<p>parabella: if your last couple comments were a response to mine - I have never mentioned last name as any sort of marker for clarity of speech.</p>
<p>The OP’s rather short query asks about professors, but it’s not a stretch to include all those who will be teaching in front of a classroom. In fact, many lecture and quiz section classes have a separate grade for the quiz section portion, so the TA fluency does matter.</p>
<p>I did not mention “thick” accents from India as being problematic. On the contrary I said that an Indian accent of a fluent English speaker is not usually difficult to understand.</p>
<p>The most important thing, though, is that the OP is being proactive not reactive. Your post #139 and many by others imply that the perceived problem is always a reaction to a poor grade or laziness on the part of the student. How can that be in the case of OP, as OP appears to be in a research phase and not currently attending college?</p>
<p>When my BIL couldn’t recognize HIS OWN NAME as read aloud by his professor he hadn’t yet received a grade to be disgruntled about.</p>
<p>The privileging of research and devolving some/most teaching duties to grad students has been going on since the US started to import the German research university model over 100 years ago. It comes with the territory of attending most research oriented universities. </p>
<p>With the prestige that comes from bigname research Profs’ publications, research, and attracting grants/prestige for a given research university comes the research Profs’/universities’ tendency to privilege research over teaching…especially the teaching of undergrads…most of whom aren’t going to be interested in the advanced esoteric topics the research Profs are doing. This applies even given the exceptional minority of keen serious undergrads who share such interests and/or are PhD aspirants. </p>
<p>Don’t like it…you/your kid(s) have some choices. They include going to a teaching-oriented universities or LACs.</p>
<p>my last responses were to Bay, but your mentioning your BiL not recognizing his name made me laugh. At this point in my life I lost count to all the different ways my name has been butchered by English speakers, and it is not a very hard name to pronounce at all. If I payed any attention to that, my life would be very hard indeed. And of course S inherited this pesky last name from his dad, and now there may be some people who will think “thick Eastern European accent” looking at his last name, not knowing that the only accent he has is American, when speaking to his Eastern European grandparents in their native tongue. :)</p>
<p>I understand the OP is being “proactive” here, but he/she has no way of knowing how well any of the “accented” faculty teach, one doesn’t miraculously become a capable teacher by virtue of being a native speaker. There may be very exciting opportunities missed there, just because of potential “difficulty to understand”.</p>
<p>I also note how you avoided answering the question about the grade level of your TA friend, tacitly confirming he was not at the same level as the student he was tasked to grade.</p>
<p>:)
Here is a story from my friend who works in customer service and has an accent(fluent English speaker none-the-less). She needed the customer’s first name. Steven, he says. With a “v” or with “ph” , she asks. With an “S” he says, very annoyed, calls her a “D…n foreigner” and hangs up.</p>
<p>I think the problem with teachers with foreign accents isn’t just their accents, but their grasp of the English knowledge. My dad was a TA back in grad school, and while he is great at math and can be very patient, I wouldn’t want to be a student of his in a lecture hall. The fact is, he just wasn’t the most eloquent English speaker as someone who just moved from China. I don’t think 100% of people with accents have poor English otherwise, but I think many foreign TAs don’t have that much experience with the language and it impedes their ability to communicate. Even the best teacher in the world can’t help someone if they don’t know the language.</p>
<p>parabella,
Just because some people are rude or feel entitled doesn’t mean that heavy accents are not a serious impediment to learning.</p>
<p>Why do some people feel the need to defend profs who cannot teach effectively due to speech impediments/accents/fluency? I think that is bizarre. Prioritizing a prof’s shortcomings over students’ needs seems like an awfully selfish position to take, let alone a harmful one, in the long run.</p>
<p>should I tell my S to stay away from profs who graduated from Ivies because the worst prof he had in his college career was a pompous jerk with a Harvard degree? Accent does not a bad instructor make. There are good profs and bad, period. You may end up with no foreign born instructors(as S did) and some of them will be duds. Such is life in higher education.
S learned how to deal with erratic geniuses, soporific bores, condescending a-wholes(all native speakers) and do well in their classes. Made him appreciate the good ones even more and made him a decent teacher in the process. Can’t complain.</p>
<p>In my opinion, the accent is not the largest problem in a teacher, but then I am myself a teacher with an accent(you know, in my area of expertise, music,having a teacher with a certain accent may be a point of pride ;)).</p>
<p>You’re correct in that the student wasn’t at the same level as my TA friend. </p>
<p>My TA friend wasn’t the type to flake out on most of his assignments, perform abysmally on exams, or to whine/complain about self-inflicted failures to his Profs. Why, my friend would feel quite insulted if those traits were associated with him as the above would speak poorly of his maturity and character. </p>
<p>Quite understandable as the existence of such a PhD-level student caused us both to wonder the following: “How in the heck did he manage to survive high school and undergrad…much less gain admission to an Ivy program…even if it is in the School of Education given his extremely lackadaisical/crappy attitude towards his studies/Prof?” Especially when my TA friend found out from the Prof and the program grapevine that this student has had a prior history of flaking out on assignments and exceeding deadlines for incompletes in his program. </p>
<p>If this joker acted similarly in the private sector businesses I’ve worked in…it’s likely he’d be fired quickly for such attitudes. In some cases…on the spot by the end of the second day. My supervisors, colleagues, and I had no time for those who are going to act as effective deadweight for the rest of us.</p>
<p>I wonder if anyone would be willing to give advice on how to get rid of accents for those of us who would like to become more effective teachers or professors.</p>
<p>There is a huge problem with self-entitlement among many American college students. There are bad professors (native speakers or not) in almost any school. The accents should be one the the last concerns students should have. They want their instructors to have no accent (even if they have an accent from another region in the US, the horror!), and blame their bad grades on that, when the students with goods grades don’t. It’s not defending bad professors, regardless of accent (I’d rather have a well prepared, kind, punctual professor with a different accent, than someone who just doesn’t give a s&*t). What will these students do when they are working, and their boss comes from a different part of the country or the world? Or if they need a doctor, and the best in that specialty has a slurred speech pattern? Particularly in STEM fields but also in others, in your career you will interact with people from different backgrounds. Part of the role of college education is preparing you for the world out there, right? Well, the world is very diverse in many things, including accents. Everyone who wants to make it has to learn to live with it (because they might have accents that are hard to understand for others too). Ask about how much professors care about their students, whether they are learning, etc. The accent should not be your first concern.</p>
<p>I have to say, now that I’ve been at my post-college job for almost a year I’ve realized that, short of reading and writing, the most valuable thing I learned from my entire education was how to learn from a bad teacher. The person responsible for training me when I started was borderline illiterate and though english was her native language, she jumbled her words, didn’t explain ANYTHING, and was incapable of understanding some of the most basic things-- I would ask her a question and she would give me an answer that had absolutely nothing to do with the question, if I tried to rephrase she’d give me the same answer and be upset that I was being dense. We would miss turning in assignments because she would say things like “sent the report,” implying she had done it, when really she meant “send the report,” as in a command-- she didn’t know the difference between the two words. I had to train with her for months and months, and she was the only one that could teach me my job, and today we still have to work together.</p>
<p>That isn’t to say that I wouldn’t still strive for a great professor every time if I could do school all over again, but for those who get stuck in these situations there is a huge silver lining. Most people in the workplace aren’t good teachers, and if you can’t learn from them that’s too bad for you.</p>
<p>No, I don’t. As I clearly stated, it’s not like that’s something I’d choose, but sometimes you don’t have a choice in what professor you take and it’s good to learn how to deal with that. It’s better to have a good professor, which is why I said it’s only a silver lining for when you’re stuck.</p>
<p>Have you ever noticed how certain kinds of discussions seem to share the same DNA? This one is remarkably similar to many I’ve read that were talking about whether some problem or other was the fault of teachers or students.</p>
<p>Teaching is a learned craft to most people, like most other jobs. Professors who care about their teaching almost always become good teachers. But asking someone either to lose his/her accent or get lost, seems to me, is demanding to much. Henry Kissinger came to the US as a teenager, has anyone listened to him on TV lately? I am sure some people today would have complained about his accent if they had been in his political science classes.</p>
<p>I understand that it takes a greater effort at the beginning to learn from someone with a strong accent. But if some people don’t want to study with brilliant scholars like Henry Kissinger, Hans Bethe, and Chang-lin Tien, they definitely can find other schools and classes where the professors speak with no accent.</p>
And of course S inherited this pesky last name from his dad, and now there may be some people who will think “thick Eastern European accent” looking at his last name, not knowing that the only accent he has is American, when speaking to his Eastern European grandparents in their native tongue. :)</p>