communication

Today we met with our teacher mentor to show her our presentation for Future Problem Solving Program. She was not satisfied with our presentation. I explained that yesterday we only had time to finish editing the powerpoint and did practice speaking much. She pointed out that the problem with our group is communication as she had already said the problem with us is not content, but oral presentation. I did remember she said this, but why did I give it no heed? As this is not the first time we made mistake due to communication problem, I think now it is the time to reflect carefully and see the reason.

Firstly, four of us are all from China and English is not our first language. Our disability in English may give rise to misunderstanding. This cannot be changed in the short term and all of us need to improve our English and talk with local friends in English more.

Secondly, culture may also play a role. In China we usually did work when the teacher pushed. Every detail was usually planned by the teachers for us in advance. What we needed to do was just to follow what the teacher said. However, it is different in Singapore. We need to do explore unknown by ourselves. Mentor was only there to give advice. We did not realize this and were waiting for the approval of the powerpoint from our mentor before we started to prepare our oral presentation. Unless we change this mindset, we may encounter such communication problem again.

Finally, last time our mentor said, “Come tomorrow to practice presentation.” I thought the practice suggested that we could go through trial and error. What our mentor actually meant was to present to her. I don’t know whether it is a natural tendency for all humans to subliminally interpret an ambiguous expression to their own advantage. For me, it was true because my interpretation meant that I did not need to practice so hard the night before. I realize that we should ask if we do not understand some instruction clearly and that it is always better to give specific instructions such as “finish it in by this week”, “you two will be in charge of it” or “finish editing the presentation”.

All in all, I feel that the mindset matters most in this case. Indeed, we need to learn how to listen though it looks easy.

I check online and found this two links quite useful.

http://csj.org/infoserv_articles/how_to_communicate_effectively.htm on generally how to communicate. As I have just seen, listen effectively is the premise other communication skills can be built and giving specific instructions is important. I also learned other tips such as “physically attend to others”, “respond in descriptive terms”, etc.

http://www.mindtools.com/CommSkll/EmailCommunication.htm on email communication. The tips are really useful for me: make the subject lines headlines, specify the reply wanted and make one point per email. These are easy to follow but indeed help a lot.

I believe with this reflection, we can communicate better next time.

befriender's club activities& laugh therapy

Today, we went to the moral neighbourhood link in the afternoon. We arrived there at about 2 o'clock. Then we began the session of laugh therapy. The laugh therapy is really fun. Laugh can be heard thorought the session. The elderly like it very much as they are very activie while doing the exercise. After this, we started to teach Chinese Knot Making. This time the knot is rather difficult. However, we were very happy to see that some of the elderly did not want to give up and about half of us finally made it. When we were making the chinese knot, I had a chit-chat with one of the elderly. She once worked for building construction. It was all about labouring job without machine and she started to work at the age of 15. She described that it was very exhausting and she needed to work for ten hours a day. As a result, she retired before the retiring age. Then she asked me about my parents' jobs. I said they are engineers and work in the office, however, the job is not very easy, either. She agreed greatly with me and said to me seriously in an educating tone that no job is easy and one can only achieve success under pressure. Thereafter, we started to do some recreational activities. This time I played majhong with my friends with the help of the elderly. The elderly taught me some techinques about this interesting game. And I found it was not that easy as I thought. I quite agreed with her opinion that majhong is very easy to learn, but very difficult to be good at it. This time I won a lot with the help of the auntie. She also seemed to be very happy. At around 5 o'clock, we went back. The elderly said thanks to us and I could sense that they were very willing to play with the young.

Wang Yuhan
12/6/07

Chinese Knot making and inter-generational activities

We heard that every Tuesday afternoon the elderly in the Moral Center did Laugh Therapy, a group activity whereby elderly intermingled, exercised and laughed together. Why don’t the members of our befrienders’ club do it with them together? We approached Sandie, an official in the Moral Center and she highly appreciated this idea. So as planned, the first part of our inter-generational activities today was to laugh together with the elderly!
More than twenty of us, young and old, stood in a circle and, under the instruction of Sandie, begun imitating tiger, calling, eating, etc. The mimicking was not an end in itself, in fact all of us imitated badly; imitation was to let every laugh together, the worse every one mocked, the funnier it was. Both the young and the old laughed naturally; I realized that I was meeting the trouble half-way when I dreaded before the Laugh Therapy that no one would laugh as both the young and old would be timid. At the end of this 30-minute exercise, all the senior citizens and the members of the befrienders’ club pledge, “we are the happier people in the world!” At that instant, I really thought so. The laugh therapy worked.
Then we continued the Chinese Knot making we left off last time. This time we prepared 12 copies of notes on how to make Pan Chang Jie, a much more beautiful and complicated kind of knot compared with the last time so that elderly can refer to the notes when they forgot a certain step. Also learned the lesson from the last time, we paired the elderly and the young up: one senior citizen and a member of the befrienders’ club would make a knot together. This was to increase interaction and build rapport. Indeed, this worked. We saw the elderly and the young talked about family, school and leisure activities. However, this time the knot we chose to teach was too difficult to make – there were too many steps in it – so that it ended up the young did nearly but the elderly just sat idly by. We would choose to teach knots that are straightforward to teach the elderly the next time.
Chinese Knot making lasted for little more than an hour, after which the young and old played board game and talked in a relaxing way just like the last time for another hour. The young also brought paper and pen to jot down some words in dialect and how to pronounce them.
2007-6-12

Chinese knot making and intergenerational activities

Though I have taught Chinese Knot Making in school sabbatical, which had a very good feedback, while preparing for our first Chinese Knot lesson for the elderly, I was still not sure whether I could teach the elderly well, a group of people who may not learn new things as quickly as the young. Thus I purposely chose Shi Zi Jie, one of the easier types of Chinese Knot to teach the elderly and made it once again while thinking how I could make the instructions clear.
During the lesson today, most things went smoothly as expected. Though there were only six senior citizens as many of the elderly today went to a Tai Ji course (we will change the time for the lesson next time so more elderly who are interested will not have a hard time deciding between Tai Ji or the Chinese Knot making), they learned conscientiously and said that they would spread the message and bring more elderly to come. Basically, I showed them how to make Shi Zi Jie step by step and went around checking whether they had followed correctly. In spite of many mistakes made, I have to say that the elderly learned faster than I expected, as Chinese Knot is indeed not easy to make and even a tiny misstep in middle will lead to a peculiar pattern at last.
Of course, there were many details in the way of teaching which could be reformed. First of all, we can provide notes next time on how to make the Chinese Knot in steps to the elderly. We saw one of the elderly actually took down the main steps on a paper and thought, “why can we help them do this in advance so that they can refer the notes to recall what they learned in case they forget?” Furthermore, when I teach next time, I shall do the demonstration on how to make the knot on the same side of the elderly so that they will not get confused as what I demonstrate and what they follow are on the opposite direction.
The Chinese Knot making lesson lasted for two hours, after which we played Majiang, Pingzi and Nummy with elderly for a whole afternoon. We all had a good time and the elderly warmly invited us to come and play with them when we were free, which made we feel fulfilled as it showed that elderly enjoyed the time with us. With such well-received inter-generational activities, our relation with the elderly will go deeper and the bond between us will be stronger and surely the elderly will not feel isolated any more.

Li Xiaoyi 2007-6-8

Chinese knot making and intergenerational activities

As planned, we arrived at the Moral Center at ten o’clock. As the Moral Center was informed of our Chinese Knot Making lessons in advance and had thus notified the elderly who are interested, some senior citizens were already waiting there.
Xiaoyi taught the elderly Shi Zi Jie. The elderly mastered the skill and at the end of the lesson each of them can produce at least three such knots. However, as the lesson is heavily content-based, there lacked interaction and bonding between the young and the old, another important aspect we wanted to achieve in our project. Beside, for the convenience of the elderly, we will print out the main steps in making the knot so that they can refer to it when they forgot how to make the knot.
The inter-generational activities in the afternoon turned out to be a successful one. More than ten senior citizens played games with the members of the befrienders’ club for a whole afternoon until five o’clock when the Moral Center closed.
We played Pingzi. It was a game similar to Majiang, except that parts of Chinese characters replaced the normal “Dong Feng”, “Ba Gu”,etc. This improved the elderly’s Chinese, at the same time, we got an excellent chance to learn elderly’s dialect. Each time a new character was formed, we would request the elderly to pronounce it in their dialect and we would roughly take it down on our note book. We hope little by little, we can more or less understand what the elderly were talking in dialect.
We also played Majiang with the elderly for recreation. Nummy, a math-related game in which the one who can put out all his card first can win, was also rather interesting. The elderly were rather good at this: they figured out for many time how to put out a card when we thought it was impossible. This showed that the elderly were still large sharp in their mind and affirmed our belief that they could still contribute to the society in one way or another (like sell Chinese Knot for charity).
I also solved a jigsaw puzzle together with an elderly. We were so happy that we made more than fifty pieced together in a few minutes.
By and large, the activities today were fruitful and we would keep it on and visit the Moral Center more often during the holiday.

2007-6-7

Chinese knot making and intergenerational activities

Today we visit the moral neighbourhood link to teach chinese knot making and to do some intergeneration activities together with some members of our befriender's club. We arrived there at about 10 o'clock in the morning. Then the teaching session started. As an expert of chinese knot making, Xiaoyi actually was in charge of teaching how to make the Chinese knot. We could see that the elderlies are very keen to do this activity and also they mentioned that this can help to prevent their brain from out of practice. Shizhi and I helped to take photos and talked with them. After that, we told them that we wanted to do some activities in the afternoon, such as mahjon. They seemed to be quite happy with this, and quickly wanted to teach us a game called Pinzi Majiang, in which way it is played that the players put the bricks with some parts of a Chinese character on it together to form a complete Chinese character. This is quite difficult even for us. After lunch, we came back and played some other games. The elderlies are very good at these games and they wanted to play a role of teacher while we are playing. We also had a good chat with the elderly. One of them had visited Wuxi in the 1970s. She knew many things about my hometown. Also, the elderly always communicate with each other in dialect, especially Cantonese and they are interested in teaching us and also know how to speak in our dialect like Ningbo and Wuxi dialect. After a while, I found that some of the words in Cantonese were similar to those in Mandrin. The elderly seemed to be very happy if we can speak the words they just spoke in Cantonese in Mandrin to reply them. At around 5 o'clock we went back.

Wang Yuhan
7/6/07

chit-chat with the elderly in the Moral Center

Today, the first Saturday in the June holiday, Xiaoyi, Yuhan and I went to the Moral Center again. This time, as many elderly were out of the Moral Center for a charity show, we intended to teach the elderly there neither English nor Chinese calligraphy, instead we just wanted to make it an informal chit-chat session so that a stronger bond can be forged between the senior citizens and us.
The chit-chatting turned out to be a fruitful, joyful and enjoyable one. When we arrived at the Moral Center, the elderly there were knitting blankets, just like the ones we sold on their behalf before the Chinese New Year together with the Chinese Lanterns. As they expressed their wish that they would like to have some more charity sales to sell all the blankets and the Chinese Lantern they made, we promised to help them to hold a charity sale during the Racial Harmony Day celebration in our school this year.
They looked rather happy to see us and invited us to sit with them. We chatted leisurely about everything, ranging from the school life to TV series, from life attitude to their children. We were happy to know that two grandsons of one senior citizen there happened to our seniors studying in Hwa Chong as well. They also recommended to us a TV series on Channel U named Xi You Ji, which is a basically a documentary of some Singaporeans’ life abroad. One grandpa, who went to China about three times each year, could tell us his experience in China without any stop. The atmosphere of the chatting is always casual and lively, just like a dinner chat between a grandma and her grandson. Not only did the elderly invite us to come to the Moral Center more, they even asked whether we would like to play Majiang with them during the weekdays. They even cooked dessert for us, Lian Zi Zhou which was really sweet, sweet to heart. This showed that we were on the right track to achieve our objectives.
Through chatting, I also developed an appreciation for the wisdom of the elderly. They knew that we must be aspiring to scale greater heights. They knew we always looked forward. They knew we never cared about our health much, because “young people never know what pain is until they are old”. They admonished that we should pay greater attention to our health as it is the foundation on which other great things in life such as family, love and career can be built. Indeed, their words were wise. Their spoke from their own journey in life and within the benefit of hindsight helped us to avoid some obstacles. Thank you, grandmas and grandpas! By trying to make your lives more colorful, we are also learning from your all.
The chatting today was indeed successful, but there was also room for improvement. At one instant, one of us said we could “accompany” (陪)them playing Majiang, a word some elderly seemed to be sensitive to as they felt it suggested we did not like to play with them full-heartedly. In the future, we would avoid such words and let the elderly feel as if we were their grandsons. We will also learn their dialect little by little (we learned some today) so that the communication may be a bit easier for some of them.