The Buddha In The Attic: Summative Writing Assignment

Name Professor Course 06 April 2019 Reflection Am Chinese student taking my undergraduate studies at a university in New York. Am in third year now and adapting to the American classroom practices has been a difficult challenge that am still facing today. I can trace the source of my difficulty to my Chinese roots. First of all, the learning method, our teachers and the Chinese curriculum, in general, focused on vocabulary memorization, grammar, reading, and writing but gave little attention to speaking and listening. Due to the lack of chances to speak in and out of class, I learned deaf and dumb English. Also, I did not bother to practice speaking as by then I did not have any ideas or thoughts of ever traveling abroad. Why travel abroad while China is big enough. During my first year on campus, I was afraid of participating in class out of two main reasons: I did not know how to engage and my fear that my heavy ascent or poor English will make others laugh at me. Some of my courses require group work and every member of the group has to participate in the discussions or presentations. Back in China, the main classroom activity was spoon-feeding. We did not participate in class discussions, we just sat there and listened to what the teacher had to say, all we had to do is to absorb what we were taught. It is like watching a movie in a theatre where your opinion does not matter. Having different ideas and even speaking them out was heavily discouraged, and the students voiced their views would be attacked by others who considered it as showing off. We were supposed to keep the ideas to ourselves as it was not polite to interrupt lessons because teachers were the authorities of knowledge. I remember one day the professor asked us to form groups of eight and discuss a topic. The discussion started well with the other classmates enthusiastic to give their ideas and opinions. What is there to be ...