Dealing With Students Always Gives Me A Lot To Learn

Situbondo- Today’s day started a little bit unusual to what we are used to. For last three days we were giving presentations and educating students in terms of how we can be environmentally friendly on a theoretical basis in the SMK Middle School. The difference today is that Wenjun, our new team member Michael and me were divided into two groups and certain students were associated for each group. Then we went to visit one of local schools to introduce these techniques on a practical basis.

To my surprise, immediately after my arrival, we did not deal with rubbish or whatsoever, but I was given a room to give a presentation about my country instead. Apparently, students were more interested in some information, some data from other countries to see what environmental difficulties we are facing overseas. Well, my audience was interested in the topic I presented despite this different schedule; it is also one of many differences against the country I am from.

In Europe we have a precise schedule for everything what is going to happen, particularly for any project or presentations. In Indonesia it is planned and organized as it goes, this is something impossible to happen in the European environment, I am aware that this cannot be solved in a week time, but in the future terms students should be led to be punctual. If they move to any European or other countries overseas, it would help them a lot deal with a new culture.

After this presentation we shook hands, exchanged personal contacts to keep in touch in the future and left back for our “home” school. The afternoon activities were sort of relaxing. Wenjun, Michael and me were to paint a big picture together with other students, this picture represents the environment we all have to share and we all should look after it in order to keep it for our future generations. It took a few hours to get this picture painted, thus a few more students came to help us out.

In the meantime, Wenjun, Michael and me went to visit a Language Centre where a friend of us is working to give students a bit of taste with dealing with people from overseas. We introduced ourselves and said something about our hobbies, habits and how things are in the countries we are from, which is the Czech Republic, China and Australia. Students were vastly interested in our stories, however they were a little bit shy to ask questions. This barrier was broken when the teacher encouraged them to ask them more.

We spent there approximately an hour and moved to another language school to do essentially the same. Students here were younger than in the previous school but had more courage to ask about us. After an hour or so, we moved back to our “home” school to make some essential preparations for the last day of our stay.

The final dot after this day was having dinner with some members of our team and some members of the schools staff. We went out to one of those street stalls, to my surprise dinner was brilliant and very yummy. It is unbelievable what magic these street stalls are able to cook.

Today’s schedule, despite a bit of misunderstanding from the morning session, I really enjoyed what was going on today, dealing with students always gives me a lot to learn from and hopefully they also learn a lot from our presentations about environment.