IIRC, she was born in Italy and grew up speaking Italian as a small child, until moving to the US. It’s English that is her second language.
We just got a new professor here at the Eng Lit department, who is still rather young but quite well-known for her cutting-edge work in feminist theory (or so they say - I wouldn’t have known her from Dan Brown until this autumn) and her work as a poet. After the first week a rumor started circulating that she accepted the position at our school because it had the least amount of required teaching hours. Her idea of leading a discussion consists of listening to someone’s opinion, then saying “That’s very interesting. [another person], what do you think?” In a grad class that’s half full of undergrads, this doesn’t take the discussion very far. Honestly, what’s the point of becoming a professor if you don’t like to teach? It’s kinda part of the job description. I don’t care how brilliant you supposedly are - if we’re not getting anything out of it, something is not working. The least people could do is make an effort.
My most unintelligable professor was for my matrices class. The professor was both deaf and Swiss. He’d learned Swiss without really hearing it and then English (which is pretty admirable, actually) but had this really bizarre Swiss/deaf accent.
It’s interesting how different peopel have trouble with different accents. I always had the most trouble with Chinese accents but I was talking to a guy who was a Mexican national and he said the Chinese guys were no problem, it was the Scottish guy that he couldn’t understand…
The TA for one of my freshman or sophomore physics classes had ESL problems significant enough that he was removed from his position after a few weeks. I felt bad for him, as he seemed like a nice guy and the speech issues obviously bothered him, but since nobody in the class could understand him, something had to be done. Thankfully, the replacement TA was the professor who had written the lab manual for the Halliday & Resnick physics books. He was about 80 at the time and was still hanging around the physics department because he enjoyed it. Best physics TA evar!
I still remember my Calculus II prof from first year. He spoke with a very heavy Chinese accent, spoke very quietly and when he did any examples on the board his writing looked like chicken scratch.
It’s a miracle that I learned to integrate trig functions with his teaching.
And then there was the overmatched TA who thrown in at the last second to teach a 3rd year Hydrology class. I don’t think I attended a class after the 2nd week. Everything was on his powerpoint slides and if we needed more explanation for anything, it was easier to get it out of the textbook or the internet. A simple question only got a 30 minute example of the board and most of that time was spent with him staring at the board figuring out what the next step was. I got my B and moved on from that. The following year they had a prof teach the course and things went much better supposedly. I did feel bad for the TA, he didn’t know what he was doing, and he only found out he was teaching it days before.
Then there’s my least favourite prof of all time who taught me Environmental Chemical Analysis and was supposed to teach Microbiology but at the last second gave it to his wife to teach. This wouldn’t be a big deal except that all of the course materials were photocopied from long missing textbooks or downloaded off a website or old photocopied overheads. Each page was a table or a graphic or a figure of some sort and he used to talk about each one and you were supposed to take the notes on the white space surrounding the figure. Well, when you don’t have a lesson plan or anything written down you really handcuff the person you hand the class off too. Just awful. She would frequently skip over pages since she didn’t know what the relevance was.
In the UK it isn’t that easy to get brilliant people of any description into HE when they can get paid lots more somewhere else. Research attracts more govt funding and generates funding spin-offs through start-ups, patents, and outside research projects.
Being able to teach does not enter into it. It is assumed that the university’s own internal training will give staff teaching skills.
(UK University admin bod)
Are you a first/second year (Glasgow’s four years like Edinburgh, right?) pretend my name is witty? I found that things get a lot better when you get into your final years - the lecturers are actually interested in the subject being taught and take an interest in you and the lecture. Lecturers that were appallingly bad in the first few years are now pretty good.
Hear, hear, brother. I had a Chinese statics teacher who lectured us using three Greek letters for all of the angles: Arfa, Beeeta, and Ass-Eater. Yes, they were clearly “alpha,” “beta”, and “ah… theta.”
I mostly feel sorry for these chaps. I had a TA once who couldn’t figure out how to say what he needed to explain a statistics concept that was baffling all of us. He was so imbarrased.
My worst professor, to contrast the other posts, was for a modern art history class. The woman would script out her lecture before hand and just read it. It metre sounded nothing like normal talking, so it was difficult to follow. If you put your hand up with a question, she would come to a scretching halt mid-sentence and lean out over the podium to stare at you while you asked your question. It was incredibly intimidating and made you feel like you had totally interrupted her. Asshat.
[QUOTE=brewhaThe 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.[/QUOTE]
Damping constant is a lower-case xi, and to be fair, I’ve never seen anyone draw it exactly the same way twice either. Hell, *you * try it.
I was lucky enough to be able to understand every foreign TA I had. The only bad ones were a few who simply didn’t want to be bothered teaching at all. Language just was never an issue. The worst was an old, shuflling, half-deaf guy who filled in for a couple of weeks for a vacationer, just read the notes out loud, repeating any new words endlessly until we all started snickering, and got pathetically tied up any time anyone had a question. A few years after I graduated, I recognized his name in a news story - he’d just been awarded the freakin’ Nobel Prize for work he’d done decades earlier. So you never know.
Good to hear!
What was your specific course?
I’m fourth year AI + Computer Science.
My Chinese EE TA in college said “Ewectwic Fucks” for an entire semester instead of “electric flux.” I don’t remember a thing about the class except that.
Cool. Was in Edinburger today, went to deep sea world with some friends because it’s more bearable when hungover than the one lecture I would have gone to today (guess whose…)
When I was a first (only) year engineering student we had a Chinese chemistry teacher who gave us a two-hour lecture two days a week. I think he flew in from NASA just for the lecutures. Anyway, he was unintelligible. On the other hand, he could do square roots of long numbers in his head quicker than any of the 500 of us could do on out TI calculators. I can still see him writing the number on the board then looking back at us waiting for one of us to come up with the answer, asking, with a very strong Chinese accent, “Is correct? Is correct?”
I had an engineering drafting class taught by a woman with a very thick Quebecois accent. When describing parts, she pronounced “slot” as “slut”. It provided endless amusement for me (but I’m petty and childish like that).
Her: “Zo zou put the shaft into the slut like so…”
Me: snicker
Her: “If the slut iz to small…”
Me: snicker
and so on. Great fun 
Think about it from this point of view: to teach astrophysics at the college level, you have to have a Ph.D. in astrophysics. The people who make it through Ph.D. programs are the ones who can do research, and like to do research, and actually produce research. Teaching is just an unpleasant side effect of the business.
And I have to say, in my search for a professorship, a low teaching load is one of my top-five priorities.
Maybe it’s because my experience has all been in research-oriented universities, but nobody makes it to a professorship because they like to teach their subject. You have to love your subject–and therefore want plenty of time to pursue it.
I’m a career counsellor, and luckily, employers are telling us more and more that the specialist knowledge you get at university is not that relevant as they will teach you want they want you to know. They are looking for the transferable skills you get from a university education - time management, written and oral communication, working in groups, learning to learn etc.
I feel your pain. I had a mathematics class with an Israeli TA who didn’t know the word “coordinates.” I dropped that class very quickly.
I have also classes taught by instructors with thick accents who were wonderful. The two that immediately come to mind were both Russian, one for astronomy and one for Russian history. (WHo would’ve guessed?)
The astronomy prof had a few language issues, but he LOVED astronomy and managed make class fun, interesting, and occasionally goofy. One incident was when he using a yoyo to demonstrate orbits. He was whirling the yoyo around his head during the explanation, when the string caught on his ear. The yoyo wrapped around his head and smacked him in the forehead with an audible BONK. The class looked on in horror, trying not to laugh. The professor, on the other hand, just started cracking up, calling it a “quickly decaying orbit.” THis was a welcome contrast to my first astro prof, who was American, but dour and still bitter about his experiment being bumped off the Voyager probe. (Yeah, we got to hear the whole story about that the first class. I immediately transferred to the other section.)
My Russian history prof had been teaching this class for decades, probably using the same notes. However he still put a lot off effort into the presentation, and had a great sense of humor, so class was still interesting and pretty funny. He had fled the Soviet Union before coming to the US. At one point at my school he was the department head. The administration decided that they needed some old records, and the department no longer had them. Of ocurse the admins didn’t believe him, and continued to insist that they existed. His reaction was basically, “You want to play bureaucratic games? I am from the Soivet Union. I KNOW bureaucracy.” So he told the admins that they had to submit their request on department form 1H-1A. They duly submitted the form, at which point they were informed that 1H-1A had been superseded by a new form, 1H-2A. Everytime they submitted the new form, there was a new one. Eventually they gave up.
I also had a linguistics professor who sucked. He was American, and apparently quite the researcher, but he obviously considered the class a waste of his precious time. He just didn’t give a damn, and it made that class boring and a general pain in the ass. Thankfully my professor for historical linguistics and almost the complete opposite; I still have fond memories of that class.
My point is (what the hell is my point? Oh yeah.) that accents can be a real pain in the ass, but the instructor’s attitude towards class is a bigger factor in how good it will be. IMHO, YMMV, and all the jazz.
There were a couple of lower-case Greek letters that often got used in physics classes that I always thought of as “squiggle” and “other squiggle”. Some people called them “left-handed squiggle” and “right-handed squiggle”.