The first 2 lessons of my Cultural Differentiation Elective (CDE) have been amazing and quite interesting. I have finally broke free from my usual and boring lower secondary humanities which were quite dry. I don't mean to say that they were boring but Humanities are always very dry and I just have to get used to it. Geography and History for the past two years were fine and okay. However, since I have applied for CSE-BSP, I have thus taken a fresh new start and a new Integrated Humanities Elective (IHE) which is the Cultural Differentiation Elective. I hope to have a fun and joyous journey in this year learning this new elective!
In our first lesson, Mr Karplus, our CDE teacher, roughly showed us our SOW or our syllabus. He showed us our CDE wiki and some case studies we were going to look at. For example, the topic titled "Dichotomy between China and the USA" looked interesting as I thought how do China and the USA differ exactly and many more questions. It would answer all of my questions and get a deeper insight into the topic.
Then, Mr Karplus started the first lesson asking as what we thought CDE was about. We all had different views to the subject, but had a similar concept of what the subject was about. He also showed us the differences between the West and the East, showing us Google searches if he searched American Culture and Chinese Culture respectively. The search results were quite stereotyped. For example, American Culture revealed pictures of hamburgers and the US flag, while Chinese Culture revealed ancient art and calligraphy. Mr Karplus then went on to show us the differences between Chinese and American values. For example, American values include consistent persistence, success emphasis, work for work's sake, efficiency and practicality, Science & Technology, progress, material comfort, humanitarianism, freedom, democracy, equality, racism and group superiority. I was quite shocked to learn all these values as most of them were quite different from the Chinese values we were taught when we were young. For example, the education in the West was much lax than the education in the East. Young people in the West were allowed romantic love while the young people in the East are more restricted in terms of relationships. I felt that it was quite amazing as I had learnt so much just attending the first lesson. Moreover, my peers had also asked intelligent questions in which the whole class benefited from. The East and the West have similar and different values at the same time.
In our second lesson, we started our first case study on "Google Way". Mr Karplus showed us 2 videos of Google. I would expect such a famous and big company to have long and tiring working hours, heavy workload and stress but surprisingly, it was not! I was stunned to realise that the Google workers have freedom and relaxation. They have a lot of facilities for the workers in order to come up with ideas for the company. For instance, Google had many cafeterias for the workers to have their meals, massage rooms, swimming pools and almost all the 'relax' facilities in the world. However, I know that life couldn't be so good in Google so I took the video with a pinch of salt. Google has planned to make the workers happy. Even the long queues Google is deliberately having in their cafeterias. All these facilities provided and benefits has a motive to it which is to get the employees to mingle so as to share their latest ideas to come up with something new. This is a ingenious way of getting their employees to perform to the best of their ability, with emphasis on quality over quantity. The second video was a more perceptive video in the sense that it not so much focused on the benefits of Google, but however had more interviews of the high ranking positions people such as the CEO of Google and basically all about Google. It had certainly differed from the first video as this video was more on the neutral side.
Overall, the first few lessons have been thought-provoking and interesting, and I definitely look forward to more lessons in the future.
