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Thursday, May 17, 2012

Survival school

I cannot remove the wistful feeling of the last period of the school in Sydney, because the course came to an end when I felt I was really taking off and up in the air.

First year of the school was really terrible simply because I never succeeded to take ride on the group discussion. 80% of learning in business school is through talk, listen and write in the group. That's it.

Part time students in the tertiary school are highly motivated. They come to school with strong intention to learn what they intend. Also most assignment is to write a group report; group research is half and group writing is the other half. They talked very fast and I couldn't not pick at all.

Hence what they usually do during the first day of lecture is exploring who to form a team with.
 A team? Making a team is impromptu job.  If you lose a fraction of concentration on the climate of the class room? you will be left easily alone.Who will pro-actively be willing to approach to form a team with an Asian looking man who happens to speak English so poorly? Actually no one.

In fact they had no need to take care of me who never be attractive for good group mark.

Making a team was so stressful back then. I felt I completed half the subject if I just managed to be in a team within teaming dead line. Any professor who didn't delegate students to form a team on their own, but announced prearranged team was my favorite.


In general, many English native speakers have wrong assumption, which worked mostly disadvantageous to me, is that poor English speaker might possess poorer writing skills in English. No evidence at those days however some colleague students seemed to suspect my intellectual readiness to learn in English by the assumption. I came to know later on that  even they feel stressful to good writing requirement Among native English speakers if you have good writing skills you'll be very admired in the academic.Yes, it will be same to any language. Everyone admires who has good writing skills in their native language.
 
After struggling of a year or so, I found myself start talking to them, stop them to listen to me, sometime debate over them, and lead conversation. Also I learned how to get things done without deep involvement but not losing focus.

Those days experience really work for me for this project. That's for sure what I learned those days was not just English but social skills of how to deal with better English speakers than myself.

Last 3.5 weeks' work reminded me the lengthy hard time of 2008. And now I have same wistful feeling of taking off to the sky.

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