Marshmallow Challenge

Do you believe in coincidences?

On Wednesday, when I was working at the promotion counter, Dr. Udani came over and had a chat with me. Coincidentally, Ivy passed by with Polly, and we three, who were born on 9th of July, met at the same place without any reasons. We then celebrated that by having lunch together. In this short gathering, I learnt one interesting skill from Dr. Udani. That's the "3" rule, and I think it is helpful for the TOEFL.

In the speaking part of TOEFL, usually we need to make a short presentation about the given topic. Dr. Udani taught us that we could start with stating the introduction by using the "3" rule, that is, separate the topic into three dimensions. In this way, the listeners may have the phenomenon that you know well about the topics. Also, when stating the first dimension, you will have time to think about the second dimension, and the third one, and so on. And that's a good skill in making comprehension too. Thanks to Dr. Udani for introducing this skill to me, it's really useful.

Then it came to the 11th HONR202 Lecture. In the beginning, we focused on the topic "isolation". It's really a good topic for us to brainstorm. In my opinion, isolation doesn't exactly mean to be alone, but loneliness, a step to be lonely. Everyone may have experienced this step, and I think most of you know how horrible this step is. No one wants to be lonely. Thus, we should not look down to those people who are isolating themselves, but try to help them out from the situation.

After this brainstorm, we had a short break. In this break, we were asked to write as many thank you notes as we could. Comparing to last time we were asked to write only one encouraging note, this time we could write more, but this doesn't mean that encouragement is less important than gratitude, yet for Chinese, saying thanks to others were easier than to give encouragement to others, therefore Dr. Udani let us know that we could use this simple action to help others out from isolation.

Then, we had the most interesting part of the lecture, the Marshmallow Challenge. We needed to build the tallest and strongest tower by using spaghetti and sticker only. Being an engineering student, I felt shame as I didn't actually know the best method of building the strongest and tallest tower. However, this was really a good activity for us to learn, cooperate and brainstorm. In fact, I did come out with a new idea, that is, trying to learn from the others' ideas. As I and my group mates didn't know how to build the tower, we tried to see how others' groups worked with the given materials. Then we tried to use their method to build our tower, even though finally our tower failed. We learnt that whenever we try to use others' ideas, we should not use them directly, but try to make improvements, and complement with our ideas, and creativity always come from here.

Next, we had the main lecture part, "Dealing with difficult behavior". After entering the HC, we always make discussion on the topic of "Behavior". Behavior is the key thing that would affect others' impressions, thus, we should always focus on the behavior, not people. I also have many bad behaviors need to deal with. And I would try my best to change all these bad behaviors.

Finally, we had a little celebration for Albert's birthday. Thanks Echo for always making us delicious cakes, and also Dr. Udani for providing us time to celebrate. Time passes so fast when we are having fun; our lectures always end in happy and joyful environment. I hope we could bring this great atmosphere to the coming two workshops so that others can feel how warm our HC family is.