The Art of Teaching, Part 1: My Personal Rant

Part 1 of a 2-part post about my feelings on Teaching:

I swear, not all my posts are going to be 2-parters...but I really need to take a whole post just to rant about my current teachers & professors...they're nice people, but I just don't like any of them, particularly their teaching styles:

1. My Intro to Stats Teacher: She's from Eastern Europe, & has a thick accent. I can understand her fine, but it just bugs me when people don't learn to speak English right... It's one thing if they're really new to the language...but when they can speak it quickly & fluidly, & have an extensive vocabulary, they should've had enough practice to improve on their American accent. The accent is an intregal part of any languange... If someone clearly has a strong grasp of a language, but don't even seem to be trying to speak with a correct accent, it just strikes me as...lazy...

2. My Intermediate Writing Teacher: He's a Grad Student. He knows his stuff, he's a nice guy, and he's got a good sense of humor, but...there's a complete lack of structure in his class. We basically have no idea what we're going to do on any given day until the class period before. His "lessons" don't fit together in any more than the vaguest, most general of ways. It just seems like a kind of random class...

3. My Middle East History Teacher: The class covers 1798-1914 (last century of the Ottoman Empire). My professor is a nightmare... First off, there's no textbook! How can you have a history class without a textbook?! No slideshows, no powerpoint presentations, no maps...no visual aids of any kind, except for a few random words & phrases he scribbles in no particular order on the chalkboard, & then points at them at the appropriate times in his lecture...

Basically, it's him lecturing all class long. And his lectures...my gosh...they're so random & disjointed...he just rambles on, off on tangents that don't seem to connect together to any relevant theme... You know what it's like? It's like this:

http://www.truveo.com/Strike-Breakers/id/3352720668

I swear, it's barely 5 minutes in to every one of his lectures before I start half-expecting him to say "So the Sultan tied an onion to his belt, which was the style at the time..." I don't know how many more of his rambling lectures I can take...

4. My Arabic Teacher: He's a nice guy, and he knows his stuff, but...ugh... First of all, he has a heavy Arabic accent. The fact that he doesn't even try to speak with a correct American accent when he's trying to get us to speak with a correct Arabic accent comes off as not just lazy, but...arrogant, in a way...

But more than that, it's his style of teaching...it's like he makes us guess what words mean! He'll keep saying a word in different contexts, or use body language, or draw it on the whiteboard... By the time I finally understand what the word is, I think "Oh...why didn't he just say that???" Learning vocabulary goes at a crawling pace the way he teaches...

I've had all kinds of other terrible teachers before, too...teachers who seem to take absolutely no joy in their field, or in the act of teaching...teachers who just seem crabby all the time...teachers who just lecture on & on, not even wondering if the students are absorbing or understanding the information... So many teachers are just...lacking...in certain ways... I'm sure everyone can relate to this.

Stay tuned for my thoughts on just what all those teachers are lacking...

"The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think--rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men."