<p>I just wonder that how frequent do you run into classes that are taught by foreign professors, especially those who can't really speak English? And what do you think of it and how does it affect your learning?</p>
<p>For me, I am very disappointed of my school. For instance, my first 2 semesters of math classes, the prof is Russian. I don't mean that foreign is bad. Just that in the lecture I don't really understand what the prof is speaking. I feel that I am just writing down whatever the prof is writting on the board without comprehending. Ironically, I learn the material better by self-teaching. Same thing happen to my EE classes now. </p>
<p>And same thing for the TA's. In my physic lab section, I mean, I don't understand what really is going on. The TA's are so bad in Enligh, I got lost so easily. Morevoer, during the discussion section, the TA just does some random examples and really do it only for the sake of gettingfree education on grad school.</p>
<p>My organic chem TA is Chinese and I swear he doesn't speak English. He also typed our lab manual, which is in very poor English. I'm just glad I only have him for lab. :/</p>
<p>When I talk to high school students I always make sure that I mention that our teachers can actually speak english. My school does not hire people who cannot speak english very well. But this is a rarity these days.</p>
<p>I have one of the worst TAs ever right now. He is Turkish. I'd probably not mind his accent that much if he taught well. He sucks. It's sound like he's swishing everything around in his mouth. I can't even listen and it doesn't matter b/c he doesn't teach anything useful. I'm scared for when the class starts getting hard.</p>
<p>Oh well what's even worse if the prof is American and speaks it really badly. Like my chemE prof who stutters so bad I can't listen to him. I think all the extraneous syallbles might make my head implode.</p>
<p>Really tho I can't listen to anyone with speech problems. It has always bothers me. I mean really you're a professional adult. Get that **** fixed. Like now.</p>
<p>For next semester, I would pointedly ask your advisor (and other students) about which profs and TAs can/cannot speak standard, understandable English. You are paying alot for school, and it is your right to be allowed to understand your class lectures.</p>
<p>When I was in college, I had this problem only once. After that, I asked around.</p>
Like my chemE prof who stutters so bad I can't listen to him. I think all the extraneous syallbles might make my head implode.
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<p>Once I had a prof who stuttered. Not only that, but he stuttered in a thick Chinese accent. He gave really great lecture notes, so you sort of had an idea that, if you could just get past the impenetrable cloud of speech confusion, you'd learn a lot.</p>
<p>Everyone's got a story about a prof with an incomprehensible accent.</p>
<p>My dad once had a chem prof who gave a lecture on "the differences between mo-rare-ity and mo-rah-rity." Of course, this did nothing for my father's understanding of molarity and molality.</p>
<p>My brother's math professor was chewing the class out for making some careless errors and said, "You need to be more careful!! You need to be more reckress!!" The class was stymied. Reckress? Like, wreckless? What..!? After massive frustration on both ends after asking the professor to repeat herself several times, the class finally figured out what she was saying: "You need to be more rigorous." Aaahhhhh.</p>
<p>At Rice, Dr. Gao of the math department taught me Wector Cancurus. Another professor gave a lecture on the dynamics of rigid bunnies. (It took me a good three weeks to figure out that he was saying "rigid bodies", as I'd not had engineering mechanics before.) A third professor would measure loads on beams using "keepsah". (kilopounds-->kips... and that was in our first civ analysis course, so we'd never heard the term kips before!)</p>
<p>Yes, it sucks now, but later on, you'll have excellent stories that you'll be able to share with other engineers, and everyone can laugh together hysterically.</p>
<p>My high school calc teacher (who was awesome, btw) said " 'creasing' " for both 'increasing' and 'decreasing'. </p>
<p>"The graph of f(x), between zero and one... is f(x) 'creasing? yes or no?"
He never could understand why we so often missed such an easy question...</p>
<p>Another Olin plus. . . . I've never heard complaints about faculty with language problems. </p>
<p>At one of my daughters' mid-sized state school, students who complained about this language problem were told "it's a multi-cultural world, so deal with it." And, pay thousands of dollars to do so!</p>
<p>I've gotta say... at Rice, the ones who didn't speak English well generally weren't teaching for long unless they were absolutely incredible professors. Gao is legendary.</p>
<p>It's not "a muti-cultural world" that you have to deal with. It's the fact that many science/engineering grad programs have to enroll many foreign students because schools are way short of native students in those fields. Most native students fear math/science, let alone developing interest in it. Until that's changed, there will always be large number of foreign students in those programs; since there's no interview for admission, no one can tell if the person is qualified to TA before he/she is admitted.</p>
<p>Heh... my calc TA is from somewhere in South America. He's mostly comprehensible, but it's kind of funny when he says things like " 'eerection vector" and "shane rule". My English teacher has a Russian accent, my discrete math teacher has some sort of eastern european accent, and my economics TA has an Indian accent. No serious trouble understanding any of them.</p>
<p>Ah, all your stories brings back memories. Reminds me of the old stories about the Soviet Unions where the students pretend to learn and the teachers pretend to teach. </p>
<p>However, all your stories points to a large and serious point, which is that a lot of research universities place little emphasis on actual teaching ability. The harsh and sad truth is that a lot of research universities pay little regard to the quality of teaching product they put out there and will go so far as to disrespect their students by having TA's or profs who they know have no business in teaching students, either because they can't speak decent English, or because they just don't care about being good teachers, or whatever.</p>
<p>However, responsibility lies with the students too. The fact is, a lot of students don't really care about actually learning anything, and are hence willing to put up with subpar teaching just because they want to go to a namebrand school. Let's face it. For a lot of students, it's more important to go to a school that is prestigious than to go to a school that provides good teaching. And until that changes (if it ever does), then schools will have no incentive to provide good teaching. Why should schools improve their teaching if the students don't demand it?</p>
<p>This problem varies among different universities. At Northwestern, I didn't have any grad students teaching the actual classes. They were just TAs--they graded homework, led the lab (profs gave you the lab procedure or posted it online prior to the labs anyway) or "discussion" (mostly just a help session for your problem sets) sessions. The ones that weren't native speakers were comprehensible for the most parts. The school required a minimum of 600 on TOFEL for admission and that helped. But I did meet one or two grad students (not my TAs however) that didn't speak very well. Only two of the professors I had classes with were foreign-born and they spoke pretty good English.</p>
<pre><code>Your point is something that I have been preaching on these boards for months. Most medium and large universities care very little about teaching. I interviewed at a large university in the south and during the day long interview we spent about 30 seconds talking about teaching. Research and money were the key.
Thankfully some places are different. Some places do care about teaching and only hire people who can speak english. I'm glad I found such a place.
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