Evaluating Intercultural Behaviour

This took place 12 years ago, when I was still a 11-years old kid.

I was in a tour group along with my entire family in Hong Kong. The tour group consisted my family and some other Singapoean families and individuals, and all of us are of Chinese race.

The whole group were walking past an old street Hong Kong when we came across an old restaurant that sell snake meat and snake wine. In front of the restaurant, there were live snakes exhibited inside cages, as well as skinned snakes hung on hooks like chickens hung on hooks in front of chicken rice store. When I first saw this restaurant, I was excited because this was the first time I saw a snake restaurant. I had heard tales from my family about restaurants selling snake meat and snake wine in places like China and Hong Kong, and I had also seen them shown in documentaries on TV.

As I was looking at the live snakes in front of the restaurants, I heard loud gasps behind me. I looked back to see that the other fellow Singaporeans in our tour group were pointing at the restaurant and remarking on how disgusting the snakes were. That time I was still young, hence I did not understand why did those people feel disgusted seeing snakes when they were also Chinese like us.

Now, after recalling some of the things I had learnt these past 12 years, I can roughly understand why those fellow Singaporeans felt disgusted seeing snake restaurants.

Eating snakes has been considered to be normal by some Chinese cultures. To the western societies, especially to the christians, snakes are considered to be evil and never to be touched, let alone eaten. In Singapore, many of the Chinese Singaporeans had been educated by the British system for generations. For many Chinese Singaporean families, snake eating cultures had been slowly "forgotten". As for my family, we belonged to a more traditional Chinese family. Although we had never eaten any snakes, we had heard about them. Hence I have never felt disgusted when looking at live snakes.

Do you know that Chinese also eat alot of other kinds of strange food beside snakes? Depending on the region, Chinese can treat any kind of animals as food; from spiders to bats, to even rats and dogs. To most societies, it may be considered as "disgusting", but to some Chinese, that is their life.

Still, it is quite amazing to see that there are such great contrast between the cultures of Chinese races living in different countries. Despite the same roots, there can be some things considered to be taboo for one dialect, and norm for another. Anyway, I believe that the difference between cultures should be respected, not disgusted. I feel that those Singaporeans who were pointing at the snake restaurant should feel ashamed of themselves. Even if the snake restaurant did not appeal to them, they should have respected snake eating culture of the locals, not to criticise it openly in the public like in 12 years ago. How will it be like if someone criticise durians to be stinky and disgusting in front of a durian lover?

Intercultural differences should be respected, not ridiculed. This is one of the many important concepts that I have learnt so far in this ES2007S course.

Review on Peer Teaching

Today, my peer teaching group consisting of me myself, Sheila and Min Hau, had conducted a peer teaching session with the ES2007S Professional Communication Group10 class. Our topic of peer teaching regards to designing survey questionnaire and interview, essential skills which will be needed for improving our effective communication skills. Designining survey questionnaire and interview will also have to be learnt since all reserch groups will require these skills to complete their research projects and proposals.

The experience of conducting a peer teaching session can be summarised in one word: enlightening. Why do I say so? This is because it feels so much different when I myself is the one who is standing in front of the class, conducting a lesson to everyone. Although this is not my first time making a presentation in front of the class, I can still always feel the mounting pressure on my shoulders when I stand in front of the entire class, knowing that the class will be paying full attention to me. Everytime when I stand up in front of the class to present, I will always have this form of mentality in my mind that I will be evaluated by everyone in the classroom, hence the stress will always be there, no matter how prepared I am.

Talking about preparedness, frankly speaking this preparation is quite rushed in my own point of view. Although the first peer teaching session in this class took place 3 weeks ago (so theoretically speaking we have 3 weeks to prepare), we only started carrying out plans 2 weeks ago, before finalising everything last night. The reason why we took so long to prepare our peer teaching session is because we had been gathering reference on how the other peer teaching groups conduct their own peer teaching sessions. As the fourth group to conduct our session, we are one of the last groups to conduct our session, and after we had witnessed the excellent peer teaching session on creating wiki pages by Forrest's (sorry if I have mispelled your name) group, we know that expectations on our presentations would be very high. Hence, alot of time and effort had been taken by our team to prepare this presentation in hoping to make it fun and enlightening to everyone, not just to the rest of the class, but also to our team as well.

From what I have learnt about peer teaching, I can say that peer teaching is one very effective way of learning, not just to those who are being taught, but also to ourselves too. As the person responsible for teaching others, what is the best way of preparing a presentation other than learning deeply about the topic that I have to present to others? Sometimes, stress and expectations can be a good motivator for learning, and after experiencing this peer teaching session, I cannot help but to agree with it.

I believe that our skills in conducting peer teaching and presentations can be further improved. Although we believed that we had been fully prepared for our own parts of the entire presentation, I think that the overall duration planning for the presentation is a little screwed up. Initially, we had planned this presentation to be only half an hour long. In the end, however, the presentation ended up to be almost forty-five minutes long. Due to the time constraints, we had to shorten the duration for the activity session. Maybe in the future, such error can be avoided through rehearsals and careful planning.

That is all I have to say about our peer teaching presentation. I hope everyone there had enjoyed our presentation.

Application Letter Critique

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