Reflection on the learning during this module

这是一篇关于作者的学习反思：取得进步在实践和思考是什么?作者觉得在学校里是最重要的知识。作者发现不同的学科有不同的侧重点和技能，但有三个特殊的学科，作者认为最重要的是因为他们是学习能力的基础。这三种技能是书写、沟通和时间管理。

Making progress in practice and thinking is what I felt as the most important knowledge gained in school. As for me, part of the reasons of why I want to attend a business school is because the business students I met were always dressed up and discussing current issues in the world. This “ready-to-go” attitude touches me since I am also someone who believes in dreaming big and making big business. I would like to be one of them who always seem to have a clue for everything and can conduct presentation and negotiation without struggle. However, differ from the prestige world that I have imagined, business school is a place appreciates more “down-to-earth” attitude. What surprised and convinced me during this module was that one does not need to know everything, but should have the ability to grasp up new disciplines whenever it is necessary. During this module and all subjects, I found that different subjects have its different emphasis and skills but there are three special disciplines I think are most important because they are the foundation of the ability of learning. These three skills are writing, communication, and time management. Writing, especially academic writing is about how to exhibit and explain one’s thoughts and foundings in studies. Communication is the approach to get through one’s own idea to the other and to understand others’ ideas. It is a way for people to modify old thinking and generate new thoughts. And above all, time management is a skill that ties up all process of learning.

There is a saying that time is life. As the most precious resource every man has, it is also the most wasted resource. As a student, my daily life is encircled by all kinds of issues: class, after class discussion, networking, odds and ends. The problem I have overcome this module is to avoid accomplish simple less important stuff and leave more important things undone. Not that only managers have full schedule that needs scientific arrangement, we students should also learn the importance of time management and tried to grasp a sense of the management skills of time.

One could writing good articles has good influence on people just like people who could conduct persuasive speech. In my childhood, I read Shakespeare’s novel on the life of Cleopatra (1988). In his depicts, Caesar, Anthony, and Cleopatra are all described as great speaker. If without Cleopatra’s talk with Caesar that night, she would have not be able to save her country from the most fierce troop in the world, the Roman. When Anthony was described as a betrayer by Octavian, if he was not a good speaker, how would his troop still followed him. Besides these generals, great educators are all good speakers. When Confucius traveled around countries to spread his studies, he also met douts and interferes. He had not million man in front but his most powerful troop was his intelligent talking. By the records of his wise talk, we nowadays could see how he persuade others to follow him and influence the world for thousand years. I had long realized the power of words, and practice good writing was my goal for long period. When I asked my friends who are majoring in languages to teach me something about writing because I was not satisfied with simply eliminating grammatic mistakes. She replied with a question that what kind of writing you would like to improve? It was since then I had the idea that actually there are various kinds of writing in the world and sometimes one can not improve one writing style by learning the other. Since I am still a student, I decided that at present I should focus on the learning of academic writing.

Having a goal in mind, I started my research. My friend offer me a list of books: Writing an Academic Paper in English (Feng, 2010), Academic Writing and Chinese Students: Transfer and Developmental Factors (Mohan and Lo, 1985), The Elements of Style (Strunk W, and White B, 1999). They gave me different insights regarding English writing. First is the logical structure. From the book Writing an Academic Paper in English, I read that academic writing should have a clear structure: always starting with an introduction paragraph to allow readers catch the main idea of a whole essay. And each body paragraphs should contain a topic sentence which functions like the introduction part. After all, a conclusion section should follow at the end which emphasis all main opinions mentioned in the article. For Chinese students, it could be difficult because Chinese essays tend to have more loose structures that avoiding giving readers what would be the theme of the article at the beginning. Another problem I found in Chinese academic writing is that without a clear idea pointed out at the very beginning, writers often give new ideas during writing but fail to follow up with supporting details and sometimes those new ideas are less relevant to the theme. Even overcoming the basic logical structure habit, Chinese students still have a completely sentence organizing style. When English users write, it is showed that they often put the result at the head and analysis of factors at the end while Chinese do the opposite around. To indicates relations between sentences, Chinese like to use “but” when English writers write “yet” more (Mohan and Lo, 1985). These researches on language tendency are fascinating and help me to reflect on my own Chinese writing habits. The Elements of Style written by Strunk and White has always been the classic for English writers. By reading this book, I realized the difference between an OK writer and a good writer. Even when one could structure his/her writing properly, it does not mean his/her wording is charming. The charm of English writing just lies in small details as the uses of prepositions or articles.

Communication remains my emphasis since I started my study in this exotic country. According to Communication and Cognition, the precondition of bettering and smoothing communication is to recognize the fact that there are situations of communication (Endres-Niggemeyer P D B, Haseloh K, Müller J, et al., 1998). My confuses in communication became the momentum of me to consult books in communication field. The book Communication and Cognition helped me to summarize the situation and boundaries in communication. I found the reason of why I felt unsettled here because in the past, my communication situations are mainly between generations or identity groups, but we all shared same context as being Chinese, but in my stay and study here, I am faced with more ethnical identities and the main group of students I study with are from another countries. For example, when I complained that sometimes it is hard for me to catch a breakfast in the morning because it takes too long for cooking, one of my classmates opposed my opinion and concluded that I was just being lazy. At the moment I felt I was “wronged.” But in afterwards communication, I realized that when we both talked about the word “breakfast,” for us it shows a different picture. For most westerners, breakfast gives a picture of bread, eggs, salad, and a warm drink as tea or coffee, but for me, a Chinese, I will immediately refer it as hot noodle with soup or porridge, which take time for preparation. This is only one small example of the intercultural communication “hazard” that I met in the campus. Since then, I have pain even closer attention to the different  perspectives of intercultural communication, and found the book Intercultural Communication in Contexts (Martin, N, and Nakayama K, 2012).

Though I not a student of language but business, I am sure that handling the communication between people from different parts of the world and varied culture and believes will be an important part of my future work, or that for any job, the exchanging of opinions and interactions are inevitable. By knowing more about the perspectives of communication: the social psychological, the interpretive, and the critical, I felt more calm and become more understanding. I can now tell the different purpose and social background of certain communication in certain situations. For instance, the parties of students. As a comparatively more reserved Chinese, I used to feel embarrassed to let others see the silly side of me—especially I know that I am not a good dancer and not being emersed enough to understand locals’ gags. But from the communication studies perspective, I understand it is just a situation for other teens to get to know each other. It is not a competition. Just like showing respect in the campus by talking in lower voice, in those parties, talking loud and step out of my comfort zone is a way to show respect for the hospitality of the host. Thinking of it, I felt released and more adapted to those parties. The change also led me to reflection on talking with my parents, which is just an act to show care. Bridging cultural identities, switching from social roles as youth and students, jumping from one communication situation to the other, I learned to step into others shoes. The best is that I started to enjoy this cross-over because I believe it is a kind of precious experience.

At the beginning of the module, when I had those mathematic assignments which was not that easy for me, I spend almost whole night on it. But I observed that other classmates and some friends of mine could do it much faster than me. I analyzed that situation and found that: firstly, they had better understanding of the section of knowledge, and this could come from their academic background back in China or could be that their using of time in the class is more effective; secondly, they are good in making use of recourses. For example, they seem to have the ability to tell who has the better grasp of the knowledge and ask for help from these people, which reduces much time on doing research solely depending on books and internet; thirdly they are more self-discipline in time management. When they decided that the time should be left for homework most of times they would not disturb by distractions, such as calls from friends, twitter, or ideas to stop from time to time. However, afterwards what drove me make up my mind was that I realized spending more time on one tasking of learning does not make me stand out from others. According to Britton and Abraham’s research found that time-management practices may influence college achievement as their Regression analyses showed that 2 time-management components were significant predictors of cumulative GPA and accounted for more variance than did SAT scores.

After knowing my own defects and others strengths, I made plans of improvement. The process went zig-zag but overall I started with the process of self-evaluation, tasks prioritizing, and improving execution. The idea of staring change with evaluation is from Francesco Cirillo’s The Pomodoro Technique (2007). In this book he asks readers to separate tasks into smaller tasks and determine the execution of the schedule by the help with a pomodoro—since 25 minute is an endurable and suitable period of time for most of small tasks. To specify the dividing method, I also refer to David Allen’s Get Things Done—The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (2002). His word intrigued and inspired me: “Problems and conflicts will not go away. They remain inherent as you attempt to change(or maintain) anything in this world (Allen, 2002).”  When I tried to handling the dilemma of multitasking, How many things do you like to do at once? An introduction to monochronic and polychronic time gave me most help (Bluedorn, Carol, and Paul, 1992). Their scoring information enabled me to identify my individual orientations by providing some indication.

In conclusion, during the study of this module I have gained progress in aspects. The improvement in both understanding and practice in writing, communication, and time management runs through the whole process of learning in this module.

Reference List
Allen, D, “Get Things Done—The Art of Stress-Free Productivity,” (New York: Penguin Books, 2002) p.256
Bluedorn, C, Carol K and Paul L, "How many things do you like to do at once? An introduction to monochronic and polychronic time" in The Executive 6 (4) (1992), P.17-26.
Britton, B K and Abraham T, "Effects of time-management practices on college grades" in Journal of educational psychology 83 (3) (1991), P.405
Cirillo, F “The Pomodoro Technique,” (San Francisco: Creative Common, 2007) p. 6-9
Endres-Niggemeyer P D B, Haseloh K, Müller J, et al.  "Communication and Cognition" in Summarizing Information (1998) p. 9-44.
Feng, H, et al. "Writing an Academic Paper in English" in Lap Lambert Academic Publishing (2010)
Mohan, A, and Lo W. "Academic Writing and Chinese Students: Transfer and Developmental Factors" in Tesol Quarterly 19 (3) (1985) p. 515–534
Martin, N, and Nakayama K. "Intercultural Communication in Contexts." (London: McGraw-Hill higher education, 2012)
Shakespeare, W, “Antony and Cleopatra” (Random House, 1988)
Strunk, William, and White B, "The Elements of Style. 4th edition." in Journal of the American Medical Association 25(3) (1999: i)


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