Development Skills

Collaboration: Developing. But I guess it is between developing and accomplished. I choose this because sometimes (just sometimes) I am a little bit scared and shy to share my ideas, my thoughts. I think that maybe my ideas are not that good to speak out. This is because in Vietnam, students don’t usually express their feelings or their own ideas. Therefore during JAM, I didn’t express my idea because of that. But after the JAM, my thought about sharing my ideas has changed. In every class that I have this semester, I always try to speak out. On the other hand, I’m always trying to be the leader in the group and I did it really well back to high school in Vietnam. I could handle all the conflicts in the group, the problems of the project, division the mission to each member, helping them when they have difficulties,… All my projects ended up with high grade, sometimes our group also the best group (yey) =))

Communication: Developing (but sometimes I can’t really express my thought and idea as I want). For instance, sometimes while expressing my idea, I just get stuck a while because I don’t really know which appropriate vocabulary which can be used in that situation. Or sometimes I just use a vocabulary in a circumstance. My sentence, my story, or my idea seems to be ridiculous or really funny with that inappropriate vocabulary I put in =)) For example, one time I want to say like “The structure of the house is already there. We can’t change the structure of the house now”. But I just said “the structure of the house is the structure of the house”. I said that sentence because I translated word by word (correctly) from Vietnamese into English. And that English sentence becomes so weird and not has the meaning the same as in Vietnamese. One more thing, I can’t really speak fluently. For example, sometimes, I stuck when pronounce some words. But maybe the main reason of this problem is that the process of thinking and speaking (to me) can’t happen in a same time (I have to think before speaking). Therefore it’s not smooth at all…

Initiative: Developing. I can motivate myself, take advantage of opportunities, and accept failure. But sometimes, I can be pessimistic, so I will just get out of my track a little bit. (But this just happens in short time). For instance, in the beginning of grade 10th, I had bad grades on math tests. Really bad. After that, I encouraged myself that I have to study as hard as possible for the tests. I did not only homework but also the exercises which I could find on either the internet or in some of my reference math books. But then my grade just improved not so much. I didn’t reach the goal that I set before when I pushed myself to study hard. At that time, I really pessimistic. I didn’t want to study like that anymore. I almost quitted for once. But then I got myself in the right track again. Finally, I reached the goal. My grade in math after 2 semesters is one of the top 10 grade in my class. Therefore, I think this skill is not a perfect. I just grade them as developing.