Today the professor showed up fifteen minutes late for a 50-minute class. When she found out that there was a visiting prospective student and the student’s mom (who is an education professor at NCSU), she spent several minutes of the remaining class trying to convince the mom that this wasn’t normal for the class, spent about twenty minutes reviewing last class’s material for the visiting student, and spent the last several minutes of class telling us some weird and only remotely relevant story about a frozen catfish she received from a student’s illiterate grandmother.
Sigh.
Somewhere in there she told us that our homework assignment was to write a story about President’s Day. “Take the history and turn it into a story as simplistically as you can,” she said.
After class, though, a classmate told me that the professor is rumored to have been in a very serious car accident a few years ago that left her in a coma and may have resulted in brain damage. That helps explain what’s going on and gives me a little more patience with her, even if it doesn’t make the situation any more acceptable.
To be fair, though, my current first-year Calculus teacher is one of the best teachers I’ve ever had, and he makes simple mistakes all the time (like adding instead of multiplying, or forgetting to distribute a negative). He’s always very careful to recheck every step, and never gets defensive if we correct him. He just says, “Sorry, thank you,” and erases the mistake and re-does it.
The Calculus itself, he never gets wrong, so it’s not interfering with our learning at all. I guess my point is that teachers making mistakes isn’t the problem, it’s teachers refusing to admit their mistakes that’s a problem.
When I told the anecdote, I wasn’t being paid to teach a bunch of college students about how to teach language arts. People weren’t writing notes based on what I said. My error isn’t going to propagate, whereas hers will.
This was one of three or four errors that she made within about five or ten minutes regarding the dictionary. That’s unacceptable, and if her wires are crossing that often, she needs to find a new job.
Just the other day I saw my neuroscience co-ordinator spell alcohol, “Acholol”.
I’m not quite the geek enough to put up my hand and ask if that was alcohol combined with laughing gas*.
If that’s what you think a phoneme is, you’ve got it slightly wrong. A phoneme is an individual sound - or rather, what language speakers will perceive as an individual sound. (Actually, most phonemes are composed of many different sounds that all “sound the same” to native speakers - compare the /n/ in “ant” and “anthem”, for instance.)
No possible argument could exist for dividing a word into phonemes. “Dog” consists of three - /d/, the vowel (I can’t make the symbol here), and /g/. There’s three sounds, two consonants and a vowel. Anyone who can’t divide a word into phonemes shouldn’t be teaching about the subject. And English has only around 35 of them (depending on dialect.) I’m not sure how many Japanese has - it’s definitely fewer, but it’s not a lot less.
Can’t think of any others - that’s a neat example. In Spanish, there’s límite (stressed on the first syllable), which is a noun meaning “limit”. Then there’s limite, the subjunctive of the verb “to limit”, meaning (roughly) “I (or he, or she) may limit”. Then there’s limité, stressed on the last syllable, meaning “I limited”.