My experience as a facilitator this
semester has not at all been what I was expecting. I never had a full group meeting and by the
end of October, only one girl was coming in spite of my enthusiastic (and
increasingly pathetic) reminder emails every Sunday evening. The most frustrating part was that no one
bothered to tell me that they couldn’t make it.
One week, when Heather couldn’t come because she had to go to her
professor’s office hours, I sat in the Union by myself for an hour. This was the low point. But looking back, there were many, many high
points.
Undoubtedly, the best moment in Chat
Café this semester was when Heather came to my parents’ house for
Thanksgiving. We had been talking about
American holidays in general and she was telling me that she didn’t have any
plans for Thanksgiving, so I invited her to come over and see what it’s like
for herself. Her face just lit up. She was very polite to my parents and she was
really interested in all of the food. We compared Thanksgiving to Mid-Autumn
Festival in China since they are both holidays that impose one kind of food on
everyone (turkey and moon cakes). She
met everyone who came over to eat and so she got to talk to a lot of new
people. It was so funny to see how
interested she was in the food. The only
time she’d had turkey was in sandwich meat form in the dining hall and she’d never
had squash or cranberry sauce before.
She took pictures of everything.
I’m really glad that she was able to come.
My experience with Chat Café was
never what I thought it would be (seven people getting to know each other for
an hour a week) but that does not mean that it wasn’t meaningful. I learned so many things I didn’t know about
China. I realized that every email I
ignore is the result of someone’s hard work.
I made a friend.
Even so, if I were going to do this
over again, I would change a few things.
I think that I should have been clearer about the fact that I expected
them to show up. I almost wish that there were some sort of policy about how
you can only miss 2 or 3 meetings unless you have a really good excuse. I know that this this might make it feel more
like a class, but the clubs I’m in here at Michigan all expect their members to
attend a certain number of meetings and I think that’s only fair. I would also think about creating some sort
of survey for the participants to fill out before the first meeting about what
they want from Chat Café. It might have
been a good idea to get everyone’s phone number and make a group message the
first week because I think that emailing is more impersonal and easier to
ignore.
There are also some things I
wouldn’t change about how I ran my group.
One example is that I didn’t choose a conversation topic for each week,
but instead just talked about whatever was going on. I also liked changing up what we did every
week while still keeping the meeting place consistent. We always met on the steps of the Union and
from there we walked to several places around town including Zingerman’s, the
Natural History Museum and Comet Coffee.
It’s really cool to be able to talk about where you like to drink coffee
one week and then spontaneously decide to go there the next week. I think at the beginning it was really nice
for me to be able to bring a deck of cards or some sort of backup plan in case
the conversation got really awkward, but I never had to use it. I also enjoyed the outdoor sessions where we
sat in the grass on the Diag before it got cold.
Despite some frustration, I would
say that this has been a very rewarding experience and I would do it again. I think the best piece of advice I can give is
to be flexible and open to the very real possibility that this probably will
not be what you were expecting. But maybe
it will be even better!
No comments:
Post a Comment