Okay, now that the KuroCon volume 2 dust has been settled, let’s go back to regular programming.
Oh yeah, Vtuber lives matter, justice for Haato and Coco or whatever. Let’s get started.
We get a shot of a new school?! Do they just change schools randomly? Is iSchool just a fly-by-night school? You make the call.
Name of the school used is still unknown as of late.
Today’s lesson is finesse, specifically, it’s how the girls handle themselves in public situations. In short, how to handle PR, a component of the I.D.D.O.O.L. system (see iSchool episode 1). Our teacher for today is teacher Mia, aka personality development coach for MNL48.
..and we get exercises on this episode, goodie. They create a circle and took some deep breaths. They must be summoning the Super Saiyan God or sumthin’.
Oh wait, they’re just scooping up positive energy, scoop it out of thin air, transfer it to one another and then they crash onto each other.
…so they are summoning the Super Saiyan God.
..and then they get pass around the “imaginary ball of positivity”, something I’ve never heard of when it comes to team building activities.
Now we get into the lesson proper, aka personality: a very essential thing idols should possess.
With how teacher Mia explains things, personality is anything about you’re feeling, thinking, and communicating consistently not just with one person but with everybody you’re interacting with.
I am going into semantics here later but as far as I can remember, personality doesn’t necessarily entail positivity.
Teacher Mia then points out that good listening is key and then mentions the seven levels of listening.
At this point, I thought teacher Mia will talk about the seven ways people listen…
Recitation happens and they play a game of “sea if you can find the errors”, another game I’ve never heard of when it comes to team building activities. By “sea if you can find the errors”, they meant read a paragraph and see if there are errors but there’s more to that than what it seems.
See, when you ask somebody to find errors in a short paragraph, people would tend to take a look at how some words are being spelled, not noticing the rest of the sentence and what is being asked.
This is where my answer is going to differ from Teacher Mia’s if you include grammar in the mix. So that makes my answer that there are seven errors instead of five.
If you’re as dumbfounded as I am, you’re not alone
Here’s why, aside from the four misspelled words and the fact that there are six errors on the paragraph is false, notice the sentence “see if you can find all them”, as I would’ve pointed out that the “all them” part of the sentence is grammatically incorrect as I could’ve written that one as “see if you can find them all” or, if you wanted to go full grammar Nazi, “see if you can find all of them.”
Next activity is “gibberish interpreter” where they interpret each other via physical gestures, eye movement, and facial expressions. Alice gets to be the interpreter between Benoit* (an Illonga) and Sheki (a Ilocana). The episode ends with Alice understanding almost all of the conversation by body language and some understanding about some words. Maybe I can use that to understand what the audio crew is saying while Alice is talking.
The overall grade for this MNL48 iSchool episode is a solid B+, the activities were a fun watch, especially the Super Saiya…I mean the “imaginary ball of positivity” activity and the gibberish interpreter.
Faith being a living reaction image ever since episode 6 is a plus in my book as well.
The cameramen seem to notice that as well. Good job on providing me material, guys.
What brings these episodes down to a B+ for me is the “sea if you can find the errors” activity where I had to contest Teacher Mia’s stance that there are five errors instead of seven and the fact that having a positive personality is treated as the be-all, end-all of the word “personality”.
I understand what Teacher Mia is driving home about having a positive personality is very important in being an idol but with the way how she explained the concept, it is as if that there is no such thing as a negative personality but looking at the world outside the confines of iSchool says otherwise.
Ethan Ralph of the infamous Killstream is a very good example of this, he has a very bad personality to the extent of his personality and actions turning him into a lolcow outside of his avid listeners but that same personality is what drew his avid listeners to him in the first place because they love his raunchy, in your face way of delivering the news and internet bloodsports in a way he knows how.
With that being said, no, having a strong personality doesn’t necessarily mean having a pleasant demeanor towards everybody, but having a demeanor that can attract people to what you’re saying or doing in a “positive” way.
Okay, rant over. See you next time for another iSchool review.
*Benoit in this instance is Tin because of this GIF. Chris Benoit does this too.
Rayas-WEB 