if I had taken COM150 before this, we could work together and less burden will be taken by my friend and I. Due to my lack of interpersonal conflict solving skill, I missed this chance we had to work day and night to finish the project. I chose to avoid the matter and in the end, it was a LOSE-LOSE situation. However, it is really hard for an introvert to speak up and tell him directly, I know this is bad but I could not help. Is there any suggestion from you guys that can help me to improve this fear to speak up?

Importance of Active Listening

Importance of Active Listening

I was doing home tuition for a kid in Serangoon.

Her grandma always come to me and complain about her, saying "she is too lazy to do work, so she(grandma) had to beat her up everyday." Meanwhile, the girl, Yvette was speechless and refuse to respond to her. It seems like between them, there is a lack of active listening. Yvette refuse to listen to her grandma and doing her own things, her grandma keep beat her up and scold her because of that. I once asked her about why is her grandma so fierce, why didn't she try to listen to what her grandma said so that she suffer less. Yvette told me that she tried to do so but her grandma still scold her, so she would rather refuse to respond to her. 

The situation is worsened by age and culture. There is a huge generation gap between them, and her grandma is less used to the current technology. Yvette told me sometimes when she was studying with her iPad, her grandma would think that she is playing and scold her. When she was explaining that she was doing work, her grandma did not believe her. Chinese culture tend to be more demanding and strict to children, and this is extremely true to Yvette's family. Her family have four kids and they were all under a strict house rule. Some of them did improved but some of them just became more rebellious. I gave tuition to three of their kids and all three told me that they had been beaten by their grandma. 

I believe active listening will help their family greatly, because they always argue and the result is usually the kids get scolded. If they practice active listening, stand in another people's shoes and think of why is she arguing with me and be more tolerant, their family will be more harmonious. If kids study more at home, play lesser game and listen to their grandma, they would not argue with each other. If their grandma can be more tolerant and think in the kids shoes, that they were still young, they need other ways to be taught rather than beaten up and scold, they would also argue lesser. 

Descriptive Reflection - Strengths and challenges in communicating

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Communication is probably the most important tool in managing inter-personal relationships, My strength in communication is empathy. I am always able to relate to others when I hear from others. By putting myself in other peoples' shoes, I am able to feel what they feel and share other people's problems, giving others critical opinions in a way that will not hurt them. With this strength, I am able to get along well with a lot of people and gain trust from others very fast.

However, I have my own troubles. Firstly, as a non-native English speaker, I am not very confident to communicate in English and I always stumble myself when I speak publicly, even though I had tried my best. However, I can perform well on a stage with thousands of audiences but I can hardly speak fluently and naturally in front of a 20 students class. However, I am able to present well with my native language, so this problem is because I am unfamiliar with English, if I continue to practice English, I should be able to solve this problem. 

Secondly, during Teng Teng's second lesson, I gained a lot of new knowledge and the sentence "Selection affects us" shocked me, as I realised that I am also always affected by my own perception and not being objective. This is very bad because it prevents me from being fair to all. With a coloured-glass, I might appear mean sometimes. For example, I had a terrible conflict with one of my classmate before (whom cannot be named), and since then my opinion of him have always been negative and refuse to talk to him. Whenever he did badly I will blame this with his internal attribution and when he did well, I will think it as an external attribution. 

As I am enrolled in COM150 course, I look forward to more chances of practicing effective communication skills to gain more confidence when I am communicating with others in English. I also like to learn more of my weakness by the end of COM150, I hope that I will not just getting a pass in this course but also digging out more of my weaknesses and strength, so I will perform better in my future workplace.