Q6: How did you cope educationally/academically in your tertiary experience?
The learning and teaching style was similar to that of my high school where I completed the IB. All the assignments, essays, exams, and presentations I had to do was similar as I was used to the more western education system. Therefore, it has been challenging as we are no longer spoon fed with information, but it has been manageable.
Though, the initial difficulty that I was faced with was getting used to the accent. With the tutors, you can always ask them to repeat the questions or ask to talk slower, but it was difficult for me at the beginning at times when they showed videos and documentaries.
As my degree is about teaching in Australia especially in New South Wales (the state), I had to adapt my way of thinking to the NSW system and curriculum. I learned a lot about the difference between private and the public systems, which was something I was never really exposed to as I grew up in a sheltered life in Singapore which was the International school.
Especially because of my degree, I feel that I have now assimilated to the way things are in Australia. I always thought I could get away with being myself with my different accent using different terms. However, this was not the case when I started my professional experiences at schools, as I had to promote and model Australian Standard English. I now call the water fountain “bubbler” and break times “recess”. There are still some things I am learning by the day as I have learnt things differently in the past.
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10 Comments to “Q6: How did you cope educationally/academically in your tertiary experience?”
September 25th, 2008 at 12:51 am
“By tertiary experience I mean by a tertiary institution - so your University or anywhere you went to after high school. Sorry it’s taken me ages to reply!” (Miki)
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September 25th, 2008 at 1:39 am
In Canada we used to call break “recess” as well
I don’t know if they do any more. So many words and expressions have given way to their American counterparts since I was a kid. It’s sad really, for me anyway.
Most Canadians used to pronounce “been”, as in “I’ve been there”, as “bean”, the British pronunciation. now, most Canadians under 25 use the American pronunciation, “bin”.
In addition, standard Canadian English uses British spelling. Colour instead of color. Organise instead of organize. But because many people don’t bother to change the default language of their operating systems, which is US English, Canadians have forgotten the true format of their own English.
Very sad.
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September 28th, 2008 at 9:53 am
In terms of how academically things went while in University, I managed to finish it but it took forever.
Just the same as you, I too have the IB; but I think it prepares people for an Anglo-Saxon university system. Or at least that’s my impression, which may be influenced by the fact that I took it while attending an International British school. The Italian university system was very different; as I wrote in an answer to a previous question, there was a national reform which profoundly transformed it. Although I graduated in the new system which is closer to the Anglo-Saxon approach, it’s the old one that shaped me. So I’m talking about that system when I refer to my experience.
After three/four years through the system, things were so bad that I considered leaving for the UK in the hope of improving my general situation. My reasoning was that the International British school had prepared me for that system, so by going to a UK university I could finally be and feel at ‘home’ there. I feared, however, that what I had learnt could not be useful there given the discrepancies in the two systems. Particularly it was not raw knowledge what worried me most, but rather the learning/reasoning process, since that was crucial in my field. So I tested myself by repeating in English a recent exam I had just given. It did not work: ideas and concepts would not flow smoothly in English, they were somehow locked in Italian. Much to my demoralisation, I therefore gave up.
You ask how did I cope with all this. I don’t know, I just went on. I never felt I had an alternative: I had to graduate and that was it. I guess I learnt from each difficulty by questioning myself a lot, always aiming for more fundamental truths. And then going on to the next challenge.
Cheers,
Ezio
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September 30th, 2008 at 1:28 am
I had trouble taking notes in classes taught in Japanese because the professor would use some kind of a ’short hand’ to write Kanji and I was unfamiliar with these. This meant that if I copied his strokes and used a dictionary to look them up - they wouldn’t be there.
I only passed these courses because we were allowed to write our papers in English.
The university I went to classified courses into 3 types as far as languages go: J, JE and E. J meant everything would be done in Japanese. JE meant the course might be lectured in one language but you could turn in the papers in the other language. E meant everything would be done in English.
I avoided taking any J courses.
I enrolled in Japanese language courses to help my Japanese but not being very good at languages I was unable to learn 50-100 Kanji a day (which was the expectation) and barely passed these courses.
The problem with this course called ‘Special Japanese’ was that it was really for Japanese students who spoke Japanese perfectly well and knew a fair number of Kanji - but didn’t know all of them. It wasn’t geared toward children who had spent almost all of their lives abroad and never really went to Japanese schools.
My problem was that I could write grammatical Japanese but hardly knew any Kanji which meant that instead of having to learn 1-50% of the Kanji they gave us everyday - I had to learn 90% of them.
I couldn’t keep up.
I guess I could have tried harder…but still, I’m not sure I would have been able to do very well, since I failed to learn them in the first place when I went to weekend Japanese school.
When we finally started composition at the end of the term, I did better than most people because I’ve always been good at this one thing - but my poor ability to write Kanji was a problem until the advent of the word processor and the computer.
Since I could recognize and choose the correct Kanji even though I couldn’t write them off the top of my head - the advent of the PC and it becoming a ubiquitous presence in the office liberated me from this handicap of being unable to write Kanji off the top of my head.
Problem is although I was fully functional once inside an office with a computer, there are entrance exams to good companies which require a Kanji exam and so my job hunting turned into a disaster and I ended up working for years in the entertainment industry.
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October 11th, 2008 at 6:23 am
I would say my adjustment to college from a public high school, despite that it was located in the same state, was quite a challenge.
In high school, you are given assignments. As long as you did your homework and actively participated in class you were learning the material and you could expect what the format of the quizzes, tests, and exams would be like.
College is different because doing your homework and going to class is not enough. You are expected to study textbooks on your own and to get further help from professors and TAs by visiting their office hours. Many faculty members I met were friendly but some were not interested in helping.
So to put it into one sentence, in college you have to teach yourself to think deeper than what you learn in class.
Tests and exams are pretty different from high school too. Some classes have class average of 60 and at the end of the term, professors take the highest 3 grades as a standard (making them A’s) and curve other students’ grades from there.
Because I was so used to getting grades scaled out of 100, it was freaky to see exam grades in their low 60 ranges despite that they were actually equivalent of B’s in some cases. Each class differs in how much percentage of class participation, homework, reports, online tutorials, experiments, exams, and final exams they would account for the final grade.
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October 13th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
It was hard for me to cope when I did my final high school exams, having come from Argentinean and Italian system…and landing in the terribly confusing british system of O levels and A levels…took me a month to figure out which exams I could or could not do.
But as far as tertiary studies go, It was easy peasy.
I enjoy design and having had an Architect as a father, many concepts came easy. Manufacture was also easy, it was a lot of labour
boring, doing the same basic ring for 2 weeks in a row…but I can’t say it was in any way trying.
Classes where very relaxed, mostly in English or mish mashed in Arabic and french, but spirits where high, there was always a joke around the corner…so as far as academics go, can’t complain.
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December 26th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Instead of IB I am doing AP…but tat’s beside the point because the hardest part was switching into it rather than actually doing it. but switching into AP wasnt so bad comparing to switching into IGCSE…
i notice that not many TCKs go through the hardest, which is to go to LOCAL school everywhere they go….NOW TAT’s HARD, because u must adjust FULLY. i havent been to tat many local schools, just in china and canada, which is easy enough cuz we all noe canada is the land of misfits…lol. So most TCKs intend to go bak to their own countries anyways, maybe it’s ok for them to not learn the local language fully, but for sum others it’s necessary to treat the new language as your own and become reli good at it…i feel reli bad for ppl who havent got a natural knack for language sometimes because it is seriously SOOOO hard. It’s not hard to be able to communicate basically, but being able to express deep thoughts proficiently is hard!! If they live in tat country where the language is not sumthing they understand COMPLETELY it would just feel reli incomplete to stay there forever… Amy Tan once said tat another main reason asians choose science/math rather than social science and language is because they dunt have the level of language proficiency to express themselves well enough, and worst of all not many of them attempt to get out of the “asian+science” hole because it actually is easier for them to stay in it…
it feels like a miracle to me that I can actually do tat now, and it took a VERY long time. WOOT
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December 27th, 2008 at 8:33 am
Hey
I took the IB too! I even did seven subjects all relevant to my major (Electrical Engineering) and I find it difficult (I am a first year) but It’s more mangable than not thanks to the IB. I’ve already learnt and done most of the stuff.
How did you guys find it?
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December 27th, 2008 at 8:36 am
Oh by the way, I’m in university in Canada.
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December 29th, 2008 at 10:15 am
Ezio,
I can relate to what you describe. I was educated in the American system of education, except for my last two years of high school, in which I did the IB diploma program (which is mostly British, I guess). I was used to learning by reading and writing essays…Then I got to Spanish university and everything completely changed. Turns out that here, as it must be the case in Italy, the whole system revolves around copying down everything the professor says in class and then memorizing it for the exam. They rarely use text books! I went from being in the top 5% of my class to actually failing a couple of my first exams, which was pretty traumatic, especially since I was also struggling socially. But I guess one gets used to everything, and now I’ve figured things out and my grades are good…Although I know darn well that this system is a bunch of bs.
Another thing that was shocking was going from an elite school to a university where anyone gets in. I know this sounds very arrogant, but I was used to going to school with kids who had lived in several countries and we were separated according to our academic performance. Everyone I was in class with in high school was smart and very serious about studying. In Spain, it is different story. Even the best universities in the country require only a 5/10 (passing) to get in. I was shocked with how badly prepared Spanish kids are…Most of them can’t even understand an academic text or write a decent paper. And worst of all, they dont separate kids according to academic potential, so the pace is pretty slow.
Spain is also reforming its higher education system to make it more Anglo-Saxon. They finally realized they aren’t going anywhere with this free-for-all system…
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