Do you have to speak english fluently in order to be a professor? (school, paying)
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Usually when I take challenging courses in math and science I have professors who are incoherent. And they have this attitude like something is wrong with me if I have trouble keeping up.
No, clearly English is not a necessity in the sciences. I was in a class once with a science professor who couldn't read or write English well enough to do the most simple assignments. It drove the teacher nuts, and was kind of discouraging for the rest of us, seeing as how she has full tenure and has been given various awards for "excellence in teaching."
You should complain to the school if your professors are not proficient enough in English.
Absolutely. I'm not sure the colleges care though. When one of my sons was registering for classes as a freshman, his advisor told him to look for the professors that didn't have obviously foreign surnames.
Usually when I take challenging courses in math and science I have professors who are incoherent. And they have this attitude like something is wrong with me if I have trouble keeping up.
It seemed that practically every math and physics professor at my university were from former Soviet Bloc countries. They came over when the Wall came down.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hollytree
You should complain to the school if your professors are not proficient enough in English.
Students did, every semester. I could understand these profs just fine. My bet is that those who complained did so more because they couldn't grasp the material to begin with and were using these professor's "lack of English" as an excuse. Ironically, I also had two professors who were from the South. Should I have complained that they didn't speak English either?
Are you talking about instructors whose accents are so thick you have difficulty understanding, or people who legitimately are not fluent in the language of the majority of their students?
The onus should not be on the students to decipher the mangled English of the professor, since the students are the paying customers. An accent is understandable, however, some of the professors are impossible to understand in a lecture environment.
The onus should not be on the students to decipher the mangled English of the professor, since the students are the paying customers. An accent is understandable, however, some of the professors are impossible to understand in a lecture environment.
The onus should be on the students to find professors they can understand if this is such an issue. Students do talk about this stuff, you know.
It hasn't been my personal experience that school's hire people to instruct that cannot speak the language in which they are expected to instruct. The one exception was a visiting professor/playwright from Russia, and he wasn't there to conduct classes, he was there for one semester to direct a play he'd written...which he did through student translators. He wasn't doing hours of lecturing every day to classrooms of students who didn't speak Russian, or anything.
I did have instructors with accents. That's life.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
