About two weeks
ago, Mr Adlan organized a micro teaching session for us to attend with some
Korean exchange students. Therefore on Monday we went to ‘Menara SAAS’ by bus
at 1 o’clock in the afternoon. The class is at 2 o’clock and we had plenty of
time, so we lingered around and got more and more excited to meet the Koreans.
Mirul was smiling and laughing, a few K-Pop fans were discussing about Korean
stuff, and I looked like I did not care but I was pretty excited as well.
Around 1.50 pm,
we entered a small hall that was to be used for the micro teaching session.
First thing I saw when I walked in were cameras, big lights, and a projector,
as if we were shooting a movie. Then the image of the Koreans struck me, which was
definitely very different from ours. They were very fair and quite petite, and had
pink cheeks, thin lips and almond-shaped eyes. Their sense of fashion was more
or less different from ours as well. A few of the girls were wearing
floral-printed dresses with colourful tops creatively matched with, unlike us
since we were wearing ‘baju kurung’.
The Koreans were
divided into two groups, and the first group which was Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory, taught us with much enthusiasm and fun. They made an
interesting introduction with Charlie, the only boy in the group, by walking in
while singing a song. They made jokes and laughed at ours and kept asking us
questions so we stayed interested in the lesson. Besides that, they held fun
games that could educate us well. For example, there were singing, guessing and
lyric-writing games that had something to do with the lesson, which was about
action verbs.
Even though the
second group was not as fun as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we still had
an enjoyable session with them. They had interesting hand-outs and exciting
games, like the one where we had to guess the picture of the person plastered
on our back, by describing them. However, one of the things that drew my
attention the most was their politeness. They smiled a lot, never raised their
voices to us and said ‘thank you’ or ‘good job’ when we finished a task.
Although at times we got noisy, they kindly asked us to lower our voices
without being rude. They kept smiling and maintained their calmed tones while doing
so.
When the lesson
ended, we had the opportunity to interview the Koreans. From interviews I
conducted myself and the ones I heard from others, some of them did have a few
things in common with us. Some of them loved mainstream pop songs, they loved
being energetic and positive and they loved to eat Malaysian fried rice as it
had a similar taste to Korean food as well. On the other hand, some differences
surely could not be avoided either. When I interviewed a girl named Claire, she
said she did not like our country’s hot weather since in Korea it was cooling,
and durian made her feel nauseous, which sounded queer to us Malaysians as
durian was the local king of the fruits.
Nevertheless,
meeting them was a great experience and taught me how to interact with people
from overseas. If I am given the opportunity to do it again, I would happily do
it.
P.S.: I hope this is more or less correct, because:
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