< Sharing Feelings with Others>
Sharing and empathizing with others' feelings is a key tool to work together with them.
By sharing the feelings, you can understand others more than before, it makes your job works better.
Looking back on recent experiences, I would like to write about how I could improve my job well by trying to empathizing with others. .
One is that I've been doing English tutoring and the other was my time working at ISO.
Firstly, I'll talk about the English tutoring that I gave to middle school students.
I've been teaching English for one year at the middle school every Saturday.
When I am with them, I feel younger so I love it and applied for this tutoring program.
It was for students from low-income families.
When I first started, I was quite confident of tutoring students in English since I had done it before. Of course, to teach someone I need to know what to teach them in class and consider how much they would be able to understand me. Also I have to consider students' level of English and their attitude for class.
However, the students at the middle school were totally different from the students I've tutored before.
They barely knew English and didn't even pay attention to class.
They were 15 years old but they hadn't even learned very easy grammar yet, for example how to use auxiliary verb or passive form.
It seemed as if only a few of them understood the class. I felt frustrated at first but didn't give up on them.
Therefore I tried to change the style of teaching them.
Before I just focused on how to let them understand the class well but as this was with boring textbooks and one sided classes, naturally it must have been boring for them, so I started trying to make class more interesting.
I used English movies, dramas and introduced some games at the end of the every class.
I showed them the movie "Truman Show", which they really liked and it was useful material for the class. It seemed like it was not that difficult for the students to follow what I was teaching a lot of fun with them. and could wrap up the class well though it.
I tried to know what the students were interested in and tried to engange them in conversation about for example their favorite boygroup. Knowing about what they like outside classroom and sharing their interest really helped me to empathize with the students. I could keep talking with them longer so I got closer to them.
After every class, I listened to the feedback they gave me.
I listened to it and improve the class according to it. I tried really hard to communicate with them.
Since I've been working at ISO I tried to be more considerate of others' feelings too.
I have worked with many foreign students so far and it was really refreshing experience.
Before this, I was not exposed to foreigners a lot and the students participating in ISS were all from different countries, so at first I had difficulties in understanding them. Even from small table manners to a way of thinking, I was not used to most of them. For example German students told me when they are at the table they would not talk at all while still having food inside their mouth. They would have felt embarassed when I talk to them while eating. After I got to know the manner, I tried to pay more attention to this when I ate at the same table as them.
And I also learned a lot about vegetarian. Honestly, I hadn't met vegetarian a lot before, so I didn't know much of them. But, while working at ISO, I had some chances to meet them and learned how to do when I'm with vegetarian. When I was with them at first, to be honest, it was really annoying because whenever I hung out them and go eat something, I always had to take extra care of them. However, after I heard why they started being a vegetarian, I understood them. Many of the reasons were health problem and it was more than I thought. They don't want to be it, but they have to be it. It made me think about it again and now I'm totally okay with them. If I hadn't gotten to know them, I would have not been conscious of vegetarian, but now I can empathize with them.
Through the time at ISO and teaching at the school, I learned how to share others' feeling and empathize with them. Both were really valuable periods to understand what I have never felt yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment