Another month passed. I had class for my chemical engineering subjects in Japan for one month and I had some shallow comparison about Japan’s Sensei’s (“teacher” in Japanese) teaching style and learning style of the students with Malaysia Style.
I spent my whole life to learn in Malaysia and this is the first time that I encountered the way of learning of another country. First of all, I would like to say that the gap between the lecturer and student is very small in Japan. Sometimes, you can even feel that the lecturer will treat his students like his friends. There are no priority for teacher as the teacher uses the same toilet, same cafeteria as the students, and the teacher also has to queue too to buy his food. Sometimes, the teachers will even have their meal side by side with the students. This is probably due to the country’s culture that everyone is the same and stand an equal chance with no exception. Because of this, the facilities for disabled person are well developed in Japan for their rights to live independently like any other people.
Furthermore, the teaching style and learning style are different too in Japan. The Sensei as Malaysia style, he will prepare the teaching material printed for us. However, it is just a brief information of the syllabus and most of the theory will be written on the blackboard. Besides, the sensei will concentrate on elaborating the theories and relate it to the industrial uses because most of them have rich experiences in the field and research. Unlike our education system, we stressed on doing the exercises from the text books. There are always pros and cons. At Japan, we have to look into the problems in the book and learnt by ourselves (because the sensei gives too few of examples) to be prepared for the quizzes and tests which concentrates more on self-learning.
On the other hand, the learning style of the students in Japan is totally different with Malaysia too. As I mentioned in front, the sensei expects a lot of self-learning by the students. Therefore, the students here have to acquire the learning skill of “trial and error”. They will have to discover the knowledge itself by themselves and the sensei will not correct if you are wrong unless you approach him and ask him. By this, the students learn from mistake and failure. Though sometimes I feel that this is kind of time consuming but I feel that it is a very effective way of learning as the students able to acquire the spirit of never give up. This can be one of the reason that Japan is one of the leading country in the development of technologies as they produce graduates with strong research ability.
It is a little bit different here. I would say it is a life of producing a perfectionist. I think I really like Malaysia.
~A few photos of the month~
~Welcome party at the living room of the sharehouse that we are living. Residents from Japan, Korea, US, France, Vietnam..... A little left out though cause we can't speak Japanese but it was still fun! hehe~
~typical Japanese lunch that we had in the cafeteria of the TUAT~
~a visit to the water purification centre for the Tokyo Metropolitan City with our beloved Terada Sensei (left 2 with sweater) and Hosomi Sensei (left 5 with light blue shirt)~
~Halloween Celebration at Shibuya Streets. I wonder why Japanese so into this celebration as it should be a celebration by the western country only right?~
~Visited the Kawagoe-Shi, an heritage town since the Co-Edo Era with Thailand friends. ~
By Ben.