The topic of the fourth seminar was about different cultures. I forgot many details, I remembered we first started with our own definition over what is foreign and what is local. Some people believed that how people identified themselves as is more important, others thought that you cannot define yourself arbitrarily how people think you are a more important factor, some others believe it’s the combinations of many factors. And then we also discussed about should we change the culture if we wanted to make a better world. For example, should we go fishing if the locals were fishing in the pond but there’s a sign which wrote “no fishing”. I learned that we could choose to accept or not to accept a culture, but we don’t necessarily need to change it.
I don’t know my scores I think I already forgot. I think my performance on this seminar is very different from the other seminars I had before. Because this time I didn’t really prepare, even though I also didn’t really prepare in previous seminars, but I would still think through my ideas clearly before I speak, this time I usually only get a rough idea and add more information while I am waiting for my turn, and I think I started to speak more than I did before (maybe it’s because before it’s more about analyzing compositions I will usually be concerned about whether my interpretation is right but now it’s more of sharing your own ideas, the scope of the discussion is broader).
About the leader’s way of managing the seminar, I think it was a bit slow, because they have plenty of questions, but we can spend a very long time discussing about our understanding of the definition of a word, like this should take a shorter time as a short introduction. However, this also usually suggests that their management gave us more freedom to speak more on the topics we have preferences on. And, the leaders’ question’s structure and order were very nice, comparing to the other seminar’s questions which usually come from different topics; however this seminar’s questions are diving into one specific question, and the questions are eventually getting deeper, most questions are like some guidelines for exploring into a specific topic.