Tag: Kaitlin Liszka

“How You Made Them Feel” – #AgEd2Malaysia Thoughts from Kaitlin Liszka, @TeachAgPSU candidate!

Kaitlin LiszkaPost-Trip Thoughts

Little did any of us really know how much of an adventure this trip really would be!

From the moment we grabbed our baggage we were greeted with a warm welcome and show of hospitality that would last through out the entire adventure.

I knew before this trip that we as Americans were not always preceded with the warmest stereotype, but this trip has really made me step back and realize why we can perceived as rude. I was truly blown away by the hospitality shown to us for the month that we were in Malaysia.

I took a unplanned detour from our itinerary and spent a day in the hospital (talk about unplanned adventures!). While I was there, three different professors from UTM came to visit me and make sure I was okay – one even brought some donuts 🙂 ! To me, this was very unexpected. I’m not saying that professors in the United States would not have been concerned about me if the countries would have been flipped and I was hospitalized in the United Statess, but the chances of one stopping in to physically make sure I was okay is pretty low, let alone three! For them, a simple phone call for a status update would be enough, and this is just a small sampling of the hospitality shown to us.

The little things they did while we were in Malaysia have reminded me of how I should treat others so that they too can feel more welcome.

The small gifts we got everywhere we went, along with the “refreshments” that really provided enough food to count as a meal, the constant help carrying your bags, we were even welcomed in to the homes of teachers from the schools we visited and the lectures from UTM, the conversations we had, and I could keep this list going until everyone was bored of reading.

Truthfully, I learned so much on this trip, that one blog post could not even begin to unpack it, but I think that this quote shared with me by one of the teachers on the Malaysia adventure before we stepped into a classroom to teach sums up the experience for me:

The reality of life is that I don’t remember all the little lessons and cool facts that I learned while on this trip, I will, however, always remember how welcome and loved the people in Malaysia made me feel, and I hope that someday I have the chance to make someone else feel the same way.

 

Ms. Kaitlin Liszka (@KaitlinLiszka) is a  pre-service agricultural education candidate (#psuaged20) at The Pennsylvania State University (@TeachAgPSU).

Day 21: Meandering Around Melaka!

Kaitlin LiszkaCulture

We were given a nice break from our routine this weekend when we traveled to Melaka and were set lose to travel and explore the city to learn what we specifically were interested in. The group collectively went on many different adventures including touring different museums and historical sites, going shopping, eating food, touring the river, exploring the Shore Sky Tower, and even catching a movie at the theater.

 

 

 

 

 

 

For my first adventure of the day, I somehow was talked into climbing the Shore Sky Tower. With the observation deck 43 floors up, the Shore Sky Tower is the tallest building in Melaka, at 163 meters or 535 feet. From the top we got a beautiful 360 view of the city, making for some great pictures. I kept my distance from the edge though, and definitely did not participate in the picture on the glass! I wasn’t afraid to check out the cool fish they had for you to feed though!

 

 

After finding some lunch, my group headed to some museums, like the Baba and Nyonya Musuem, where we learned about Chinese wedding ceremonies. Our fascinating fun facts included:

  • Seeing the chair that the bride and groom would sit in to meet each other for the first time at the beginning of their 12 day wedding ceremony.
  • Having a young male with a compatible horoscope to the couple roll around on the marriage bed so that the couple could have many children, and the oldest be a male.
  • That the couple essentially played footsy at their first official meal together, and whoever got their foot on top first was the head of the household.

Then we saw the ruins of St. Paul’s church. Originally built on the hill in 1521, it is the oldest church building in South East Asia. It received the name, St. Paul’s church after the Dutch took over Melaka in 1641, and was used as a church until 1753. In 1824, when the British took over the city, they used the church for ammunition and gunpowder storage, allowing it to further deteriorate to the ruins that it is in today.

What we thought would be the wrap up our evening was a boat tour down the river where we saw a traditional Melaka village, murals, and many beautiful bridges.

It really was getting caricature pictures drawn though and attracting a crowd of people because of the music we played and were singing/ dancing too while we waited for the completed artwork.

 

Though I didn’t ride one, I have to mention, a large part of the culture of the city included bikes with carts to two passengers that were all decked out to a theme with light and music. Some of the popular themes included, Hello Kitty, Frozen, Minions, etc.

 

Ms. Kaitlin Liszka (@KaitlinLiska) is a  pre-service agricultural education candidate (#psuaged20) at The Pennsylvania State University (@TeachAgPSU).

Day 9: Keep Calm and Plan On

Kaitlin LiszkaAgriculture

Today we spent the morning hard at work putting the finishing touches on our lesson plans for our second teaching episode, Ag Day, which will occur during our FELDA visit. We also created our third (and final) grouping of instructionals teams for our third teaching episode in Malaysia. Creating and working with unique instructional teams each time allows for us to learn and engage with different teaching styles. Each instructional team is composed of a U.S. secondary agricultural teacher; a U.S. pre-service agricultural teacher candidate and a U.T.M. pre-service agricultural teacher candidate. Our third lesson will be taught at a Vocational College, and each team will get to teach on a different topic.

A Vocational College in Malaysia is a little different from what we would envision in the United States. It is comprised of students aged 15 to 18. Students in Malaysia take a one to two week exam when they are in Form 3 (about age 15), and their score determines the options they have to finish their education. There are three main choices that students have based upon their scores; go to what we would consider a boarding school or elite university preparation academy, attend a Vocational College, or continue in a National Secondary School (SMK). The digging that we did during our lesson planning session has me super excited to see what their facilities include. I know that their food processing facilities look very intriguing! (Check out their Facebook page here)

 

To wrap up our morning of planning, we did a partial working lunch of SPAGHETTI! Dr. Melanie, Dr. Husna, and the other faculty have been hard at work for this whole experience to try to accommodate all the participants, and to the joy of the American participants somehow got us almost American-like spaghetti. The UTM students were a little less thrilled, as they were missing their staple of rice in our meal again. After lunch, we had a quick orientation to staying with host families because tomorrow we will begin our travels to FELDA to see another aspect of Malaysian culture and education!

In the afternoon, we traveled to another part of UTM’s campus to see the Institute of Bioproduct Development (@ibdutm). Not only did we learn how they uses herbs to support the nations wellness industry, we learned from the director about his experiences that demonstrated the need for understanding other cultures to better your lifestyle and the importance of truly immersing yourself in the culture so that you can learn the most about it. I also found interesting the idea he brought up of taking probiotic supplements when you take antibiotics to replenish the good microbes in your body because antibiotics kill all the microbes, good and bad. We also learned that some put probiotics in animals feed to help prevent them from becoming sick as opposed to using antibiotics to treat illness.

 

During the tour, we got to smell some of the products that they produce in the Herbal/ Phytochemical Processing part of the facility.

 

I think the real fun fact that we all learned today though, is that the reason your coffee creamer is flammable. It’s because of the lactose in it! So I guess don’t try to put out a fire by dumping your milk on it…

Ms. Kaitlin Liszka (@KaitlinLiska) is a pre-service agricultural education candidate (#psuaged21) at The Pennsylvania State University (@TeachAgPSU).

You Get What You Work For

Kaitlin LiszkaPreTrip Observations

“Four weeks over the summer, I have time for that!”

Those are my naive thoughts from this fall as I filled out my application to be a part of #AgEd2Malaysia. I severely underestimated all the time it would take to prep for this exciting journey. It is not the first international trip that I have taken, but I forgot to tack on a little extra work per week compared to my mission trip to the Dominican Republic, and most importantly, I forgot to multiple that amount of work by four. A month of travel takes a lot more time to prepare for compared to only 7 days!

Even as I sit here tonight writing this with only about half of my classwork done and a paper to write with only about a month to go (Oops… I keep hoping that someday I’ll figure out how to not procrastinate), I am thankful for the prep work that has been done. The amount of work that I’ve been asked to put in is so minimal compared to what others have to do, like write the grant for the trips funding, finalize the itinerary, make contacts, book the flights, and I could probably keep going for a whole post just listing all the tasks involved in going on a unique trip like this one. All this work in not in vain though and will definitely help dispel some discomforts of being in a new culture.

Here in the United States, wearing a normal short sleeve shirt or a pair of sandals to school is an everyday occurrence, but in Malaysia that doesn’t hold true. Thankfully through some prep work done with our partners, I  now know that and can plan accordingly, so I don’t have to add to the stress of a new situation the discomfort of feeling out of place because of my outfit. I think that most of us can say that we’ve been there and understand that feeling. You missed the memo and wore business causal to the informal banquet or didn’t realize that everyone was going to dress nicely for the picnic you decided to wear athletic shorts and a cut-off t-shirt too.

Most of us can probably also relate to those situations when you’ve sat through a lecture, the teacher asks for questions, and the response is a silence where you could hear a pin drop because no one understands the class content well enough to even begin to form a question about it. I’ve been in those situations on industry tours as well, and they can be awkward. I’m thankful for the research that we’ve been doing ahead of time that can help mitigate those situations. We now have enough background information on things like the Palm Oil Industry, or the Malaysian Government Structure, or FELDA, that they aren’t completely foreign concepts, and we can ask questions to be able to learn even more, making it a more enjoyable situation for everyone involved.

I’m thankful for the work that we have been doing now that will help make the traveling aspect of the experience that more beneficial and enjoyable. Even with my gratitude toward the prep being done now, I am sure that as we are in the country I will appreciate what we’ve done now even more, as well as find things that I’ll wish I had made more time to learn more about before departing from the US. But hindsight is 20/20, and the small amount of research we will have done now before we leave, is better than not learning anything at all!