The way that Universities Work
Another one of those Rants that I wrote a while back
I have been wondering as of late where certain people in charge of my schooling get their great ideas. The thing that really bothered me today is how did the University, or the person who is in charge of handling the hiring, figure it is a good idea to get people who don’t speak our language (english) to teach technical courses. I have one teacher who is teaching his first course to us, it is not a simple course either, it is a rather technical, brain taxing course. This teacher seems to be a really good guy, and he also seems to know his stuff, however english is NOT his first language, it actually seems that he has only been speaking in the last couple of years. In most cases this would not be a problem, if you are talking to him one on one, you can get him to slow down if you can’t understand, but in the classroom this can be a very big problem. I should say this, I do NOT blame him, it is not his fault that the teacher who normally instructs this course is on symbatical, and there was no one to replace him. It is the fault of the administration to get him to do this job, knowing full well that he doesn’t have the ability to communicate with an english speaking class, where the majority of the people only speak english. If the class was Asian then there would be no problem, he would speak his native language and everyone would do very well in the course and learn along the way. So why does the University do this, well I think it is because all that is important to them is the research, and undergraduate studies is only a means to fund this research.
Now I would like to mention a even more infuriating situation, another professor at this school is very good at speaking english, even though it is not his native language, but he has NO interest in the courses he teaches. The course that I have him for now, is horrible, he doesn’t know the material and seems not to have any interest to learn it either. He likes to make the class do unbelievable difficult problems, even though he hasn’t taught the material that these problems covers. He also likes to NOT answer questions, or dance around a question when it is asked. If he doesn’t know the answer he will answer a different question and then move on. If he is pressed, he has been known to say “I don’t know”, which is fine if he would either find out the answer and relay it to us, or not test us on it. However he has tested us on these sort of things, and just expected us to go find the answer on our own. You tell me where is the advancement of knowledge, when a professor will say he doesn’t know the answer, then go research and find the answer, but not tell the class. Like it is a big secret now.
Anyway I think that it would be great if the teacher I mentioned before would take the second professor I mentioned, communication skills. That way we would have a prof that will be able to communicate AND who is knowledgeable in what he is teaching, and another prof who would be even more useless, but I must say there is not much hope in him anyway.
I have to go, need to do some work for said profs.