Profs who cannot speak English

Parents Forum
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<p>dietz, some years ago I had to make some dental decisions while working in China. Everyone had accents (Chinese, Irani, Malaysian). Some of the key people didn’t speak English. My Chinese isn’t great, and the translators English wasn’t great. We all were patient with each other and muddled through. I am not afraid of medical professionals with accents.</p>

<p>You obviously live a very different life than I do, but the world is changing. That is why you are asking these hypotheticals about medical professionals with accents. I want my children to be prepared for the world as they find it. I want my children to be able to make sense of regional and foreign accents.</p>

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<p>If I have a surgeon I can’t understand, I will change doctors.
If I call about health care options and can’t understand the representative, I say “thank you for your time. I need to give this some thought” and keep calling till I get someone I understand.
If I can’t understand the pharmacist, I change pharmacies.</p>

<p>My kids never had the problem of “Profs who cannot speak English” so I can’t really speak to how I would have responded. However it has been made clear, in this thread, that if your kid sees this as a problem, there are options. It really doesn’t matter if other posters don’t see it as a problem. Or if they would choose to work around what you perceive as an inconvenience but others might judge a growth experience. You have the power to correct the problem. For your kid. Or to teach your kid how to correct the problem. Decide what you think is educationally important and be sure your kid gets that. No one is stopping you. We are really in a loop here. : )</p>

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<p>And yet there is still not one data-point of a college where this is a problem. Except of course the OP’s friend of a friend. Not a single instance where a kid went to the administration to explain that the professor was not able to make him or herself understood and where the administration cackled, “we have your check now you can go pound rocks”. </p>

<p>Starting to feel like an urban legend to me. And all the “values” driven parents are up in arms over someone else’s kid with the problem and the outrage over the callous and venal provosts who don’t value their children’s educational outcomes.</p>

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<p>Mamalion: um…if one is in China one has put oneself - presumably voluntarily - among a population which is speaking THEIR native language and making a polite and valiant attempt to communicate in yours. This example makes no sense.</p>

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…obviously you have lived a more charmed, traveled, educated and priviledged life than I. So, please check that priviledge :wink: and try to put yourself into the position of the downtrodden.</p>

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Do you see this “power to correct the problem” extending to correcting the problem of instructors who just can’t teach at the level of the majority of the class, English or otherwise? Because I think it’s a little more complicated than you seem to think it is.</p>

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<p>Sylvan: I am not sure exactly what you are asking. I think it is pretty easy for a student to solve the problem of a class with a “prof who doesn’t speak English” if such a problem exists. Along with some others here I prefer (at least for the sake of argument) to take students at their word when they complain. Students who find themselves in this position can 1) Complain through the proper channels. 2) Change sections. 3) Meet with teachers before signing up for classes. </p>

<p>I can not fix education in this country. I can be sure my own children receive the education I want them to have. I have that power. All parents do not have that power. That is sadly true. My comments were addressed to posters on this thread who seemingly have children presently at highly selective universities. I believe they do have that power.</p>

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<p>dietz, believe me there is nothing privileged about receiving dental care in China, or at least where I was. I simply meant that my life was different than yours. I did suggest that we all would be dealing with more accented people, but that was intended as a statement of fact. </p>

<p>Sorry if I offended you.</p>

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<p>To someone, somewhere - we are all accented people. : )</p>

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Let’s take an example, not language related. University N has no Physics Department. There is one tenured physicist who teaches such courses as are necessary for pre-med and other majors, along with those courses for which there are enough students to form a quorum, and two physics adjuncts, A and B. Dr. Full-time gets a sabbatical year, and U hires Adjunct C to teach the minimum load needed. The students soon realize that most aren’t getting anything from Adjunct C, but it’s not until after the first exam that they realize the extent of the problem. The exam is too long and too difficult and takes weeks for C to grade. The scores are terrible. The students are despondent. </p>

<p>Your solutions are to: 1) COMPLAIN THROUGH PROPER CHANNELS. - the students go to the science chair to complain. Nothing changes. 2) CHANGE SECTIONS - well by now it’s week 5, and there are only 2 sections, both of which are being taught by Adjunct C. 3) MEET WITH TEACHERS BEFORE SIGNING UP FOR CLASSES - Adjunct C is a really nice guy and meeting with him prior to the semester doesn’t really tell you anything about his teaching philosophy or approach (I know, I met with him). Besides, he’s teaching the only two sections. Not like you have some other choice. </p>

<p>So the students are faced with suffering through 2 semesters (or trying to wait a year for the return of Dr. Full-time, which doesn’t help the Seniors). What does your “power” get you in this situation? </p>

<p>And despite common perceptions, it’s not as if there are scads of physics adjuncts lying around ready to pick up two morning sections of intro physics at a moment’s notice in the middle of October. Not to mention the legal contract with Adjunct C.</p>

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<p>Interesting perspective. I always suspect this is done to create a grade distribution because it is an unwritten rule here to maintain a c average in large classes:</p>

<p><a href=“http://occ.crescentschool.org/geography/worldissues/Articles/university.htm”>http://occ.crescentschool.org/geography/worldissues/Articles/university.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>The flaw of this system is that you will end up with easy As vs hard As, depending on the course, the major, and the school. This is why I suggested we should use something like the GRE as an exit exam so we have a common yardstick to evaluate the “product”, regardless of school or major.</p>

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<p>When I was a student, 75% was an A. Now an A is 80%.</p>

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<p>You must be thinking of the wranglers. Names like Maxwell, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Strutt (Baron Rayleigh), Cayley, Hardy, Russell, Keynes etc. will be remembered.</p>

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<p>sylvan: pages ago QM asked what kinds of colleges people were talking about, what level of school. I have been thinking about a different sort of college than you are describing. I can’t really even imagine an institution called a university that doesn’t have a physics dept. That, of course, is my problem. The posters I am addressing have described their kids as being at very different sorts of colleges than you are describing. I am extremely fortunate my children didn’t have to deal with what you are describing. I have no ideas how to fix those problems. I am sorry you find yourself in this situation.</p>

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<p>One of my grandfathers taught at a small LAC, with about 1500 students, and they had a physics department with multiple faculty members in it, so it is a bit difficult for me to envision the type of “university” that has no physics department. I would think that small liberal arts colleges would be very unlikely to hire an adjunct who was a very poor teacher. Also, approval of sabbaticals is not automatic. In the scenario described by sylvan8798, I would expect that the “university” would ask the physics prof to delay the sabbatical until a reasonably good replacement can be found.</p>

<p>Was this a real situation, or just a hypothetical?</p>

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<p>It is neat to see the different approaches to how education is viewed.</p>

<p>@alh stated, “For our family, increased knowledge is the value. It is the goal. The diploma is the by-product.”</p>

<p>This is a platitude that sounds great and works philosophically when thinking about the college experience for your kids, but doubt you and the other posters, who hail this statement, actually accept this in practice. In the real world, the statement holds no water.</p>

<p>If you really believe the real value to your kid is the knowledge gained in college, then you would have had no problem with him / her going through college and then dropping out a month before graduation and not getting a diploma? </p>

<p>I bet all of you would go through the roof because you know a person, such as me who hires people, would not give your kids the time of day without that diploma in hand, regardless of the knowledge in their brains. </p>

<p>That is why colleges list 4 and 6-year graduation rates for students. Even the students know what they really pay for in the end is the diploma, and no one puts any value on the information in their brains without it.</p>

<p>I would agree though that the ABSOLUTE value of college to students is the knowledge gained. However, the REAL world value is the diploma. We live in the real, not in the absolute. </p>

<p>@alh stated, “If I call about health care options and can’t understand the representative, I say “thank you for your time. I need to give this some thought” and keep calling till I get someone I understand. If I can’t understand the pharmacist, I change pharmacies.”</p>

<p>Wow, you have me at a loss with this one here. </p>

<p>Who in the world would go through the serious college admissions process (research, visitation trips, applications, admit days, and final decision), write $60K/yr checks and then think changing colleges is easy as switching pharmacies? OK, you do I guess.</p>

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<p>Some schools may have no physics major, although they may have a few physics courses and instructors to service pre-meds and biology majors. An example:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.marymount.edu/academics/programs”>http://www.marymount.edu/academics/programs&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“http://marymount.edu/Media/Website%20Resources/catalog/2013/undergraduate/physics-courses.htm”>http://marymount.edu/Media/Website%20Resources/catalog/2013/undergraduate/physics-courses.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>In theory, sure I think it is disgraceful if schools are putting profs with very limited English skills or incomprehensible accents in front of a class But I agree with those who feel like this is too small a problem to be either worrying about or making generalizations over. </p>

<p>International grad students and professors are going to have to be not only teaching, but presenting at conferences, going on job interviews, and working with English-speaking colleagues in labs. The idea that any significant number of them are utterly incapable of communicating with the average person isn’t realistic. Yes, many of them will have accents, and those accents might sometimes take some time to parse, but it doesn’t strike me as beyond the bounds of reason to ask a student to accept that modest difficulty as a natural consequence of having a global community.</p>

<p>Obviously, all sorts of strange and unfair things go on, and I’m sure there are cases here and there of teachers who, because of their accents, really shouldn’t be before a class - and, while we could all think of horror scenarios, usually one will figure that out in time and have the opportunity to drop the class or switch into another section. The number of cases in which a student is in a course needed for graduation that must be taken a particular semester with this particular professor and can’t understand what is being said to the point where it affects his or her grade is probably very ,very small. In the majority of cases, I suspect “impossible to understand” really means “sometimes I miss a phrase here and there,” or “the accent took some getting used to.”</p>

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<p>While no evaluation system is foolproof, LAC departments evaluating prospective hires tend to weigh teaching very heavily in their evaluations…including having them teach sample classes. </p>

<p>A classmate who was a student representative in one such hiring committee at my LAC wrote an article about how the committee she was a part of turned down prospective Professors because they weren’t good at undergraduate teaching and/or seemed more interested in their research than teaching throughout the evaluation process which caused them to wonder why they bothered to apply if they’d rather be at a research university. </p>

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<p>At the risk of being accused of promoting an urban legend, I will reiterate that I actually had an incomprehensible teacher, for freshman calculus, at Yale (although this was a long time ago). Although I think I should have complained, I will note that I did what some of you are saying I should have done, which is work around the problem. I copied down what he wrote on the board, and pored over the (lousy) textbook, and ultimately got a B in the course. But what did I learn? I didn’t learn much calculus, although I guess I learned enough–temporarily–to do OK on the exam. I suppose it was valuable to learn that even at an institution like Yale, some people were incompetent to do the jobs for which they were being paid. I’ve certainly seen that in other settings as well.</p>

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<p>Perhaps they were in subjects where faculty jobs are scarce relative to applicants, so they applied everywhere. Of course, it is not like LACs are devoid of research for faculty and students.</p>

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This was/is a real situation, QM. The adjunct in question had NO college teaching experience. Would you have expected the U to call the regular physics prof back from sabbatical? Can they even do that? And what about the contract with Adjunct C?</p>

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Thinking back to my undergrad days in a large university with a large civil engineering department, it does seem to me that some upper division courses were only taught by ONE professor, often with only ONE section, as there were only 50-60 CE majors. EVERYONE had Dr. M for Wastewater Quality, etc. And some of the professors did have accents that took time to get used to, in fact most of them were foreign. For students unwilling to make that effort, I think that would be a problem.</p>