Tiring yet enriching experience.
Purpose
Meeting the Delta Senior School Students
On 9th May 2019, our class went to Delta Senior School to meet up with the students that will be doing our service learning with. We met the Delta Senior School Students, got to know them, and took pictures for the making of the upcoming photo montage. Mr Alif, the teacher-in-charge of Delta Senior School, brought us to meet with the students after having a school tour. Each of us are assigned to a partner, and I was assigned to a student named Gabriel.
My Partner
A hard-core Marvel fan......
I have never seen a person who is so into marvel movies. Gabriel is extremely, hard-core fan of marvel movies. He especially love the Marvel Opening song, and couldn't stop playing it, even when he is holding the IPad during the photo taking session.
Hardships
I really wish Avengers can help me.......
I met quite a lot of problems on that day, and one of the major problems that I faced is communication. Gabriel has autism, thus I was having a hard time communicating with him. I tried to ask him a few questions like “what are your hobbies?”, to get to know more about him. However, he was more interested in his Marvel videos from YouTube than talking to me. It escalated to become a one-way conversation, which made the situation very awkward to the point that I couldn't bring myself to ask more questions. At the point in time, I felt helpless. I can’t even get him to talk to me! How am I supposed to let him work with me?
Overcome difficulties
Teachers, not avengers
Turns out, Avengers did not jump out from his YouTube videos and came to rescue me. It was the teachers there who neutralize this awkward situation. They told me a few tips on how to make him reply my questions. They advised me to ask simpler yes or no questions to communicate with him instead of open-ended questions. This is very effective as I finally hear something out from his mouth for the first time! Therefore, through this experience, I understand that when problems are too huge or difficult for me to handle, I should split the problem into smaller and simpler problems. Tackle something easier, then tackle larger problems
Photo taking session
It was funny and tiring
The photo taking session was quite tiring as Gabriel literally ran away from me when I asked him to take pictures. Every time he ran away from me, I will have to chase him. After pestering me for a while, he took a few pictures hastily and immediately went back to his videos. He even took pictures of strangers, which shocked me when he did that in front of the them. Fortunately, those people seemed to be too puzzled to ask any questions and I quickly pulled Gabriel away from them before anything bad happens. Despite this, we still managed to get sufficient photos for the video montage which we would be making on another day in Ngee Ann Polytechnic. Through this experience, it has taught me how to communicate with people effectively. I realized that it is easier to interact with him by giving commands rather than asking him to take photos. He responds well to commands such as “take picture this place” or “take picture with your friends”, rather than asking him to do something like “do you want to take a picture of this place?”. This taught me that in order to communicate effectively, we should flexible when communicating with other people, as different people have different ways and styles of communicating, thus we should find the most suitable way to communicate with them.
Conclusion
See you in Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Gabriel!
Overall, I felt that this is an enriching experience as Gabriel give me a lot of shocks and surprises, which made me learnt a lot when interacting with him. I would need to come up with a plan when I meet him in Ngee Ann Polytechnic for the video montage
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