The Empathy

When it comes to teaching and being a class facilitator, I’ve realized that I haven’t shown enough empathy to my students. As a teacher I have the tendency to speak fast and assume that the students have no problems following my thoughts.

Wrong. Some are often lost and out-of-focus, and when I do stumble upon these students, I get upset and think that this is their problem, not mine.

A reminder to myself: It’s okay to slow down. Better to spend more time and making sure everyone understand as well as making sure that they read the lessons ahead before they are being discussed, rather than wasting time telling the students off for not listening.

My other weakness is giving instructions – I often forget that different people think differently. Most of the time, because of the time limit and the amount of lessons I have to cover, I belittle the importance of giving actual example of the task in which I want my students to do. I tend to think that verbal instruction is sufficient and that everyone understands – which might work on a Lower Intermediate class, but will definitely fail on an Elementary level class. Even on some cases, I find that giving actual examples by putting myself as a part of the role actually makes a significant amount of difference in both levels.

A reminder to myself: Show them how it’s done exactly so they know exactly what I expect of them. There’s really no other way to do it. This will eliminate students from interpreting things differently and doing unwanted improvisations that again, might result in me getting frustrated for not achieving the target.

To sum it up nicely, my biggest problem when teaching is probably patience. This, I don’t have enough. I don’t like wasting time and I simply can’t afford to; especially when there are twenty students needing my undivided attention and for me to identify each of their strength and weaknesses so I can find out ways to help them. Individually.

I hope I can remind myself to try to put myself in their shoes and think; If I were them, would I hate the teacher? Would I agree with the way she teaches? What could I do better?

Living Together aka Cohabiting

This post was actually inspired by Maureen‘s comment on my previous post about Life After Marriage.

So what does cohabiting mean? Seriously, stop being so lazy and just freaking google it. Here, I’ll make it easier for you by providing a link that explains it all.

Read it?

Alright, now that we’re all on the same page, let me tell you the reason why I post about it (although I actually don’t really need to, cause this is my personal blog and I can write whatever I want without having to explain anything but however);

I’ve heard plenty of times before of people saying that couples who live together before they decide to get married will jeopardize their plan on actually getting married.

I’ve heard my grandmother saying this, I’ve heard friends saying this, I’ve even heard strangers saying this. And I seriously don’t understand what makes them come up to this conclusion.

I’ve also heard people saying something like, “Don’t be engaged for too long otherwise you’ll end up jeopardizing yourself in getting married.”

Seriously, what kind of lame ass bullshit is that?

If two people decide to live together and they end up not getting married in the end it’s because their relationship is not strong enough to survive the long haul. It has got nothing to do with them living together before marriage.

And wouldn’t it be better, economically-speaking, to cancel the whole thing off before they actually get married, rather than realizing that, “Oh God I really can’t stand living with him/her, such a pain in the ass, I’m better off single!” AFTER you get married?

Imagine the regrets!

But of course, being in Indonesia, everyone seems to hold on to the deluded idea that cancelling the wedding after the couple has lived together will hugely disadvantage the woman since she has lost her virginity, because of course, when two people live together they also sleep together.

I wish people will wake up and smell the coffee; virginity is only an idea held dear by the people living in the village; it’s over-rated and sex is just as free here as it is in America. And actually, the people in the village are worse because a lot of the girls there get pregnant out of wedlock so ha!

Seriously, I can’t imagine what it’s like marrying a man whom you’ve never seen naked before. I mean, to be fair, you’d want to know how your man performs in bed, right?

You’d be naive to think that he will be great in bed even though you’ve never slept with him before. Seriously, what if his penis is really small? Or what if he has an early ejaculation? You can say that all of these things don’t matter in the bigger scheme of things but try being married without ever having known what multiple orgasm feels like.  I know some women whose husband just rolled to bed as soon as they let it out and they end up having to resolve to solo performance, the poor things.

I myself always think that before you buy the car you must always take it for a test drive. Sounds logical, no?

The Creation of the Teacher

It has come to my realisation that being a teacher is a tough job – especially when I’m assigned as the person of contact in which I have to be responsible for the students’ progress. It might all sound very academic, but as I get to know my students one by one, I become quite attached to them.

The first week is usually the toughest. The students will have to adjust themselves to the campus environment. Some have no problems in doing so, while others might feel overwhelmed. There are also those who are not confident with themselves, and they don’t have anyone to talk to, and this is where I step in.

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