Introduction

My name is Amna Raza. I have done Masters in Human Resources Management and Bachelors in Commerce. I have a working experience of about eight years in Human Resource Management,  office administration and teaching between 1998 and 2017.

I got married in 2006 and relocated to Saudi Arabia. It was a great start of our married life but I could not continue my professional life there as expatriate women were not allowed to work. Nevertheless, after 7 years of living there, I got an opportunity to teach Business Studies and Accounting to grade 9-12 students at an international school.

I was always keen to work but we had three kids one after the other in a period of 8 years. This kept me busy with them. 

When I moved to Canada, the first thing was to get driving license which I got in last August. Now, I am trying to get my foot in the door and I have been trying hard to grab any opportunity to work.

Budgeting

Today, we learnt 19 new expressions which can be used in day to day life and also specifically for budgeting conversations. It was the result of dialogues between sister 'Nancy' and brother 'Ron' where sister had a good financial sense so she advised her brother many useful tips after investigating his spending patterns.

Infact Ron was in a hole since he was strapped for cash and was difficult for him to make both ends meet; he already borrowed money from his mother and his friend the past week. His sister was expecting him loaded as he just landed a new job. The main problem was that Ron had no budget and, therefore, unable to keep track of his income and expenses. So he ran out of bucks and ended up broke. In order to make his both ends meet, no wonder, he needs to cut back his extraneous expenses  due to which many critical payments were made through his nose. His sister just figured out that he was just blowing his money for unnecessary things and she advised him to make a budget to curb his spending and stick with it.It will help him to get rid of financial problems.

BANKING EXPERIENCE

It's been more than a year we moved here in Milton from Saudi Arabia. In last November, I got opened my separate account in TD bank in the nearest branch to my house. When I was planning to get that account my husband forced me to go by myself for the process. For opening the account, bank needs two IDs so I went TD bank with my PR card and the driving license. When I entered in the bank, one of the banking Reps came to me and asked " how may I help you?" I responded her the reason of vising Bank is to open my account in her bank. She demonstrated a good customer service and referred me to the relevant officers in the bank. They were two colleagues who were working for the same seat and one was supposed to train other. They collected information from me and verified my IDs. Afterwards, they just entered my information in their system and took print out and got my signature. However, they explained a few important things of that contract which I singed with the bank such a overdraft protection fee, 10 free transfers within Canada and no hidden fees. Nevertheless, I was too concerned about any extra or monthly fee for any transactions in the account. So I shared this consternation with them and they assured me that there would be no hidden any charges and fee deduction on monthly basis. The officers assured me that if you maintain minimum of $2000 balance no charges would be applied. I was doing the same thing. so It was a good experience and I am thankful to my husband who encouraged me to go and do that independently. I am also thankful to my friend who advised me to go to TD as the other bank was ripping me up for the monthly charges. 

Reflection of Venn diagram exercise in the class

Today, we discussed the consonants and vowel sounds in the class with the help of Venn diagram. It was an interactive exercise for recalling sounds in our mother-tongues as well as in English

It was a pleasant surprise for Urdu and Arabic speakers that most of the consonants' sounds do exist in their language, except a few such as:TH, NG were not found in Urdu. However, one sound of consonant which is " th" was the disputed sound as Urdu speakers claimed that they had have this sound  in their language but Marcella was not agreed. She supported her findings by giving an argument that if native speaker felt difficult to pronounce the sound then it implied that it doesn't exist. Nevertheless, we as native speakers had some words in mind like as 'thook' 'tham' and 'thor.'

Subsequently, we discussed 16 vowels sound and out of them e, i, wu, oy and wood were not found in Urdu language at all.

This exercise made me realized that we should not ever underestimate the power of knowledge. Since, we are living in Canada and we only need English to survive and thrive here but still we should be active learner for our own languages as well that knowledge about anything can be helpful and needful sometimes as it helps in this exercise. Otherwise, its been a long time so I know my alphabets sound so I could participate well in this exercise.

Thank you Marcella for being my teacher. The way you conduct a class that the most effective way to include everybody in any class activity. In nutshell, this exercise was well conducted and well received by the class members as it was a good comparison of different languages like Urdu, Arabic and Spanish with English language.