Profs who cannot speak English

Parents Forum
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<p>I would venture to guess an overwhelming majority of the people least concerned about this issue were / are not the ones who wrote / write checks and footed / foot the bill out of their own bank accounts. </p>

<p>I highly suspect those actually writing the checks have a very keen sense when their money is being wasted, and they do not take it lying down. </p>

<p>As pointed out earlier, this concept students need to learn to work around such an issue is beyond silly. They (students and parents) are paying for the instruction; they should receive the top-notch instruction they have paid for. It should bug them if they do not receive said instruction. Unless, of course, they are not footing the bill and are two steps removed from assessing value.</p>

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<p>Okay, my daughter had some horrible experiences with professors and graduate students in engineering who just didn’t know how to teach which, in addition, was severely compounded by their accents. They may have been excellent researchers and knowledgeable in their areas of expertise, but they couldn’t effectively present their topics. She couldn’t transfer out of these classes because certain profs only taught certain courses.</p>

<p>I’ve read through most of the posts because I am interested in accents, but as a speech pathologist, I am not allowed to work on them. There are certain consonants that do not exist in many of the Asian languages. There are certain dipthongs that are in English, but aren’t produced by non-native speakers.</p>

<p>Many of these professors and Grad assistants had difficulty as children, with producing sounds, and/or controlling their rate of speech, and increasing or decreasing their prosody (tones, inflections, stress patterns) and never were guided on how to produce these in English. For the English speakers who mumble and can’t present themselves well, this adversely impacts their students. </p>

<p>I agree that the teaching institutions have to rely on foreign grad assistants to run the labs and this really impacted both of my children. For the elder DD, the grad students never opened the labs, because one in particular stated that since he wasn’t given this advantage in his native country, that the students there should do without as well. He was immediately reported by the students, but this GA returned, with lit cigarette, and would unlock the door, leave, then come back early and kick them out-to lock it.</p>

<p>The middle daughter has had similar experiences and recently had a bio lab where the students were required to complete lab packets. The GA either was intimidated by the students or just didn’t care. She glared at each student as they entered and would tell them: “Don’t ask help! I no here to help you” My daughter’s team accidentally dropped a vial and the girl hurried over and yelled that they were “stupid Americans” who couldn’t do anything and to “clean up! get out!”. So much for international relations. . . . </p>

<p>I was offered a job teaching “improved” English skills to adult immigrants on Sunday afternoons for a lot of money. (I needed extra money for tuitions). It was explained to me that these were professionals who were advised by their companies that they needed to improve their presentation skills. I knew it was an accent reduction task, so even if I wanted to, I couldn’t take the job. I would have started with about 40 “students”; the interesting part is that they were strict about my licensing and experience in the production of sounds. Nope, couldn’t do it; I like being around family on the weekends.</p>

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<p>Alh,
Don’t get me going about this! Not today or the last two weeks.
Let me tell you about my day so far. I write this while inhaling my lunch. I spent from 9-11:30PM meeting with 3 graduate students about their projects and mentoring issues (they count too). I spent 12-until 3:00 meeting with the 4 undergraduates (individually) doing research in my lab. I’m emailing back and forth with colleagues about undergraduate curriculum issues in between meetings. I have to respond to two emails from my advisees next. To end my day I have an appointment at 5:30 until about 7 to teach an undergraduate an experimental technique. According to some people’s math, I did no teaching because I did not stand up in front of a classroom.
Last week I spent a large portion of my time reading 6 (100-150 page) honors theses from undergrads.
I’m a research university and run an actively funded research program. Believe me the teaching we do, AND the teaching that takes the most time, goes unnoticed and uncounted. Delivering a lecture is a break for me!</p>

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<p>^^
Now, that’s the kind of day I remember! Yep, professors just don’t have enough to do. </p>

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<p>luvthej, on your real busy days, I would assume you also - take part in university committees (required part of the job) come up with,conduct, and publish original research (required part of the job) – and write grants to fund that original research. </p>

<p>Yup. Professors are lazy and a waste for universities.</p>

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<p>You know, Mathyone, I have shown tremendous patience to NOT call you out on your (blatant) ignorance when you keep coming back wityh utter non-sense about the SAT. And this because I understoood that your “knowledge” was dated, and that your only datapoint was a vicarious one in the form of your daughter’s experience. </p>

<p>Here again, the beauty of an anomymous discussion forum is that we do not have to broadcast our experience to make a point. I know nothing about you and vice versa. You simply do not know how many academics I know or work with. You do not know anything about where I studied and what subjects I studied or researched, except for what has filtered here over the years. </p>

<p>In the end, you have your experience, your opinions, and perhaps some data. And, I have mine. However, while you might disagree with my opinions, suggestions for discourse, or my erroneous conclusion, nothing here gives you the right to call others … ignorant! </p>

<p>And, now that this has been said, perhaps you should try to understand that I was talking about professors who were dedicated to teaching 24 hours a week, and obviously NOT having a similar dedication to research. And, perheps, you should place that in the context of adjuncts that are not hired nor paid to engage in research by their employers. </p>

<p>Fwiw, I fully understand that any “attacks” on the performance of academics, be it K-12 teachers or professors, is USUALLY met with a barrage of “you do not know what I do” and … a bunch of flimsy math about hours worked. The problem is that people CAN measure it from the outside and know when the overworked poor souls are available for online discussions, attending family affairs, and on paid leave! </p>

<p>It is what it is! And sooner or later,it will have to change! </p>

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<p>Xiggi- maybe your points about the need for change in higher education would face less push back here if your position didn’t always begin and end with your observation that tenured faculty are overpaid and don’t work enough hours. You might (for example) make an observation that at some colleges, tenured faculty are only accountable to the provost or their department chair. And that this creates a dynamic where other constituents (undergrads, taxpayers, folks at private foundations or the NSF who fund their research, corporate research sponsors, etc.) don’t always see a connection between the work a professor does and the greater good.</p>

<p>I don’t think anyone on here would argue that more nuanced point. And then we could get into what would likely be a vigorous debate about how a tenured faculty person in the Classics, or Art History, or Comparative Literature, faces very different pressures and requirements than one in Chemical Engineering or Nanotechnology. And that debate might be useful.</p>

<p>But instead you immediately go to an argument about hours clocked in the classroom, summers off, too many sabbaticals, not caring about undergraduates, etc. which is both naive and superficial. There are highly productive professors who are truly doing good for society but aren’t punching in like you’d want them to, because they spend their summers in Kenya developing better treatments for malaria and use their sabbaticals in Stockholm comparing the genome of five virulent strains of malaria and the skeeters that carry them to the giant database of insect genomes. This is the guy you want to be showing up at 8 am forcing him to teach 4 sections of Freshman biology every single semester to “earn his keep”? YOU think society is better served by having him teach 18 year olds who can’t be bothered to turn off their cellphones instead of pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge?</p>

<p>So dial back the rhetoric and you won’t feel condescended to. The life of a faculty person at a place like MIT is so different from a faculty person at Framingham State- even in the same discipline, and even if they are both tenured, even though their institutions are 20 miles apart. Your arguments never seem to recognize that. The life of a professor in a field where there is actual field research (archaeology, agronomy, anthropology, etc.) is quite different from a field like French literature. You never recognize that. The life of a professor who can bring in huge grants (materials science, human factors engineering, aero/astro) is completely different from that of someone in a “publish or perish” field like linguistics or Renaissance history.</p>

<p>Get a grip on your anger and the rest of us would be happy to debate without condescension.</p>

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<p>I do NOT want to beat up on Xiggi who has been a huge help to many on this board for a really long time. Thank you Xiggi! </p>

<p>And I have generally been very impressed with all his posts over the last decade or so. : ) Though I remember being somewhat taken aback he didn’t seem to share my notion of the importance of academic freedom in the university. The problem for me is that so many people don’t understand what tenured faculty do. And why should they? When someone intelligent (like Xiggi) tells them professors don’t really do much, that seems a problem. Universities are changing. People should understand what the change they are advocating/ supporting really means. imho</p>

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<p>Blossom, in my years here, I have made plenty of nuanced posts on this or similar subjects. However, I do not have to make excuses for my steadfast belief that the expected workloads of teachers and professors have a direct impact on the ever-rising costs of education. A belief supported by ample data. I never wrote that such workloads are solely responsible for the unfettered inflation – only a fool would dismiss the large expenses of administration and the cost of providing “countryclub” amenities to students. Regarding my position on teaching loads, I maintain that schools could afford to show more dedication to teaching than to researching. I did not attack the value of the type of research you describe. But I would be happy to discuss the type of research I consider of a “different nature.” Discussions like this tend to jump from one extreme to the other. There are few reasons to believe that research at research universities is about to fall in a deep abyss! </p>

<p>What I resent here is the implication that I am simply “ignorant” of what really happens in academia. My point here has been that my own observations are not better and … not worse than the ones of people who reject my “arguments.” One might disagree with my conclusions but rhe same person CANNOT declare that my positions are without foundation. And for the simplest of reasons: they do know what I know! Anymore than I know what they know. I never stated that my own observations are universal. I wrote that, based on my own, I did not think it added up. </p>

<p>Lastly, this has nothing to do with anger or having to dial down the rhetoric. I have responded (now twice) to posts that described my “ignorance.” Nothing more and nothing else. There is simply no place here for such posts, and I will not hesitate to call them for what they are! </p>

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<p>I don’t understand economics. At all. However, it seems to me all across the country senior faculty positions are being eliminated as people retire. Departments are shrinking. At the same time enrollment is up everywhere. How does this correspond with tenured faculty salaries being one of the problems in creating escalating costs?</p>

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<p>I don’t know how you can conflate teachers and professors. Teachers in most public school systems are eligible for tenure after 3-4 years; I know you’ve seen the statistics which show that applicants and grads to schools of education have lower average SAT scores than applicants to a wide range of others (not just medicine and law). Teachers “outputs” from a productivity perspective are “student outcomes”, i.e. what their kids are learning in the classroom due to their involvement. And in many (most?) school systems, the huge increase in budgets are due to mandates regarding special education, the need to accommodate kids with a broad range of learning challenges in a mainstream classroom, and the huge outlay for non-instructional personnel in speech, OT, para-professionals to aid kids with autism, etc.</p>

<p>What this has to do with the cost of a year at Harvard I just can’t fathom. Apples to kiwi fruit in my mind. The outputs of a professor are multifaceted- mentoring students, particularly getting grad students through their doctorates and becoming productive members of their field; grants administration and primary research, peer review of colleagues work and research, and also teaching. But to measure a professor at Harvard working in an interdisciplinary lab (and anything interdisciplinary is twice as time consuming- your psychiatrist colleague doesn’t know genetics like the biologists, and the materials scientists don’t know anything about brain cognition) against the standard of a fourth grade math teacher strikes me as absurd.</p>

<p>So you know what you know- great. I’d love to introduce you to professors doing what I know about- and you’d be thrilled (and shocked and probably sad that the entire world doesn’t know what they are doing.)</p>

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<p>Alh, I really believe that my position is quite different from simply “saying” professors don’t really do much! This conversation started with an example of “hard to understand” teachers with a sequitur that a solution would be hard to find. My “solution” intimated that professors could be “rededicated” to teaching. Again, I am aware on what a 3/3 or 4/4 load means to teachers when they also follow a 40/40/20 model with research and service added to the “40 percent” teaching duties. I am also aware of the never-ending administrative duties. I am aware of this for having spent a number of years in school, living with a PhD student, and working for faculty who had huge research commitments. Not to mention the family members who are currently … teaching!</p>

<p>In addition, I am also aware of how hard it is for young graduates to jump onto the tenure train. Discussions about how difficult the life of adjuncts is, and I do not think that the first years of associates and assistants is much better. All we hear is that schools produce a glut of teachers who will never gain tenure, or anything close to what was available in the past. My position here, and perhaps germane to this thread, is that schools might find some merit in lowering the demands associated with publishing and providing adminstrative services. In so many words, it would entail augmenting the possibilities of professors to … spend more time in the classroom. </p>

<p>Lastly, we might disagree about the long-term impact of economics of education. It is not hard to see the numbers at many colleges that are not as rich and successful as HYPS, and it takes a deaf person to not hear the lamentations of parents about being able to afford their kids’ education. </p>

<p>I wrote that institutions were at a crossroads. And I do not think that the future transitions will be easy. Jusr as different opinions or positions easy to reconcile. Fwiw, I am more than a little worried about what the realities will be in a couple of decades … when I will have to face the world as a parent with kids looking at colleges. </p>

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<p>College as a service akin to gym membership is one metaphor I’ve used in previous threads like this, especially considering many folks still seem to believe Professors and TAs should be teaching in the same way as HS teachers who provided much more handholding than the ones at my HS or I’d say…any respectable collegiate institution worthy of the name. </p>

<p>I also agree the “Profs/TAs who can’t speak English” issue is way overblown. </p>

<p>IME, the only students who made such complaints were students with some racial animus* and already demonstrating other reasons for academic mediocrity ranging from prioritizing party/beer/fun over studying and bitching and moaning about reading a few dozen pages for an intro-level college class or doing a few dozen problem sets. Mentally, I’m wondering “WTH did you expect in college?!!”</p>

<p>And I’m talking assignment workloads most students would have no issues polishing off within an hour or less without issues. </p>

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<li>One example was an internal Professor feedback site at an Ivy where one undergrad accused a Prof with having a strong accent and being “unintelligible”. Interesting considering I’ve met the very Professor on several occasions and is as American-born as the student who presumably wrote that feedback and yours truly. Only thing I can think of which prompted that feedback was said Prof was “looked foreign”.<br></li>
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<p>With the possible exception of lowered service/admin commitments, we already have such institutions…LACs and teaching-centered universities where teaching is weighed at least as much if not more than one’s research/publication record. </p>

<p>Granted, LACs…especially top 20-40 ones are regarded as the worst of both worlds as the teaching load at LACs like mine is a minimum of 5 courses/year for all, heavy service, and one must still do some research. </p>

<p>Comparatively speaking, friends and relatives who taught at research universities though all that was insane and was a major reason why they avoided going to LACs when they were on the market for tenure-track jobs if they could help it. </p>

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<p>I would --obviously-- be thrilled to find out what the professors are doing! And, also, quite sad that little is known about their work. In turn, I might be able to repay the favor and lift the veil about “whom I know” from a wide scope that takes us from measuring the usefulness of logical positivism of Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca to developing a HPV cure, or saving our future generations of middle-schoolers from the perils of uber-testing! </p>

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<p>There is a huge difference between understanding heavily accented English in regular life, and in a lecture hall.</p>

<p>My cul de sac has: Russian immigrants, Chinese immigrants, Indian immigrants and native English speakers. When I have difficulty understanding my neighbors, I can ask them to repeat a sentence, or a word, or I can simply smile and nod, because the conversation is pleasant chit chat, and not vital to anything, and eventually that word or phrase I don’t understand will become clear. Or maybe it won’t, but it doesn’t really matter in the big scheme of things.</p>

<p>Some of my neighbors would be very, very difficult to understand in a large lecture hall setting, where there would be no back and forth conversation, no ability to ask for clarification, and the vocabulary was specialized.</p>

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<p>@xiggi, my views on SAT prep are irrelevant to this thread, and I have not tried to represent my experience with SAT prep as anything but my own limited observations, nor my opinions as applicable to anyone other than a certain small minority of students. It’s not hard to find other posters on this site who share my opinions.</p>

<p>With regard to the topic of University professors, you feel free to insult many thousands of hardworking people with namecalling such as “fat cats”. You also spread misinformation, for instance portraying sabbaticals as something that is earned after 6 semesters.</p>

<p>Sabbaticals according to Indiana University:
"Much of the confusion about sabbaticals results from the widely held but incorrect view of them as entitlements. IU sees a sabbatical not as an entitlement, but as an investment in a faculty member’s career that should benefit both the faculty member and the university. Think of a sabbatical as something you’re eligible for if you have an appropriate project, not something you’re entitled to.
5) Alright then, when am I eligible for a sabbatical?
You are eligible if you are tenured, once in every seven years of full-time service following your sixth year of full-time service as a faculty member. Pre-tenure and non-tenure-track faculty members are not eligible for sabbaticals. "</p>

<p>The information from Indiana University is pretty consistent with other policies I have seen.</p>

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<p>I have found that most people simply do not listen well. When I spell my name one letter that ALWAYS gets mistaken is ‘T’. Nearly 100% of people write it as a ‘P’. Even when I go ‘T as in Train’ or ‘T as in Tom’ it gets misunderstood. Unless there exist word in English for Prain or Pom I kinda doubt it so…</p>

<p>People are also not as quick in comprehension. I speak quite rapidly, and use complex forms of speech, metaphors, etc. All par for the course in my native tongue, but big time no-nos in English. Those who are used to my accent (a few weeks) rarely have issues with it. </p>

<p>In my experience, unless we’re talking atrocious accents, and I’ve had a few of those as profs, people are not trying hard enough to listen… </p>

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<p>“I have found that most people simply do not listen well.” Oh, so true. My name is always misspelled. For this reason, I always spell it out, carefully and clearly, whenever the spelling might matter. And people still misspell it. And I am a native English speaker with no unusual accent.</p>

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<p>IF anyone thinks 24 hours classroom time a week should represent 40% of a professor’s workload, then that would really be ignorant. </p>

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<p>@"aunt bea"‌ </p>

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<p>This is really interesting. Why on earth would a speech pathologist be prohibited from working on accent reduction?</p>

<p><a href=“Accent Modification”>http://www.asha.org/public/speech/development/accent-modification/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;