Day 2: As the old saying goes, a lesson taught is a lesson learned.

On the Wednesday of 9th September, we went to SMK (L) Methodist again to have another session of PACE program. Ms. Rabi’ah wanted us to communicate with speaking English to them, asked them to read every single word in the article and corrected them with the right pronunciation.

As time passed during the session, i tried to use mix of Malays and English to communicate with Adam. By using this method, I can see that he was more opened up to me which at least he asked me to explain the whole article to him. There was an unforgettable moment on that day when my friend’s mentee, Kin Boon asked her some questions about which university are we currently studying and why are we so bad in teaching student. I guessed this was what something special added today and we realised that we have a serious language barrier as we couldn’t explain everything in details with speaking English fluently. Same case occurred on me, I feel deeply bad to Adam due to my broken Malays and my poor teaching skills. I felt anxious when he asked me the meaning of the vocabulary as I did not really know the Bahasa words into English transaction. I ended up using google translate to immediately find out the Malays meaning for him. After that, he seemed to be more comfortable and continued doing the rest of the questions.

After a short discussion with my friend, we found out that how we usually learnt in class back to our old times in school. We were just tightly remembering all the theories and how the grammar worked together to form a proper sentence. This was why we just answered them “this is the formula” when we didn't know how to explain “why” in another way. In this piece, i will reflect on a bad teaching day and what i learn from it to do an overhaul.

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” - Albert Einstein.

We have to put ourselves in their shoes and imagine what they want. From today incident, I was truly feel that I have to read more books in order to enhance proficiency in English and writing skills.