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.