<p>Bone, if what you say is true then how do you explain what the OP is saying about not being able to understand the instructor? Of course I’m not saying don’t hire anyone whose native language isn’t English, but regardless of the workload and compensation of an instructor, if a majority of his/her students can’t understand them, that is unacceptable. You’re saying they assess oral communication skills during the hiring process, and yet the OP posts that he finds it hard understand the material due to the heavy accent of the instructor? Something doesn’t jibe here. Are you saying there aren’t enough primary English language PhDs out there willing to work as adjuncts, and the best we can hope for is that those PhDs that are willing to accept the paltry pay take enough classes to be able to bolster their ability to actually teach in a secondary language? If that’s the case, then the high cost of tuition to attend today’s universities is even more costly than I thought.</p>
<p>I’ve never had a problem with accents from my professors, and I’ve had teachers from Thailand, Turkey, Brazil, China, India, Russia, England, Poland, Cambodia, South Africa and the US. But I’ve also been exposed to accents before. Somebody who has never encountered an Indian accent before might have trouble, but it’s not impossible, and it’s a handy skill to learn (the ability to understand foreign accents). And even if there were some difficulties in understanding, they were willing to repeat and reword their statements as many times as possible, though they might ask you to go to office hours (which is perfectly acceptable). If you can’t understand them even after repetition, ask them to write it down. </p>
<p>I’ve honestly never met a Chinese with unacceptable or un-intelligible english. </p>
<p>Honestly, blaming an accent is usually just not bothering with meeting the professor halfway in their efforts, or not working hard enough to learn the concepts of the material yourself… College is not about spoon-feeding pre-digested information to students after all.</p>
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<p>I can really only speculate as to why the OP’s situation is occurring. All I can say is that I know for a fact that for tenure-track faculty, there is a roughly one hour oral presentation that is part of the grueling interview process as well as meeting with and conversing with a large portion of the hiring department. Each point along the way in that process involves assessment of oral communication skills. Clearly the department that hired the professor in the OP felt that she had adequate oral communication skills assuming she is a tenure-track professor. I am not familiar with the adjunct hiring process, but I would assume it likely has at least some degree of assessment of oral communication since that is the primary job function.</p>
<p>Perhaps the dichotomy here is a result of the people doing the hiring simply having more experience understanding accents. Generally speaking, the longer you spend in engineering, especially in academe, the better you get at deciphering accents. It may be that newer students don’t have those skills yet but those who do the hiring have them after years of practice and so are out of touch with just how broken the English actually is. It also may be exaggeration. I couldn’t really say with any certainty. All I know is that said faculty almost certainly had her oral communication assessed during the hiring process. Beyond that I don’t know.</p>
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<p>Generally speaking, no, there aren’t very many primarily-English-speaking PhDs willing to work as adjuncts because adjuncts get treated like absolute dirt. It’s a lot more common in areas like the humanities where a job’s a job, but in engineering where there are plenty of options available, most would rather go work in industry and have a weekend rather than get paid $40,000 a year for working an 60+ hour week. And yes, the high cost of education these days is a problem. Tuition keeps going up while universities rely more and more on adjunct faculty to save money, who studies have shown tend to provide lower-quality instruction than their tenure-track brethren. It’s a real problem. Government funding is an ever-dwindling pool and the administration side of things continues to get more and more bloated at many universities, taking up a lot of funding that should be going to paying the lowly adjuncts better or getting rid of adjuncts altogether. </p>
<p>If memory serves right the daily homework in DD’2 Basket Weaving Calc II was in the order of 40-50 problems. The online system had a vast number of homework assignments so the only feasible way to cheat was to find someone to do the problems for you. It may have been timed also. Also, unlike HS and some college, the strength of the problems in the homeworks was fairly comparable to what was on the tests.</p>
<p>I agree, tho, weeding out is a consequence and not the reason for the epic failures. In my mind poor teaching skills, useless books, and even more useless homework unrelated to the tests are the real reasons. </p>
<p>Adjuncts are not necessarily bad - DD1 had an adjunct as a tutor and 1:1 he could explain Calc I very well, so I hope he was as good in teaching at the college level as he was 1:1. They can get ‘bad’ due to workload and resentment, for sure. As mentioned, kids and parents should definitely know the ratio of adjuncts to faculty…</p>
<p>Lake Jr. has had the good fortune to have been exposed to teachers (and classmates, for that matter) who immigrated to the US from abroad. Accents seem to have never been a problem for him. When he began his engineering studies I went online out of curiousity to check the Ratemyprofessor.com report on a couple of his teachers. One Physics prof from a former Soviet republic got slammed by students for his accent (although he was appreciated for being a nice guy). Lake Jr. took his class, liked the guy a lot and did very well. The lesson is that students have to grab their own bull by the horns, to use a cliche.</p>
<p>Undergraduate students have to understand that from time to time they will run into teachers whom they do not like, but the goal is to nevertheless learn the material, try your best and do well. Also, it’s just a fact of life for U.S. STEM students these days is that many young faculty whom are teaching them are relatively recent immigrants to the U.S. They are the ones whom are flooding US graduate schools in STEM fields. It’s a new world baby, and it’s one world.</p>
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<p>Or just create new homeworks each semester and make up the questions, not using them from a book. Plenty of professors I had did that.</p>
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<p>So you discount any responsibility of the student? There are plenty of bad teachers and sketchily-designed courses out there, but there are also a lot of bad and immature students, particularly in the freshman- and sophomore-level classes that people usually label as weed-out classes.</p>
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<p>I agree that, individually, adjuncts are not necessarily bad, but on the average, they tend to provide inferior instruction based on a variety of studies. This says more about how they are treated than their own capabilities, as there are a lot of bright and talented adjuncts that are simply overworked and marginalized. So, while you might find one adjunct to be great, the overall number is still usually indicative of poorer instruction. This is a much bigger problem in the arts and sciences where there is less money floating around rather than engineering, but those are exactly the kinds of people teaching some of those early classes.</p>
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<p>In an ideal world, that would be great, but even the ones who make up problems generally cycle through them again eventually. It is quite difficult to craft an effective problem set, and doing a new one every time you teach the class eventually gets quite taxing as you start running out of different ways to effectively ask the same question. At that point a lot of professors trying that approach just cycle back through, sometimes changing numbers. That only slightly helps the problem though, since if they start doing that, chances are someone still has the old questions somewhere and can get them distributed.</p>
<p>I can honestly say I have never come across a professor who uses as completely new set of problems each time he or she teaches a course year after year. It would just be too much. Ultimately there isn’t a foolproof solution short of brand new questions ad infinitum, so you either have to just make homework not worth very much or else put everyone on equal footing to make it fair.</p>
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<p>Sometimes they have a grad student write it. One class in particular I had (which is not a good example of this working well) the hardest questions on the problem sets were near impossible (for us at least, you could ask 20 people no one could figure it out), we would go to the professor office hours and they wouldn’t know either, telling us to ask the GSI because he wrote that problem. </p>
<p>I’d say on average that our homeworks/projects were worth an average of 40-50% in my classes. Though there was a wide range here, anywhere from 0% to the entire class. </p>
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<p>I fully agree with this statement. From my experience professors with foreign accents make more of an effort in meeting with you during their office hours and even after. They seem to know that on evaluations that their accents will be used against them so they make up for it in a lot of different ways. </p>
<p>Thanks for all your responses. I am just going to try my best to self teach the material and screw it. I am just too frustrated with all the other BS I have to deal with everyday, professors who have no common sense and are totally unreasonable, TA’s in Office Hours who can’t answer questions because they took the class “long time ago”. Love it!</p>
<p>As far as her accent goes, it is a little beyond that, it is about being very disorganized, about not sticking to the syllabus dates and changing stuff as she goes. This may sound politically incorrect but it has a lot to do with being Chinese and I dont need to expand on this.</p>
<p>I am not going to make her life a living hell because I know it is hard being an immigrant here, I am sure she tries her best within what she knows but the culture here is very different from Chinese culture. I am not going to stress over this crap anymore.</p>
<p>Um, what. No, it does not have to do with being Chinese. American, English, Indian, Turkish, etc professors can be disorganized and inconsistent too. You got a bad professor, and that sucks, but stop trying to push all the blame on the fact that you got a foreign professor. </p>
<p>You’re going to be working with a lot of foreigners. Such an attitude will not make you any friends.</p>
<p>Learn not to live or die by the syllabus dates. If deviating from that schedule flusters you then you are going to have a rough go of it later on down the road. It is nearly impossible at times to abide by those schedules exactly, particularly for professors who give a crap and are willing to speed up or slow down based on how the class is handling a given topic.</p>
<p>My eyes always started to glaze over whenever a math or physics professor began putting a proof on the board, whether they spoke good English or not. My gripe with math professors was that they bored students to tears with proofs, and spent no time motivating students by demonstrating how math was actually used in the real world.</p>
<p>One of the main reasons I transferred out of Ohio State (long ago) was because there were too many professors and TAs, in all subjects, who couldn’t speak English. That said, if you’re going to work in some kind of science or engineering field, you’re going to have a lot of co-workers who speak English as a second language. My first manager was from Hong Kong, and I couldn’t understand half of what he said in the job interview. It took me a few weeks to adjust to his accent.</p>
<p>Plus, I took several years of Japanese, and God help anyone who has to listen to my broken, schoolboy Japanese. So I’m more tolerant of those who aren’t native English speakers.</p>