PBL

Well, today's the end of PBL for the semester. It's been fun, I guess, to an extent. I've had three facilitators this semester, Dr. Hera Lukman, Lee Lim Hong, and Mr. Galy Mohamadou. Dr. Hera came across right away as a really friendly person, and things went on just fine during her sessions with us. Lim Hong's session was alright, despite the fact that he just graduated and had no idea how PBL ran along. We even had funny moments in his session e.g. pronouncing the word 'sputum'. See, it's supposed to be said as 'spew-tum' and Rasyidah was going 'spoo-tum'.

Now, Galy's huge. Tall. Mean-looking. Think huge Cameroonian. Yeah, no doubt, he was quite intimidating. Still is. Anyway, we always dreaded his PBL sessions. Not joking, really! And it's not just the fact that he's mean-looking and intimidating. We had no clue how to answer his questions most of the time. And unlike Hera and Lim Hong, he was really rigid with the way the sessions were run. Hera allowed us to skip keywords which we felt we had understood or touched on before. But Galy simply made us do every single one! And whenever we had missed a learning issue, he would just glare at us, disallowing us to proceed until someone thought that missing issue up. So it wasn't exactly fun around his sessions. Once he said, "Don't tell anyone, we're rescheduling sessions, if not you'll be in trouble in the future," in his super intimidating voice and mean look and we were really taken aback. And another time, when PBL 1 was going real slow and we were all so blur, he said, "I feel like using a bad word. Please don't make me use it..." Well, that's how weird/interesting PBL was under Galy.

Then, about a week ago, the newsletter came up with an interview with Galy. Here's some of the thngs he said:

"Students seem to find me intimidating. Perhaps they are not used to the way I speak and mistake my joking to be serious. Well, they seem very respectful as well though it can be annoying sometimes actually. Students do not seeem to want to interact with teachers unless absolutely necessary........ I wish students would ask more questions, especially in PBL."

We got the point alright. He was TALKING about us. So, from this interview, I suppose we could take a guess at what Galy actually thought of us. Anyway, coming back to today's PBL, I think most of us couldn't wait for it to be over. And you know what? It turn out to be the funniest session under Galy. Really. He cracked jokes and even chided Rasyidah in his funny BM accent for eating in the PBL room. Since we'd read the newsletter, I guess we were more understanding of the things he said. hehe =) That's Galy under the hulking, intimidating frame.... exposed to the student community.