ExCEL Self-Reflection Report 1 : Diabolo Camp

The poster of the Diabolo Camp hosted by Kolej Tun Razak which held on 23rd November 2019.

Before the teaching session start, the Diabolo committee members start distributing the wooden sticks and the diabolos to the participants.

The president and vice president of the UTM Diabolo Club give some introduction and background about the culture of Diabolo and perform some basic tricks.

This is a photo of me coaching one of the participant in the Dewan Serbaguna

This is the overall view of all the participants with the Diabolo Team coaching in the hall.

Reporting:

           On 23 November 2019, I joined an event called Diabolo Camp. This event was organized by committee members of Kolej Tun Razak in collaboration with UTM Diabolo Club at Dewan Serbaguna KTR.  The objective of this event is to promote the Chinese culture to other students from other races in UTM. I joined this event as one of the committee members of UTM Diabolo Club as KTR invited the Diabolo Club to do the teaching to the coming participants. The event started at 9 a.m. and ended at 3 p.m.

            After some briefing and ice breaking session, the organizer divided all the participants into small groups with one representative member of the Diabolo Club in each group. Before the teaching session, each participant was given strings and wooden sticks with diabolo set. They were taught on how to tie the strings to the wooden sticks in order to prevent the strings from falling off the sticks. Later, they were taught the basics on how to juggle the diabolo and teach some basic tricks to the participants. We were able to teach about 5 basic tricks as most of them were quick learners.

            At around noon, we then have a short break for lunch as the participants had paid for their lunch as well.  We as the members of the Diabolo Club took the time to practice a short performance to perform in front of the participants to further show harder tricks that can be learnt if they participate in the weekly training of UTM Diabolo Club as well. After the lunch session, the participants will demonstrate the tricks that they had learned in the morning session to the Diabolo representative members and they will try to improve if there’s any mistakes.

            Before the end of the event, the pengetua of Kolej Tun Razak came and gave a short speech to end the event with success. We all promote about UTM Diabolo Club then cleaned the hall and keep all our things before we left.

Responding:

          This event is quite fun and interesting event for me because I never really teach someone to play diabolo before. At first before the event started, I felt nervous because there’s a lot of new faces and students from different faculties. But at the same time, I felt excited as I had the chance to teach someone else who never played diabolo before.

           During the distribution of wooden sticks, I accidentally messed up and made the sticks and it made me shocked. But luckily, I quickly arrange back the sticks and luckily the sticks were given to the participants smoothly. During the teaching session, one of the participants had a hard time learning the basic tricks which I taught him. I consult from other diabolo members who had more experience than me and they gave me some advice to allow me to teach the participants better.

           During the practice for the short performance, I was quite stressful and nervous as I always tend to mess up and drop the diabolo in the middle of performing tricks. I also had stage fright and I could not face the audience whenever I trying to present something. I tried my best to not make mistakes during the short performance and I successfully perform in front of the participants with some harder tricks which can be learned by them if they continue to join the weekly training.

           In the end, I felt happy and honoured to join this Diabolo Camp to be teaching some basic diabolo tricks and met different people of different races to introduce Chinese culture to them. Even though I felt tired during the teaching session, but I gained a lot of experience as a teacher to guide new pupils in this event.

Relating:

            This event reminds me previously I just joined UTM Diabolo Club when I just entered UTM as an undergraduate student during first year. I never heard of diabolo and I joined this club and learn from the beginning and end up being one of the committee members of the Diabolo Club. This is quite similar to this event as if I were the participants who never learned how to play diabolo. This made me gained some extra skills that gave me chance to perform in UTM events such as FESKO event previously.

            Besides, I previously joined UTM Chinese Club as well to become a volunteer member for the game group for the Lunar New Year celebration. The objective of this event is also to promote Chinese culture as well to other students of other races in UTM which is similar to this Diabolo Camp event. I was in charge to brainstorm ideas to make one of the games more interesting which is the “Throwing Mandarin Citrus” game. This help me improved my communication skills as I get to interact with different kind of people from other faculties and background as well.

            Another thing that reminds me of leading someone in a group to guide and teach people is during my secondary school. I was a first aider in the St. John Ambulance during the sports day of my school. I had to lead a small team with other junior who never had experience on giving medical treatment to the injured. I also had some cases where I almost messed up the treatment and luckily some other more experienced senior came and rescue to bring the injured to the first aid room prepared in the sports hall.

            I was able to relate my past event with the problems I have faced. I think I had successfully used these past experiences into this event whenever I face challenges and problems.

Reasoning:

            The most important aspect of this event was given the opportunity to introduce Chinese traditional culture and games to UTM students on campus despite the hectic month of studies. Students will be able to release their stress from studies and also create new friendship with other students from different faculties and states. From my own perspective, I am happy that I am able to join this Diabolo Camp to teach something new to others.

             Besides that, I realized that sometimes I cannot express my own understanding and ideas to other people accurately. For example, I know how to do the diabolo trick myself but I sometimes just cannot say in it words to better describe how to do the trick step by step to the participant. If I did some research by asking seniors on how to teach other in a better way, I might be able to teach one better as well. If this situation happened, other committee members might be able to handle this situation much better than me as some of them had years of experience playing diabolo rather than me who only played diabolo for few months.

           For the small performance, I really do have less experience performing diabolo in front of other people. I understand that this stage fright problem should not be a problem to me if I was a professional diabolo player but I would still be less confident about myself and tend to perform badly and affect the overall performance view.

            The president of UTM Diabolo Club and also the organizer from Kolej Tun Razak had made this collaboration a huge success. The pengetua of Kolej Tun Razak attended the Camp in the afternoon session and stated that she was proud and happy with the work and effort from the committees. She also suggested to add more cultural activities in the future to better let UTM students to expose themselves into cultures from other races.

Reconstructing:

            In this event, I learned that communication skill is important for one to cooperate with one another to successfully organise an event. This can be made possible if one is willing to cooperate with one another rather than doing all the stuff alone.  I hope that in future I can participate more in this kind of event and maybe eventually host an event to better improve my communication skills.

            I realise that I am quite passive in this camp as I tend to teach only a small number of people. I am quite scared to express my own thoughts on diabolo tricks and thus making me paying less attention to the participants. If I was more proactive and brave enough to speak out myself, probably I can lessen the work of other diabolo members and teach a bigger group. Therefore, I hope I can be less awkward and start to communicate with each other whenever and wherever I met someone I knew or strangers.

            I also learned that adaptability is important in order to make an event successful. One requires to have the ability to adapt to any work environment. Besides, ability to recognize potential for improvement such as better honing my diabolo playing skills to prevent making mistakes during stage performance and also help those new learners to improve their basics as well. I hope I can better work effectively under pressure in future in my work or events so that I can produce better performance results.

            In future, I hope I can join more of this kind of event to better improve myself. I believe that going through an event, no matter as a participant or as a committee organiser of an event, it would gain a lot experience and able to apply in future. Even though now we are in MCO period due to Covid pandemic, this event is a really memorable experience for me. I am truly grateful that I am invited as a teaching coach for this Diabolo Camp.