Then it came to pass that I have to present a talk at the department’s inaugural Basic Translation Workshop. Public speaking is not something that comes to me easily. Despite all the training afforded to be by over 25 years of gamemastering, it still affects me negatively as I was extremely introverted growing up. I did not know whether it felt more harrowing about to give a talk to strangers… or to people I know, such as my fellow workmates here in this case. After several days burning the midnight oil producing the slides and rehearsing, it was time for me to dive into the deep end of the pool. I was creating new slides less than 30 minutes before the talk was scheduled to begin! And I would not have be able to do it without the help, suggestions and support of my colleagues in our Translation and Language […]
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I’m clearly in red
Herein lies the collection of blog posts about my teaching English as a second language to university students.
Mini Six: Shadows Through The Mist
I have always stated that tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) can be amazing teaching tools, not only for language purposes but to develop critical thinking skills, social skills and general knowledge. Yesterday, I finally ran a game in an English for General Purposes class to see the students could be engaged enough for them to communicate with each other and me without being shy. The Setup Seeing that polyhedral dice were rare in these here parts, I thought I would run a game that used the ubiquitous six-sided dice. Thus, AntiPaladin Games’ Mini Six was chosen. Besides, the system is based on West End Games’ D6 system which runs the Star Wars RPG which I have been familiar with for the last 26 years. The previous week the students and I had agreed to participate after briefly explaining to them what the game is, how it would be played and what […]
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At The End of the First Week
And now the first week of teaching is over. What do I have to report? The students are well-behaved (so far) and are very disciplined, most wearing their dark engineering jacket uniforms. They adhere to procedure quite well to, even if registering for classes seemed to be a haphazard affair. They spent little time appointing a class representative among themselves. And the class reps were easy to communicate with via smartphone messaging apps. I was quite apprehensive of presenting the module to the students, especially in trying to get the lessons delivered relevant to each class’s course as each class belonged to a different engineering or business course, and I had to customise the delivery and how I presented examples to each class. And my gamemastering experience also helped, I believe. Ultimately I discovered that the key to a good lesson presentation is to brush up one’s stand up comedy […]
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And Then You Teach
When you were a child, you always imagined – no, been compelled to believe – that life is a series of consequent acts that scales up as you experience it. You would expect pieces of your future would fall into place like a linear jigsaw puzzle that solves itself as you grow older. For example if you started out as a young technician perhaps you would advance into becoming an engineer and perhaps end your professional career as a top level manager or even a CEO of an engineering consultant firm. But on the other hand here I am at 43 and my jigsaw puzzle consists of a collection of discarded pieces from a hundred totally different puzzles. Throughout my four decades (plus change) of life I have been a extremely short-lived manufacturer and seller of bookmarks, a helicopter technician, a translation company executive, an IT company marketer, a freelance […]
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What? A Nasyid?
Way, way out from the left field comes a blog post about nasyid. I was assigned to sing in the department’s nasyid group for an interdepartmental nasyid competition despite not having to sing in public since 1987. Here is a screen capture of a video of our singing, which is linked below. We took a team photo after our performance. Ain took the video, some photos and lent her support. The team ended up at fifth place out of twenty, which meant that my unholy, discord screeches were not strong enough to pull the team down. Check out the video of the team’s performance here. After 15 years of eking out a meagre living in the city, I am now starting to live in stranger – more enjoyable times.
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