"Skip the idiot steps" Bad Teacher stories.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. My list of bad teachers (more from higher education than from K-12)

Seventh grade history teacher who could not control the class. Granted, we were seventh graders, but no one else had any trouble.

Ninth grade social studies teacher who assigned us chapters to read in class while he sat up front reading Sports Illustrated or Argosy. If we finished the chapter early, he told us to read it again.

Graduate school: One of the world's experts in his field (not my major area, thank goodness). His lectures included an encyclopedia's worth of information every session. In one year, I filled two full-sized notebooks. At one point, I couldn't follow one of his examples and asked about it. He immediately assigned me to research it myself and write a three-page paper about it due in three days. Then he admonished the rest of the class not to tell me the answer if they happened to know. I never asked another question, nor did anyone else.

Again, graduate school: My major professor was writing a book. Our Monday afternoon (4:00-6:00 PM) seminars consisted of his reading his latest chapter aloud to us and asking us for comments. We all had a horrible time keeping awake. After a few weeks, I took to bringing a large thermos of coffee and some paper cups. At 5:00 PM, just as everyone was about to collapse onto the table in front of them, I would take out the thermos and pass coffee around.

Continuing education class: I decided to review my math as background for technical translation. The college algebra instructor was young and inexperienced. He didn't work the problems beforehand, so he often got stumped in class. He didn't do any monitoring of the class to see if people were understanding what was going on (about half of them weren't). He didn't administer a placement test, so a large portion of the students were no way ready for college algebra, since they couldn't even do regular high school algebra. I've always considered myself a math dunce, but I was answering my fellow students' questions.

Continuing education class: I decided to take an intermediate language class (not Japanese) at a state university in Oregon. The course was "supervised" by an American professor but actually taught by two native speaking graduate students who had no idea whatsoever how to teach a language. Their notion of teaching was to talk about the vocabulary lists in English. There were three of us adult students in the class, and we went to complain to the supervising professor and tell him that his TA's needed training. He blew us off, saying that grad students didn't have time to take training. It was clear that he didn't like being the supervisor of intermediate language and did as little as possible. We stuck it out, though, because it was the second semester second year.

The following year, I registered for third year, since this professor wasn't in charge. The class met three days a week, and the syllabus said that we would cover one lesson a week. However, the new professor also a native speaker, spent the first day talking about the vocabulary list, the second day having us translate some reading passages aloud (going down the rows--a real no-no in language teaching, because it encourages students to ignore the instructor when it's not their turn), and the third day giving us a chapter test. I quit after the first month.

This last example was most disappointing, since some of the other language programs at that university were exemplary.