September 27th, 2006: Man of many hats

First hat of the day: Intern. I worked for an hour with Nicolina, Jeremy, Danni, DeeAnn and Madoka to develop some educational activities for the upcoming weeks. We’re a creative team. We’ll have some good initiatives.

Second hat of the day: Dancer. While Nicolina and Jeremy continued on brainstorming, I learned our new boyband dance “Seishun Amigo”. The other guy dancers had already been learning the choreography for the past hour, so I had to play some considerable catch-up. I’m not a huge fan of last-minute planning, especially when we’re supposed to be performing this in the show, but…well…this is part of the program. Gotta be flexible. Anyways, the stress we feel now will be worth it when we perform the piece in the show this week (knocking on wood).

Third hat: Student. We had two presentations today: one from local superintendent of schools, telling us about how his school system functions, second from a local professor, Dr. Paul (from Australia) who had a creative activity planned for us. He had us divide into about 10 different personality types (shy, polite, talkative, controlling, concerned, tired, etc) and in acting out those personality types we were to accomplish a task: decide what 5 items to bring with us to survive on an island. I think we managed to decide on two within the 20 minutes we were given. Point made, though initially my reaction was “we were acting…we made sure nothing happened”, but then I thought of some school projects I had been involved in, group therapy sessions, work environments and I realized that, yes, differing personally styles can certainly create productivity roadblocks. From here Dr. Paul provided us with suggestions as to how to work through these situations, such as active listening, repeating questions and statements to be sure that all involved understand what is being said, and being mindful of verbal and non-verbal cues. These tips sound familiar from my counseling training. It would be interesting to see how smoothly things would work if EVERYONE used them….all people from every interaction style, culture, and personality. Now THAT would be a true test. Maybe our cast can pilot this.

Fourth hat: host student. We talked with our host family from the time we got home until 10pm! Holy marathon, Batman!