I’m an undergrad studying Aeronautical Engineering, and generally the quality of teaching is excellent. A lot of the staff are helpful and go beyond what you’d expect a University professor to do.
One, however, is not. He seems to just stand at the front of the room and read from the book in a monotonous drawl. When he’s not doing that, he’s rambling about something insignificant or getting to a point in a very roundabout manner. It means that it’s near-impossible to remain focussed on what he’s actually saying. If you’re have a job that requires some teaching, then maybe have a glance at the basics of presentation to a group of people, sound like an idea?
It also doesn’t help that he’s Polish, and not a native English speaker. There’s a lot of European PhD students who lecture, and their English isn’t perfect but it’s not that much of an issue. But this guy has been in this country for twenty years and working in Aeronautics for much longer. So it doesn’t explain why he takes large pauses in his speech to think of words like “Aircraft” or “Engine”. That’s just 'cause he doesn’t care about what he’s doing. (And possibly might have something to do with the fact that I see him out in town putting in a better performance at the bar than most students I know. I saw him smash five pints of Guinness over the bar once accidentally and carried on walking, gotta give him some respect.)
I can get by and pass this exam by studying on my own, and I tend not to go to his lectures at all, but it would really help if he was there to supply work to complete and give some feedback. We just have to do without.
The kicker, though, is that although the other department staff know he’s shit and not aiding student’s learning, nothing gets done about it because he brings in the most research money for the department. Rubbish.
Rant over now, it might not sound like much of an issue, but it just pisses me off that he’s not doing his job properly and it’s affecting me and my friends.
It always amazed and, ex post facto, vaguely saddened me that Engineering Schools so often use foreign grad students who can barely speak any English at all to teach incredibly complicated subjects to undergrads. I had two courses where I’m certain every person in the course had one letter grade lower because most lectures the instructor was impossible to understand. And very lengthy group or one-on-one sessions with them were equally impossible - I remember one time in an advanced dynamics course where the instructor eventually gave up and said “I cannot teach you this, I do not know how to say it in English” - of course, that very problem turned out to be on the test, and I’ll bet everyone missed it.
I remember a plucky group of undergrads who went to the Department head, hats in proverbial hands, to respectfully tell the Department head that in their Numerical Methods of Differential and Integral Equations class, that the Chinese instructor was incomprehensible. The response was along the lines of “suck it down, IRL you can’t choose your instructor, and you know, a lot of people aren’t cut out for the hardest degree program on campus. If Engineering School is too hard for you there’s always the Business School.” :rolleyes:
"In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the… Anyone? Anyone?.. the Great Depression, passed the… Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered?.. raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression. Today we have a similar debate over this. Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before? The Laffer Curve. Anyone know what this says? It says that at this point on the revenue curve, you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as at this point. This is very controversial. Does anyone know what Vice President Bush called this in 1980? Anyone? Something-d-o-o economics. “Voodoo” "
My son is studying for his mechanical engineering degree. He says that he has one lecturer in five that speaks native English. He is thrilled that this semester that he can understand three out of five lecturers. The other two might as well be picking their nose for all of their ability to communicate.
When I was studying for my EE the problem was the physics department (seperate college from the Engineering College and known for disliking the engineering students). The Physics group had horrible lecturers but usually the TAs would be English speaking, very sympathetic guys who would repeat the lectures and just skip their lab assignments.
One semester though, we had a TA from Pakistan who barely spoke English. While explaining an equation during a lab he said, "You should multiply x by a constant C and then divide the result by “etch”. We all looked around the room at each other to see if anybody had a clue as to what “etch” is. He said “etch” a few more times and clearly none of us followed what he was saying.
Finally I threw myself on my sword when I raised my hand and said," I’m sorry, but I’m not quite understanding the term “etch”. He looked at me with a quizical look. I responded," You just said to divide the numerator by “etch” and I don’t know what “etch” is.
His face turned red and with fury in his voice and actions, he spun around and drew a giant lower case “h” on the board and struck a line through the staff of the “h”. Being engineering students everyone immediately saw that he was referring to Planks constant, a familiar physics term.
After a long pause he looked at me and then he screamed and pointed to the board, “Etch!, Etch!!! Planks constant.”
I don’t know if he thought that I was an idiot for not knowing a familiar term or if he thought that I was deliberately making fun of him. After that, he continually picked on me during labs. Being the more mature of the two of us I would get one of my buddies to distract him and I managed to spit in his coffee at least six times before the end of the semester.
Brings me back to my college days and getting my mechanical engineering degree. I am by no means bashing foriegners. I had one professor with the first name of Osama. He had a noticable accent, but it did not interfere with his lectures. He was very helpful during office hours and was one of my favorite teachers.
OTH, there was a different professor who seemed to care less if we learned anything or not. He was tough to understand in words or in writing. On one of the first days of class he was describing the motion of an underdamped system as a type of “sign valve”. It wasn’t until several classes later, when he drew it on the board, that I realized that he meant “sine wave”.
Same guy, different subject. I can’t remember what it was that he meant, but it came out as some type of “shit”. It was pertaining to heat exchangers IIRRC. I knew from the snickers that I wasn’t the only one who heard what I did.
I also had a Polish professor. Fairly tough to understand and wanted nothing to do with the students during or after class. He really did piss me off. The only real misunderstanding I had with him was the varible he would write on the board for the damping constant. He would just scribble side to side on the board. It was different every time. I guess he was trying to draw a lower case zeta or xi, but to this day I have no idea. The reason that sucked is that I didn’t know if he was using the same varible from one equation to the next.
I could go on, but I’ll stop here.
pretend my name is witty, you’re not alone on this one.
The head of the comp sci program where I went to college was legendary at being useless in the classes he taught. I, of course, had him for way too many classes.
In UI Design, there was going to be a review for the exam the class before. 5 min before class lets out he says ‘Does anyone have any questions about the exam?’. The whole class just stares at him and someone says ‘What will it cover?’. His response was ‘Concepts.’. ‘Which concepts?’ ‘From the book.’ ‘Which chapters?’ ‘The ones I covered in class.’ Id like to say that was an exageration, but thats pretty much verbatim. The class average on the test was a 26. He gets up in front of us and goes ‘I dont know what youre doing wrong.’
In computer graphics he came into class several times and just said ‘Anyone have any questions? No? Well I dont have anything for today’. Once he brought in a magazine article on geometric transformations in a coordinate system, and started going through the math on the board, only to get lost and simply give up when he couldnt figure it out.
In a C++ programming class, 2 weeks before the end of the quarter, he announced our final program. He started it off by asking how many people in the class knew VB. Only two people raised hands. ‘Thats ok, you can learn it’. He wanted us to do a program modelling a bank of elevators over several floors, with random people, optimize for time until a person gets to their destination, and make graphics for it using VB. Oh, and he’s going out of town for almost 2 weeks, his TA will answer all questions.
He’s the only professor Ive ever seen Indian and Asian grad students read the newspaper during his class. Im not kidding, thats how bad he was.
That’s kind of odd… at my university (Texas A&M), the CS department was primarily a bunch of middle-aged cranky white engineering types, and the occasional Berkeley-esque hippie, with a very few foreign professors, who were generally pretty good at English.
It was the Math and Biology department graduate students who were absolutely unintelligble, and belligerent about it.
One of the biology TAs was hard to understand… but he wasn’t foreign, just some unreformed coon-ass from down on the bayou. Cool guy though, once you figured out his accent.
I knew immediately that this would be an “h”. Reminded me of my thermo teacher, Dr. Viswanath (my advisor, whom I quite liked) – we used to draw little pictures of “dee hedge” as little bushes with eyes, because of how he sounded when he wanted us to integrate a variable, “h”.
However, for all that I struggled to understand inpenetrable accents in engineering school, once in the working world it’s been invaluable experience. I’ve had Saudi and Taiwaneese bosses, and Persian and Pakistani coworkers, that I could easily understand thanks to my school experiences.
Sure, it’s frustrating when your grade might be affected by communication issues – but as a student you’ve got lots of time to figure out what is being talked about. On the job, you have to be able to communicate easily with coworkers, because if miscommunication screws something up in the real world, people can get hurt, not just grades.
It would be marvelous if everyone in the sciences was fully fluent in the language of the nation they’re working in, but that’s just not going to happen in the U.S. I had one coworker from India with this marvelous, cultured British accent to his English (spoke better English than most of my American coworkers), but most of the people from India I’ve worked with were less practiced. So we had to make sure there was no confusion in talking about stuff.
Mind you, it sounds like the OP’s problem is more a poor teacher than an English-as-second-language issue.
My tale of woe. I am a ME major, and was taking the first class regarding circuits. The professor was Asian, I want to say Chinese but I don’t remember exactly. He was the stereotypical guy that cares only about research, and regards teaching undergrads as a waste of time. Anyways, his English was o.k. but he had a bit of an accent. For a couple classes I took careful notes about something called the “Roomie Square”. Sat down to do my homework, and to my chagrin found the questions regarding the Root Mean Square. Took me a good 20 minutes to put two and two together.
Another notable professor was an English version of Mr. Burns. Picture Burns as a soft spoken gentlemen with an English accent and that’s this guy to a T. If he did the finger thing and went “Exccelllent” I think I would have lost it. The problem with this guy was that he was old enough to have served in the British Army during WWII. Meaning he is at least late 70s, early 80s, and he just didn’t have it together any more. I don’t mean any delusional rants or what not, just that he was just not all there.
When I was an undergrad, I found during my senior year that I needed one more science class, plus a science lab, to graduate. So I signed up for Medical Microbiology, plus lab. It was actually a really cool class – all the ways human beings can get sick. The only down side was that you’d get so wrapped up in all these diseases that you’d cough once and go, “Anthrax. My god, I have anthrax!” But it was a refreshing change from papers on the use of alliteration in the Caterbury Tales, and I quite enjoyed it.
The lab, however, was taught by a grad student from China. His English was darn near unintelligible. And a lot of us in the class weren’t science people who would know what he was talking about if we didn’t understand him. I still remember – He was showing us how to prepare uncontaminated slides and said “Alrays frame your roop.” Jodi, little Ms. English Major, writes down iin the notebook, “Always frame roop.” And of course I’m thinking, what the hell’s a roop? And how do you frame it? I look around and half the class is also looking around, clearly baffled. Anyway, he tells us how to prepare a slide to look at under the microscope and then leaves the room for a few minutes. As soon as he leaves, there’s this “what the hell?” murmuring and this guy – obviously more of a science student than many of us – goes up from and holds up the tool you use to transfer stuff onto the slide, which is a wee little metal loop on a handle. He goes, “This is a loop. Before you make your slide you pass it through the Bunsen burner flame to sterilize it. That’s known as ‘flaming the loop’.” And the whole class goes, "Ohhhhhh . . ..
I swear, that very nice kid translates all the TA’s instructions for the whole semester. It got to be so common that, when it was clear we were lost, the TA would gesture to him and he’d repeat it in English. But I did think they should have been paying the student for translating services, if not for TA’ing.
Can we expand this pit? The OP has an excellent point:
Most universities claim that teaching is hugely important, but in fact it is only a minor factor in hiring decisions. I don’t know whose bright idea it was that all lecturers should be brilliant researchers and vice versa. It seems that although the skill sets can coincide, it would make much more sense to hire teachers to teach, researchers to research, and for those few people who enjoy both, well, let them do both. In other words, the university should have a place for limited-English grant-getting geniuses. That place should not be in front of undergraduates. (Though if he must teach, how about Polish class?)
When I went to my first college (yes, I’ve attended many), I started out as a Communications Major. That lasted about 2 weeks. My first day of class, the Head of the Communications department was the teacher. He was Iranian and I couldn’t understand a word he said. I really tried, too. Not one word.
Learning Communications from someone who couldn’t communicate effectively. What fun!
Thank goodness for the English and Theatre departments who were happy to have me.
[Physics Pedant Mode]h with a line through it isn’t Planck’s constant, and isn’t called “h”. It’s the reduced Planck’s constant, or Planck’s constant divided by 2pi, and it’s called “h bar”.[/PPM]
Your TA was not only incomprehensible, but wrong.
Problem is, the whole process of getting a PhD in the sciences depends a great deal on your ability to do research, and not much at all on your ability to teach. Faculty hiring decisions and tenure-granting decisions work similarly, AIUI. The whole system is set up to get good researchers, not necessarily good teachers.
I had a professor like that. At the end of the quarter, I said about him, “Dr D’s lectures remind me of a story that was told of the Muslim invaders of Egypt and the Great Library of Alexandria. They found this library, and wrote to their religious leaders asking what to do with all of the books. The reply came back that they should burn them- either they contain what is in the Koran, in which case you don’t need to read them, or they contain what is contrary to the Koran, in which case you must not read them. Dr. D’s lectures either contained what was in the textbook, in which case there was no need to listen to him, or they contained what was contrary to the textbook, in which case he’d made a mistake again and you shouldn’t listen to him.”
As kind of a converse anecdote, I interviewed for a job once with an archaeologist who was overly proud that he used to teach somewhere in South America for several years. We were in a Mexican restaurant for the interview, and he insisted in ordering in Spanish, and tried to draw the waitstaff into long conversations, also in Spanish.
The thing was, his Spanish was so bad as to be almost unintelligible. You know, the “Komo yousted essta?” type Spanish. I can’t for the life of me imagine him teaching semester long classes to a bunch of Spanish speakers.
Oh, and he was generally a jackass in most other ways, too. Didn’t get the job, and damned glad of it.
I can kind of feel your pain. I am a student at a small state university and most of my classes are in the English department (since it is my major). I normally am pretty lucky to have my classes in such a small department, there are maybe 10 professors altogether in it. Most of them are very interesting and can help with about anything. Some more than others, but that is neither here nor there.
The problem was this last quarter when they had an author come and talk about her writings, and as an english major, I was required to go for several classes. The assignments were pretty easy. Outline her points about writing and summarize what she talked about. For two classes, we even were supposed to read her book before we went so we could ask questions. I didn’t enjoy the book, but I thought it could still be interesting. Boy, I was wrong.
The “author,” after being introduced, simply said hi and started reading her book outloud. That took about an hour. After that, there was a Q&A session, where she either doged every question or gave some irrelevant answer. For example, when asked about her writing style (if it took her a long time to write a short passage) she said “not at all” but when asked right after about the other type of writing (quick, ideas come fast and it’s hard to get them all down) she said that she in no way writes that way either. When asked about the meaning of a passage at the end of her book, she claimed that it meant nothing, even though it was in the part she read and called “the most important part of the book.”
Worst lecture I’ve ever seen, and the worst part is that I learned how much they paid her to come talk. I swear, I could live off publishing a crappy novel like that and going around to read it aloud, treating college students like 3 year olds.
My pet peeve is when people try to show off their knowledge of a foreign language by switching on a dime from American English to ultra-heavily-accented whatever.
“Hey guy, let’s head over to Taco Bell and grab a BOOO-RRRRRREEE-TO.”
Oh god, Giada DeLaurentis (from Food Network). She speaks perfectly fluent American English (is, I believe, an American), but every time she uses an Italian term, she gives it this uber-Italian pronunciation: “Today we’re to make spah-GEH-te. Use lots of parmegiano.” So annoying. Jeez, woman, we get it – your family’s Italian. Gold star.
Ever taken classes at NC State? There’s a professor in the mechanical/aerospace department that does the same thing; I’ve never had classes with him though.
I’ve never had trouble understanding any of my foreign ME professors; some speak with a heavy accent, and some don’t. The only class I’ve ever dropped because I couldn’t understand the professor was an economics class. The professor was from Argentina; I understood him when he told us the name of the class, but that was it…from that point on, nothing he seemed to be saying matched what was on the Powerpoint slide.
Bad speakers don’t have to be foreign though. A certain student organization had a patent lawyer come in as a guest speaker. He was a wormy little white dude from NC who barely spoke loud enough for the front row to hear him; he stayed on a single Powerpoint slide (the title slide) for thirty minutes while he talked about himself.
I have a hard time understanding ANY thick foreign accent. My french teacher is from Africa - don’t remember what country - and his accent is thick and he forgets a lot of English words when he tries to explain things. He’s also a huge asshole, so I fucking hate him. “Syllabus? No! Who cares if all the other sections follow it!” (he doesn’t write our tests so yes it DOES fucking matter when he’s not teaching what is on the exams and instead showing us French rap videos!)
My statistics TA was Asian and I never understood anything he said. He talked quietly and skipped a lot of syllables/letters in words. Luckily our prof was a good teacher and I wasn’t too bad at stats like I am with algebra.
I got the one TA for Econ whose first language was English. My friends in the same class used to come to my lab so they could understand what was going on, since our lecture prof was terrible. I still had to retake the class during the summer - when the class average is ALWAYS an F on tests, something is up. That particular teacher is the MOST hated at my school. If she wasn’t tenured, her ass would be fired. She’s already been investigated, but I guess her average went up slightly because she’s still here and terrorizing freshmen. I got an A when I retook it last summer.
