Thank You Dr. Edwin

Thank you for giving me a chance to express my thoughts through blogging.

I am a habitual blogger that only blog my own personal lifes online. My blog were usually invisible to outsiders. You had given me a chance to shout out my opinions and express my feelings publicly where everyone will be free to view and give comments on my thoughts. Thank you.

Thank you for letting me have blogging for 10% assignment.

I am a habitual blogger that only blogs my own personal life online. My blog were usually private where I think the only use of blog online is to keep personal journals, no other than that. You had totally changed my opinion and perspective on blogging, and you have definitely brought up a new horizon in introducing blog in the teaching-learning profession. Thank you.

Thank you for letting me to express my thoughts about the input in class more freely.

I often do not have the guts to raise up my hand and interrupt your lecture. When I have questions I usually resort to internet or my friends, and later come out with our own interpretations. So far our application of those interpretations had not been wronged, but when I know that my personal views will be read by you online, it was an encouragement for me to write more and ask more through blogging. The boundaries in class was demolished as the whole process of blogging was stress-free and easy. Thank you for giving me the chance to ask more questions. Thank you.

Thank you for letting me to reassure my own points and thoughts about some facts.

The process of blogging and commenting was fun but at the same time a serious one. Sometimes when I was expressing my thoughts in my post, my coursemates would have some disagreements with my facts. Blogging had actually help me to learn how to stood hold on my own opinions by convinving them with some solid facts that I possesed. At the same time the process of commenting on my coursemates postings also apply the same effect where I would somehow challenge their thoughts by inserting my own opinions. The process of blogging was a mind-provoking one. Thank you.

Thank you Dr. Edwin for giving all of us a chance to know blog and to further blogging. We'll miss you for every coming semesters. Do take care.

* The Meeting with Mr. Kee Thuan Chye*
I've always admire his work after the short story "A Sense of Home". It was a brilliant piece of writing. The meeting with him was fruiful one as I had gained a lot of new insights on the play "Swordfish, then the Concubine". It was also quite interesting for us to see that he cracked his humour in front of us, but at the same time, inserting some serious national issues in his conversation with us. I had realized my own shallowness in political scenes in Malaysia. But honestly speaking, The main point of meeting Mr. Kee for was not knowing more about current political issues, but making him "alive" for us. Thank you Dr. Edwin again for giving us such a chance to have a signature of him (Maybe can sell money when we are desperate for it =P) and thank you for letting me know Mr. Kee more, and not just merely browsing through his abstract in his literary works. =)

Overall Experience in Micro-Teaching

Finally it was a sense of relieve that I've longed for the past few weeks. THE MICRO-TEACHING IS OVER !!!! This experience was an un-ordinary one because I believe not many of us can take the stress of doing 3 different micro-teaching in one shot, with different expectations of lecturers and different subjects. Sometimes its just plain confusing because we simply could not make clear between what this micro-teaching requires and what that micro-teaching wants !

However I could say that micro-teaching for this subject is the most less brain-cracking one because we don't really need to worry about the input part. The other micro-teaching require us to think of the input that we should give to our students and think of ways to deliver them, and we have to think of activities to reinforce that input. However, as for this case,the micro-teaching only requires us to brain-storm for activities that are more content-focusedm meaning we have no need to divert our attention to to other language elements in a typical English classroom.

Personally I enjoyed this micro-teaching the most because the process of brain-storming is always the most fun one. I've always need to imagine the situation in classroom when I'm designing certain activities and to anticipate their responses to prevent any boring and monotonous activities. Therefore I'm always having "illusion" when I'm brain-storming, and that had really dragged long my whole preparation for this micro-teaching task.

In this final reflection too I would like to again point out my own strengths and weaknesses. My strengths would be my lanaguage proficiency where I have no problem in giving clear instructions to my students and also my organization of my activities. However, my proficiency level at the same time become my weakness because it would be quite hard for me to lower down my language if my target students are from lower preficiency, making my lesson difficult for them to digest and accept. So from this I had realized that audience awareness is very important in a teaching process because we must always cater the need and proficiency level of our students so that they can receive input from us at the most optimum level.

Therefore, as a conclusion, I would say that this entire micro-teaching process had taught me a lot of new things and I had definitely gained greater insights in how to be a better teacher in the future.

Pre-Reading and While-Reading Teaching Experience

As a continuation from the set induction activity for the play "Soul Gone Home" by Langston Hughes, I had prepared both pre-reading and while-reading activities for my micro-teaching session today. Originally we were supposed to seperate these two activities but since we are short of time, our tutor had asked us to combine both of these activities in one session.

This time the experience of preparing pre-reading and while-reading activities was much easier if compared with my experience to prepare for these activities last semester for short story class. I had gained some insights from past experience and the process of designing activities was smoother. However, the challenge this time was to teach a "play". Last semester, although we are new to designing appropriate activities, the short story text were easier for us and target students to digest. As for plays, it was quite hard for us to decide on which part of the text we should choose from since plays are more lenghthy than text like short story.

Therefore my resolution for this problem was to choose a shorter text, which was Langston Hughes's "Soul Gone Home" and I'm glad that few people in my class had decided on this. But at the same time I too discovered that most of us are focusing on the same lements to be focused on, which are themes and characters. I was quite shocked at first because I did not want to have the same presentation as others. That would definitely make my students and also my evaluators to be bored till the core. Fortunately our tutor had gave us the advice that although the elements that we've chosen may be the same, we can still use different approaches to teach that particular text to make your lesson more interesting.

Therefore I had decided to focus on the personality traits of one main character instead of a few to make my lesson more content-focused. I had choose to concentrate on the changes that "the mother" in the play used to address "the son" as my pre-reading activities, and let my students infer the characteristics of "the mother" based on that observation.

After the micro-teaching session I had gained a few feedbacks from my friends. Mostly it was my approach of teaching and again, I had problem in my language because I tend to speak fast and give lengthy instructions which confused the others. However the feedback on my activity was positive because my friends mentioned that the connection between my pre-reading and while-reading activities were well-linked as they can see the necessity to refer back to the result of previous activity for the use of next activity.

This session of micro-teaching had let me see that organization of activities in a lesson is very important as we need to let our students see the need of them doing some activites that will contribute to another activity. The matter of designing appropriate activity for students is not just merely giving them a task sheet, finish that activty, put that task sheet away and start another new activity without any connection. I realized it was auspicious for students to "see the link".

Besides, my same old problem of language used in the classroom has yet to be solved. I really need to adjust my language according to my target audience so that my students will not be confused by my speech.

Hence, I would conclude that this micro-teaching experience was a more fruitful one compared to the one that I did for last semester. It was especially useful in helping me to gain more insight in designing suitable activities for students in classroom.

"I Broke The Covenant... So What?" said King Lear

So you pay the price.

It’s kind of interesting when the only three plays that I’ve learnt thoroughly so far were all about relationship between God and human beings. No doubt, it had changed my personal point of view towards this world, since all these while I’m the pagan believer, and these plays had make me believed the existence and the power from the “above”.

“King Lear” by Shakespeare was a total tragedy. However this tragedy, in my opinion, was not worth to be sympathized with. Every catastrophe that Lear experienced in the play, it was all stemmed from his own foolish actions and decisions. If he did not ideal of a care-free life to spend his old age and step down from his throne, he would not caused the two daughters’ greed for the kingly power. If he did not insist on the stupid game on professing love through words, he would not lose his dearest daughter and built his own path to his madness and doom. It was all because of his own actions, he had nothing to be sympathized on.

The Elizabethan world view in this play was, although a cruel one, but also a bloody truth that showed to us that men can never outwit the power from the above. Once you broke the covenant, once your action diverts from the law of nature, you have no place to hide and no place to run. That proved the old-time saying right, pay for your own actions. Sadly no man in Earth seemed to realize that this golden rule of nature was always around them, they continue to sin, they continue to live their lives in shadow, they continue to live the way they want without thinking of consequences. And more sadly, I used to be one of them.

I now believe in retribution. I now believe in karma. I hate being so cautious in my life at so young a age, but I like being informed that when I was doing something, someone would be watching me, at least I behave much better.

Singapura Dilanggar Todak !!! LARI ~

This play seemed easy to read but trust me; it is definitely not as easy when I was trying to interpret its underlying meaning. Unlike Oedipus Rex, this play is an intellectual play where it provokes our thoughts about the local political scenario which I am not familiar with, and therefore, I am having a much harder time to digest this compared to Oedipus Rex.

The prologue of the play is about a covenant between God and human. Although the characters in prologue do no reappear in the rest of the play, they are actually significant characters that influence the development of the entire play. It is because the breaking of this covenant, the kingdom was destroyed. This reminds me of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” when Lear forfeited his responsibilities as a King to rule on Earth (he broke the covenant with God) and in the end, he became a mad man as his own retribution. Again, my insights on power from the above deepen because play after play, it had proven to me that God’s power is unchallengeable and human can never outwit God.

Besides this, there is nothing that surprised me in the storyline as I am quite familiar with it, since I had read “Sejarah Melayu” when I was in secondary school. The only surprising element I found in here was the character of Ris Kaw and Logod. These two characters seemed to act like outsiders that view the development of this play in a different perspective. This had ringed a bell in me of a Chinese proverb that says that “an outsider can see a matter more clearly than those who are involved in that matter”. I see Ris Kaw and Logod playing that role because, as discussed in previous lectures, they are the contemporary voices that alert us. They let us see between the lines of what is happening and they are our own voice of conscience.

Lastly, I liked the way Kee Thuan Chye wrote this play because it is rather humorous. It seemed easy to read, but for literature students like me who have to always read between the lines, it had really given me a headache. Many of us tend to forget what we as a literature students should do (interpret underlying meaning and the message in the play) when reading this play because the entire play is funny and the language is rather easy. Therefore it had definitely increased the difficulty level of this play, and in my opinion, more difficult than the text “Oedipus Rex”.

The Experience of Simulated Teaching - Set Induction

In my set induction I had chosen to work on the story “Soul Gone Home” by Langston Hughes. The reason why I chose this play to work on is because I noticed that most of my classmates had chosen plays like “The Ring Doesn’t Fit” and also “The Ring”, which I think will be rather repetitive if I also pick these plays for my simulated teaching.

I was among the middle of the group to present where all of us had been through a few hours of looking at our friends presenting their teachings. I believe most of us had become quite bored at that time because for the whole session, the class was exceptionally quiet with little responses. So when I was presenting my set induction, I was having a hard time to elicit responses from my “students”. I spent some of my time trying to rephrase the limited responses that I had, hopefully my “students” would understand what my set induction is about.

I felt that I was quite nervous that day, so I stammered a little and maybe some slip of tongues and some grammatical mistakes in my speech. However, I did not get any positive or negative response from my tutor Mr. Harold, since he would sometimes comment on the good ones and the bad ones at the end of every session. So I guess I was on the right track for my set induction.

I had used a song named “Family Portrait” by Pink to portray the theme of mother-son relationship in the play “Soul Gone Home”. From my observance, none of my classmates had used song’s video clip but there are some who had used songs as their set induction. Most of them had opted for pictures and also video clips from movies. Thus, I think I had done something different from my classmates that do not bore my students even more, apart from the topic that I have chosen.

Overall, I would grade myself moderately because of the flaws that I had. I would definitely work on these flaws when I present my pre-reading and also while-reading activities.

Tribute the Elizabeth

Elizabeth reminded me of a rather famous critic on Jane Austen’s books.

Women in Jane Austen’s novel will never fail to surrender in a civil marriage.

As powerful as Elizabeth, she too succumbed to the basic need of a typical woman – the desire to be loved by a man. As strong as Elizabeth as the Queen of England, she had to admit, indirectly, that she is a woman who longed to have a man and a child.

The character of Bess or the other Elizabeth as her favourite maid had hinted us some of Elizabeth’s thoughts. One, Elizabeth saw Bess as the ordinary her, the other her that can do things that she cannot do as a Queen, but at the same time imposed rules on her that indicated the limitations of living in a royal family. For instance, Elizabeth was furious when Bess secretly married a man without her royal permission.

Second, Elizabeth used Bess to show her true affection towards the man that she liked – a pirate named Sir Walter Raleigh. As mentioned there were a lot of limitations when you lived in a royal family, what more Queen Elizabeth herself as the role model of all. The scene where she insisted Bess to dance with Sir Walter had indicated this to us rather vividly.

However, although being a woman, Elizabeth had at the same time portrayed courage and determination greater than a man. She stood still when Spain declared war with England, even though she knew that England was weak against Spain. She planned well, and with her wit she freed Sir Walter, who was at that time imprisoned because he had married Bess, to fight against the marine troupe of Spain and eventually won the war.

Elizabeth was a tough woman, and woman like her if lived in this era, might be even greater than any presidents in the world. I felt sorry when she had to bear the name of a virgin queen, and I am sad that the society could not see her sacrifices of being one virgin queen is for the sake of England. Elizabeth, who sacrificed her love and her happiness as a woman, and being the last in Tudors line, built the golden age of England.

Tribute to Queen Elizabeth. All hail Queen Elizabeth.

Oedipus Rex - Foolish but Wise

The process of studying the whole text was a long winding road. The fact that it was a translated version of Latin text had complicated the situations, where some of vocabulary used was hard to pronounce and not to the level of my understanding. Honestly I had quite a hard time digesting the text on my own, but thankfully it was explained in detailed in class, and that really helped me a lot in the process of comprehending the class.

The thing that I had learnt the most when studying this text would be the elements of fate or moira in humans’ life. All this while I understand that men could not challenge God’s power, but I’ve always believe that if we work hard on something, we can pursue the things that we want and it is very possible to change our fate. But studying this text had made me realized that men, although had control over actions, but can never divert away from the course of their own fate and destiny set still but God. This was vividly portrayed when every step that Oedipus take to uphold his name as the ruler of Thebes and his determination in finding out the truth had dragged him to his eternal doom.

The conflicts within Oedipus too had been an interesting to study. Was Oedipus a wise king? Or is he a foolish man? When every action that Oedipus decided to take to help find the murderer of Laios and the process of revealing the truth behind his identity, he had caused himself to fall badly in his face. Personally I pitied Oedipus, I see him as a wise king and a victim of fate where he had no control on it. I believe, if fate had found its way on you, no matter how you wish to avoid it, you can never runaway from it. One way or another, you would have to fulfill your fate. It is a road that God had laid for us, and we, as earthlings under their feet had no choice but to take it.

The elements of dramatic ironies also had attracted me to continue reading this text attentively despite of the hard time I’m having with the understanding of the text. Again, it stressed on Oedipus as being a wise king or a fool man. The notion of physically blind but having great insights of morality and spiritually portrayed by Teiresias was also an emphasis on dramatic ironies where it was greatly contrasted with Oedipus as having normal eye sight but blind to see the truth, and eventually end up as a blind beggar.

“The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves”. Are we the cause of our own actions? Or is it really fated for us to walk into our own fall? This question is a good question for us to ponder on. Are we supposed to play our cards around God’s will, or should we write our own destiny. No one knows, because none of us know our own future. Oedipus Rex had taught me to uphold Carpedium. I do not know what will happen to me tomorrow, just like the reversal of fortune that had fallen on Oedipus. I will treasure each and every moment that I have now, which I had now considered as bliss.

Teiresias The She-Male Prophet

Teiresias is a man I “know” when I read the text of “Oedipus Rex”. He was known as a man who was blind physically but had a great spiritual or moral insight, as opposed to Oedipus in that particular text. At first I had absolutely no interest in knowing more in-depth about this man, since he was just a character in one of my must-read plays, until my lecturer had assigned us to do a research on him.

It was an eye-opening again after I had went through the introduction of plays earlier these days. I was amazed by Teiresias’s background and what he had been through. My knowledge in Greek history was all this while rather limited, until the research of Teiresias had made me gain more insight on Greek’s mythical world. The experience that Teiresias had gone through was incomparable to any other man in this world. Imagine a man that can experienced both sex in his lifetime, had children and had live for approximately seven generations, I could never had imagined that would ever happened in our time and space.

In the research of Teiresias, the thing that attracted my interest the most would definitely be the reason why he got blind and how he get his ability to foresee the future. There are quite a number of versions but the two most popular versions would be, either he got punished by the Goddess of Athena because he had accidentally saw her bathing naked, or Hera, the wife of Zeus, who had cursed him for answering honestly that women enjoyed ten times more than men in bed. I remained skeptical for the first theory and chose to applaud for the later; judging from the experience that Teiresias had went through as both men and women, and also the limited power of Athena as only the goddess of wisdom and war compared to Zeus as the King of all Gods to give him the ability to foresee.

Teiresias ability to foresee the future had casted some impacts on me. Firstly, never judge a book by its cover that although a man may be physically impaired but he may have some ability that is greater than any other normal beings in the society. Secondly, believe in the greater power of God as mankind has no strong grip on their own destiny where they can only decide on their own actions, but never their fates. Lastly, never be too confident on ourselves as we may not know what will happen next to our future; this moment we may be at the height, but the next thing that we may find out is that we are falling to the lowest point of our lives.

Thanks to Teiresias, I had become more interested to continue reading the text of “Oedipus Rex” and also gained greater knowledge on the mythical side of Greek history.

Writing Play - "A Fat Soul"

The experience of writing a play script was an unusual one as this is not something that we will write in our leisure. Often we will opt for a short story or a more compact product like poetry, but writing a plays had never crossed my mind.

The last experience of me writing a play was back at my foundation years which I have to adapt from the original text of “Pygmalion” by Bernard Shaw. I was in charged in the second act and I could remember vividly that all I did was summarizing the whole act to a shorter version without even paraphrasing the lines in the play. Now then I thought of it I am laughing at my own naïve-ness at that time, I was a newbie in literature, what more on plays as one of the oldest history in literature.

However, writing this recent play was a fun experience as well. I really enjoy myself when I had brainstorming sessions with my group members to come out with the main theme of the play, what kind of characters to put in and what kind of words should we put in. When writing this one act play, we had divided 3 parts of our first rough draft into 6 scenes, and each of us was to write 2 scenes each. After that, we compiled our writings and do revision and editing together.

The whole process had been a successful one as everything worked out really well. We managed to finish draft one in a week time, and getting it back from our tutor with a good feedback. Therefore I am very happy to announce that we had the play done and it was a really interesting experience to have in this class as well as a good experience of having a successful collaborative work with my friends.

The play that we had written was entitled “A Fat Soul” which was about a fat girl who had lost her loved one because of her weight problem. Being heartbroken, she sorted the extreme way to lose weight to gain back her confidence. At the end of the play, she successfully lost weight and gain a man who truly loved her for who she is. This play was written based on the issue of weight problem because it is something that youngsters nowadays are familiar with and we hope, when they are reading the play, could bring them realizations that beauty comes from within but not from the appearance.

We really hope that this one act play will work out well. After all, three of us do deserve beginner’s luck! Special thanks to Hui Nee and also Jia Yiing. =)

A Breath of Lion Dance in Literature

It was kind of shocking when Dr. Edwin asked us to blog on traditional dance. I was totally clueless on what to write and what to do, since I'm not at all familiar with Malaysian traditional dance and how it would be related to literature in English.

"Procastination is the theif of time"
This old and familiar sayings really proved it's truth when I idled to give a deep thought on this blog. My friends, one by one, had finished their "mission impossible". So I was worried, what am I going to do? And while I'm scratching my head worrying about my own version of MI, suddenly a programme on TV gave me inspiration. =)

LION DANCE. The programme was a recap on the recent international lion dance competition at Genting Highland with critics to give opinions on every teams' dance movements. At that very moment I was in deep awe. Critics after critics, my head just couldn't stop nodding on the facts pointed in that programme.

"This team has failed to dance out the movements of lion, not natural enough, totally overdone"

"This team.. Hmm.. Very good in their posture and overall dance structure."

"No.. The actions are not skilled enough.. Too rough, there's no connection at all!!"

After the show, again I was laughing at my own ignorance. Lion dance is not merely a group of hyper-active boys dancing with a fake lion head and piece of glittery cloth behind their backs during new year and grand opening of a company. It is an art, dated back 5000 years ago. It has history, it is a hard-trained choreography that need a lot of effort and time. It is something not easy to learn, and not to be undermined.

So later I was searching for the connection of lion dance with the literature that I'm learning right now, particularly in plays and dramas. The first similarity that I can see in lion dance and literature is that both of these have structure. For literature, the structure would be the combination of elements in literature to made up a piece of literary work. For instance, plot structure, characters, settings and most importantly, the language. As for lion dance, it is a harmony of the choreography, skilled actions,music and the list goes on.

Secondly, in terms of dramas and plays, both of them needs a lot of hard works and practices before they can perform to the public. Props, costumes, stage direction/dancing choreography, al these needs to be wewll-prepared before it is carried out as an entertainment to its audience. However, lion dance is different from dramatic iterature because lion dance is mostly on entertainment purposes while literature like plays and dramas not only can serve as a form of entertainment but at the same time, able to prvoke audience's thoughts.

Last but not least,both of the subject discussed is no doubt contains beautiful aesthetic values. Both of them is a part of human history and a form of story-telling that gives out messages. Lion dance is a part of chinese tradition where it tells us about mythical animal thousands years ago, while literature reveals human cultures and values. Although literature, apparently is much more universal and "mind-provoking", lion dance must not be under-estimate as solely a kind oof entertainment. It is a form of art and human culture, and therefore must be treasured by all of us. ^_^

One and a Half Hour for Drama Dummies

That was the shortest one and a half hour I’ve ever felt.

Ashamed of my shallowness in English literature and more specifically, in dramas and theatres, I listened tentatively for that one and a half hour – a detailed guide for newbies like me to get to know the development of theatres and plays.

I discovered my total ignorance of the subject that I’ve learnt since foundation years when I wow-ed all the way through the lecture on development and history of theatre.

“The development of theatre actually dated back to Greek history and Aristotle time??”

I was speechless and at the same time laughed at myself because all these while, I thought that the most classical and oldest literature in human history would be something like Shakespeare. It had never come to my mind that theatre was actually the most traditional part in English literature and it had certainly, never occurred to me that it would date back before century.

Therefore that one and a half hour was a big slap on my face and a big realization for dummies like me. Besides discovering that I will have to do a lot of homework on researching, I think I will enjoy myself tremendously for this course. Not because of the humour that the lecturer sometimes cracked in class out of sudden, but the new things and knowledge that I will get during this getting-to-know dramas and theatres sessions. =)

The introduction for today was indeed a very successful one, and I’m looking forward for more.