Blogging- it’s MEANINGFUL!!

In my opinion, by participating in this web blog, it helped me loads to reflect on what I had learnt during lectures and tutorials time. It was because; it had helped me out in understanding the plays, dramas better and polished my skills in writing. This web blog had lots of benefits for us as students such as we were able to share the knowledge together, learnt from others’ point of view of something, improve our writing and thinking skills and so on. By reading others’ opinions and thoughts of plays and so on I knew the plays better and able to share my views with them by giving comments to theirs thoughts. On the other hand, by participating in this web blog, I think it had helped me loads in developing my cognitive skills and strategies in my learning process. It was because, when we able to gave the comments to our friends’ opinions and topics, it really helped me to look on others’ perspective and opinions of the plays and the terms of drama with different view and it has open up my mind in judging others’ and sharing our thoughts together. On next week, all of us will be going to KL PAC to watch a play. It seems almost 3 months we had looking for a play to have the experience about it. I really hope that, when we are there, we will have a true view about how the theatre looks like, how about the casts there, the motions on the sages and so on. Perhaps, it will be a meaningful watching trip to us as we are studying drama on this semester. Furthermore, it for this web blog, it had required me to think critically about all aspects of life regarding the issues in the plays. I had also developed my own perspective by creating and exploring my own beliefs when I looked on something in my life. Besides, this web blog was a good way of developing students’ skills and sharing knowledge in learning literature. As for me, this web blog was essential for us as students in gaining the knowledge and sharing the experiences in our learning process.

It has helped me lots!!

As for me, the experiences of conducting simulated teaching had given me lots of chances in improving my skills in teaching process as a teacher trainee. These simulated teaching presentations were very important stages in opening the correct schemata and getting our students interest. Through these simulated teaching presentations, it taught me to look at the poor and outdated strategy something that might be boring them. So from that situation, it had made me to think other initiative to attract the students’ attention and at the same time the methods should appropriate with their abilities. As a result, I had chosen to use an attractive and interesting strategy that will help them to get attention easily. As for my pre and while reading simulated teaching, I had chosen to give them a lesson about a theme of my text; The Ring Doesn’t Fit. Through the activities that I had prepared for them, it would give them a brief understanding about the play better and enhanced their abilities to share their thoughts and opinions together with their friends. The students can simply relate the activities with the text and they enjoyed it so much. On top of that, while doing this simulated teaching, the reflection had made me aware of and control the lesson by actively assessing what they know, what they need to know, and how their feedback of the lesson on that day. Besides, it had also helped me lots to realise my weaknesses and improve my teaching ability. Overall, this reflection was most important in prompting my teaching practices because it provided me with an opportunity to step back and think about how the students actually solved problems and how a particular set of problem solving strategies was appropriated for achieving their learning goals.

He’s here!!!

Last Monday, he was here…Kee Thuan Chye..It was such a great experience to meet him as a successful English writer in Malaysia and Dr. Edwin had tried his best to bring him to us. We had a meeting about 2hours and firstly he shared his experiences and he had been a journalist now for 28 years. His experiences started when he said that in fact, he was not thinking of going to university because of the expense. So, after Form 6, he took a job at MAS, and it lasted for two days. Later, he furthered his studies in USM and he had become enamoured of the theatre after doing a lot of work at the Experimental Theatre. Then, he wrote his own plays and directed them, and that became his passion. In the meeting he talked much about his play; Swordfish and the Concubine and had asked us about the play. It was such a good play because he was able to combine the elements of traditional and modern into that play and present it in his own way. The play completed in different way from others writers as he portrayed the humour and messages in one time. In this semester, we were studying this play and really hope that his brief explanations about it will help us better in our final on next week. He also talked about his books and certain of his works were based on the true scenarios in Malaysia. From the meeting I can simply said that he had shown to us that whether it was English literature or any kind of literature, it was important to have an appreciation of it because literature deals with life, it deals with a lot of moral issues, it deals with how people live, how they behave in certain situations. And although literary works may be fictive, or fictional, there was a certain truth to them. And, as we read them, we empathise with the characters. We go through the journey that they go through and we hopefully, understand something about life from their experience.