<p>I saw the thread about proffessors that can't speak english. I would just like to know what school you're from and whether or not the faculty and TAs can speak english relatively well or not because I wouldn't like to go to a place and not understand anything. Thanks.</p>
<p>Well, there are two main issues at hand:</p>
<p>1) Profs that can't speak English.
2) TAs that can't speak English.</p>
<p>For problem 1, look for programs that value teaching. Engineering programs that have more of an emphasis on undergraduate education, like Olin or Harvey Mudd or Rice, will have higher quality teaching professors and will place value on teaching skills in addition to research quality. When you visit, ask if professors are accessible. Generally, a professor who's accessible and in his/her office to answer questions cares about his/her students enough to ensure that they understand the material, so you'll have good quality professors.</p>
<p>Problem 2 is a little more tricky. This will be less of a problem at smaller universities where the school doesn't have to rely on the graduate students to teach the undergraduates as much. Find a program where fewer courses are taught by grad students and you'll have an easier time with things.</p>
<p>It's a problem in the engineering field in general, and you're not going to be able to escape it entirely, but some of your best professors will be non-native Americans. Mine always have been. Some of the best professors I've had have had occasional issues in being understood, but that didn't change the fact that they were still the best professors I've ever had. Ask around... talk to upperclassmen. See what the dish is on various grad students and professors before you sign up for a course, and you'll have an easier time of things.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>We don't have a problem with this at the University of Arkansas - Fort Smith. We don't have TAs, the professors teach all of the classes. The professors all speak english, we have only a couple of foreign born in the entire school and they are all very good in english. It's amazing how much this is a rarity these days!</p>
<p>Places like Rose-Hulman, Harvey-Mudd, Olin, etc. are also pretty good at this. They have very few TAs and they tend not to have a problem with professors who don't speak english well.</p>
<p>I don't think the problem is with Profs, its more with foreign born TAs. Of the few schools I'm familiar with (GaTech, VaTech, JHU) there isn't really a problem with the professors</p>
<p>Any school whose highest engineering degree is a masters, i.e., a non-research school. Research schools focus is on research first, then grad students. Undergrads are only tolerated at research schools because they pay most of the bills.</p>
<p>However, at top research schools, I get the impression that the professors are expected to speak English well (and have other positive social traits), or else they won't get tenure. Faculty at top schools do a great deal of lecturing and presenting outside the classroom, and they're expected to be brilliant and well-spoken.</p>
<p>I don't think I agree with this. When I was at Purdue I saw quite a few faculty that were difficult to understand and were horrible presenters. Conference presentations are nice, but they don't get the bucks. Writing quality grant proposals and having great research do.</p>
<p>Getting tenure at a top research school has little to do with your presentation skills. It has all to do with how much money you are bringing in and the quality of the research work you are publishing. That is 95% of the equation.</p>
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However, at top research schools, I get the impression that the professors are expected to speak English well (and have other positive social traits), or else they won't get tenure. Faculty at top schools do a great deal of lecturing and presenting outside the classroom, and they're expected to be brilliant and well-spoken.
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</p>
<p>Well, I don't know about that. Let's face it. At the big-league research universities, it is far more important to be a good researcher than to be a good teacher, and that can and does extend to being able to speak decent English. I think you have to conceded, molliebatmit, that even at MIT, there are profs whose English skills are sketchy at best. Brilliant researchers, yes. But not exactly the easiest to understand.</p>
<p>Oh, definitely. But not very many -- at least not in the departments I'm in. And one of the only bio profs I've had who spoke unintelligible English was just denied tenure last year.</p>
<p>I know it's fashionable to knock the teaching propensities of faculty at research universities, and I'm not even saying that profs are expected to speak English well in order to teach undergrads -- in my understanding, they're expected to speak English well so that they can present at big-name conferences and symposia.</p>
<p>One of the postdocs in the lab I work in has been trying to get a faculty position for the past few years, and my PI says the reason she can't get one is that her English isn't good enough -- top programs are looking for the total package in their faculty. :shrug: I tell the story I heard told.</p>
<p>All of you are greatly exaggerating the unintelligibility of foreign TAs and professors. Almost half of the professors and TAs I had at UIUC were Indian, and a lot more were foreign (Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Turkish, Greek, French, you name it). I had no problem understanding any of them. This also has not been a problem at Stanford at all. At both places, TAs have to have a certain score on the TOEFL as well as pass an oral interview to make sure they can speak English well enough.</p>
<p>I have had 1 TA in math and 1 in physics that was difficult to understand. Other than that, many profs/TAs have had all sorts of accents but could easily get their point across. </p>
<p>I would rather be taught by the greatest minds in the world, and if that means that some profs may have accents so be it. Especially when you have a chance to preform research in their groups. The benefits far outweigh the costs in my mind, thats the beauty of the top engineering schools in the country</p>
<p>I think the OP is talking about unintelligible speakers, rather than simply someone with an accent.</p>
<p>look...in engineering you will hvae to work with people who can't speak english (especially with the rise of India and China) so look at the bright side, you are just getting used to it....it's part of your job training.</p>
<p>"I think the OP is talking about unintelligible speakers, rather than simply someone with an accent."</p>
<p>But the point we are trying to make is that very few professors in engineering today are unintelligble speakers, they simply have accents. The major universities (including research universities) are filled with profs that can speak english well enough to teach</p>
<p>I think we're actually getting at a larger point. The point is not really whether a TA or a prof can speak decent English. The REAL point is whether that prof or TA is actually motivated to do a good job of teaching. And the sad fact is, many profs and TA's at the big-league research universities are not motivated to teach well. After all, their tenure, their professional advancement, and their prestige in the industry is going to be based mostly on the quality of their research, not on how their teaching. Nobody ever won a Nobel Prize for good teaching, but bad research, but vice versa has been true. Just think of John Nash of "A Beautiful Mind" fame who was a brilliant researcher but a horrible and downright hostile teacher. Surely we all remember the scenes in the movie where he wouldn't even show up for his own lectures or otherwise treated his students like dirt. He didn't teach well because he didn't WANT to teach well. The sad truth is, there are a lot of research profs and TA's who are like that.</p>
<p>sakky, </p>
<p>i think the point that you bring up is interesting but nearly impossible to objectively answer. how can one quantify whether or not a prof cares if their students learn? who is to say that profs at schools that don't do much research actually do care? surely there is more incentive for profs to do research at the big universities but how does that correlate to them not caring about teaching? its difficult to say. especially since grad students preform a lot of the physical testing for research allowing them ample time to meet with students from class, etc.</p>
<p>the beautiful mind example is trivial simple because Nash was a head case, he missed class not because of research but because of his mental illness.</p>
<p>TAs are another story</p>
<p>
[quote]
i think the point that you bring up is interesting but nearly impossible to objectively answer. how can one quantify whether or not a prof cares if their students learn? who is to say that profs at schools that don't do much research actually do care? surely there is more incentive for profs to do research at the big universities but how does that correlate to them not caring about teaching? its difficult to say. especially since grad students preform a lot of the physical testing for research allowing them ample time to meet with students from class, etc.
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<p>Well, I'll put it to you this way. There are PLENTY of profs and TA's at Berkeley, Harvard, MIT and plenty of other business schools who you can obviously tell just don't give a damn about teaching. I've had profs who's lectures have been nothing but outloud reading, word-for-word of the textbook. And I mean literally. They literally carried the textbook to the front of the class, opened the book, and were reading the book out loud, word-for-word. Clearly these guys obviously couldn't give a damn about the class and you could tell that they didn't want to be there, they were just teaching the class because they were obligated to do so. </p>
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the beautiful mind example is trivial simple because Nash was a head case, he missed class not because of research but because of his mental illness.
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<p>I don't believe so. Nash's illness occurred later in his life. According to his biography (not the movie), he missed class not because of his illness, but simply because he didn't care about classes. The same thing happened while he was a graduate student at Princeton - he refused to go to class not because he was ill, but because he truly thought that classes were worthless. It's no wonder that he became a bad teacher. MIT hired him to teach classes anyway. </p>
<p>And that's the real point. These big research universities will hire people for their research abilities, not for their teaching skills. That's why you end up with profs who are bad teachers, because they just don't see that good teaching is just not important.</p>
<p>and i'll put it this way...there are plenty of profs at the universities that I know of that not only speak english, but also care about their undergrad studnets, encourage them to work in lab with them, and generally help them in any way possible. </p>
<p>we can sit here and compare our experiences all we want but that isn't going to prove anything.</p>
<p>Exactly, I've had great experiences with the professors at UIUC and Stanford, both large and internationally well-known schools. Of the few that everyone would agree were poor professors, it was because they weren't very good at explaining things, not because they simply sat in front of the class and didn't give a damn. Give people more credit than that. I myself want to be a professor partly because I like doing research and partly because I enjoy teaching.</p>
<p>I believe I give research universities EXACTLY the credit that they deserve. You may say that there are only a few such profs at such places that are poor teachers and/or who can speak English well. I would argue that that's not exactly the most ringing of endorsements. Top schools are SUPPOSED to provide good teaching to their students and who are SUPPOSED to be able to communicate properly with their students. That's like saying that you're planning to hire McKinsey because you will probably not get a bad consultant. Uh, if you hire Mckinsey, you're SUPPOSED to not get a bad consultant. That's the whole point of hiring them in the first place. This is not a game of Russian Roulette. If somebody is, for whatever reason, a poor teacher then the school should not have that person teach classes. This whole situation reminds me of the Chris Rock joke where irresponsible people distinguish themselves as irresponsible by taking credit for doing things that they're supposed to do. ("I take care of my kids" - "Uh, you're SUPPOSED to take care of your kids").</p>
<p>I harp on this point because research universities contrast greatly with the elite LAC's. The elite LAC's whole raison d'etre is good teaching and, at a bare minimum, decent English skills. You don't have profs there who can ride off their research skills and shortchange students when it comes to teaching or incomprehensibility. Sadly, we live in a world where the research universities have overshadowed the LAC's in terms of prestige, and hence plenty of students think that getting a big name brand university on their resume is more important than having good teaching (and consequently many employers just want to see a big name-brand university for hiring purposes). </p>
<p>I leave you with these quotes:</p>
<p>"Further evidence for the need to improve the teaching of science to undergraduates can be found in an extensive study by Elaine Seymour and Nancy Hewitt from the University of Colorado at Boulder (see Talking About Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences, Westview Press, 1997). They also looked at why students transfer out of undergraduate science degree programmes. Some 90% of students who switched subjects cited poor teaching by science faculty as the main reason for leaving, but even 75% of those who elected not to change complained about poor teaching in their science courses. Common concerns of students, according to the study, were that science faculty "do not like to teach, do not value teaching as a professional activity, and lack, therefore, any incentive to learn to teach effectively". Students, the report continued, "constantly referenced faculty preoccupation with research as the overt reason for their failure to pay serious attention to teaching undergraduates". "</p>
<p>"Report Blasts Research Universities for Poor Teaching of Undergraduates
It urges new approaches to lecture classes and suggests including students in faculty projects
By ROBIN WILSON </p>
<p>A commission created by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has issued one of the harshest indictments yet of undergraduate education at research universities. What's unclear is whether the report will make a difference, or simply be added to the pile of documents already written on the subject.</p>
<p>Despite years of handwringing by educators and legislators, not much has been done to change the fact that teaching takes a back seat to research at large universities, says the report, "Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Research Universities." "</p>
<p>"...more and more faculty reportedly regard prizes and cash awards for teaching excellence as little more than token consolation prizes for not being competitive researchers. The feeling that there is no punishment or no sanctions for poor teaching only increases the sense of frustration on the part of the teaching yeomanry. Throughout the country, we see indifferent publication being rewarded and good teaching ignored. In addition, we have the paradox of released time from teaching being the standard reward for publication productivity, and the punishment for lack of publication is an increased teaching load. If the system were logical, just the opposite would be the standard practicein other words, productive scholars would have increased teaching loads because they would have so much more to say to students. "</p>
<p><a href="http://www.acls.org/op16grider.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.acls.org/op16grider.htm</a></p>