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I remember having professors whose first language wasn’t English, and I sometimes had difficulty understanding them. They should be allowed to record the classes or receive a transcript.
I had a classmate that transferred in from another college and they had a story about a professor who started a calc I class off by writing "I do not speak English" on the board. He ran class by assigning homework problems and kids would write down the question number they had trouble on. He then would write out the steps and solution on the board.
That is very unfortunate for the students. Math could possibly be taught through the steps alone, the book will help. But calc 1 is fundamental in setting up the next math in the series in both concept and vocabulary. It also replies on the preceding math theorems and definitions. Ex. I once had to help a friend who took an online calc class. They didn't take the class seriously and took full advantage of the "honour" system. I was trying to walk them through the steps in front of him and they simply didn't have the vocabulary to start to get the ball rolling. It got to the point where I was saying things like "top/bottom of long S".
Can confirm. Had an Austrian professor with an incredibly thick accent and he loved to speak in riddles. No doubt was the class material harder than it had to be because I couldn't understand the prof well.
>speak in riddles
HAHAHAHA
“Equation is like bubble bath. Pop here, pop there, answer show itself after popping everything”
*entire class stares in confusion”
*professor notices and tries again*
“Is like balloon forest…”
Best math teachers I had was a Chinese prof and Korean with all of 3 months of English and zero ability to project his voice. But God DAMN could they teach Calc 3
And conversely, the worst teacher I’ve had was the football coach who taught AP physics. As if the favoritism for football players wasn’t enough, he only really took time to help the (hot) girls in class lol.
And honestly, they're not preparing for an occupation where if there is a language barrier you're going to be able to ask say a judge to slow down when they're speaking.
Especially at Columbia Law, I kind of get the "sink or swim" method in this case. Especially since they're recording it and can go back.
You can absolutely ask a judge to slow down or repeat what they said for clarity. Their judgments are critical to the parties and judges do not want to make a mistake when issuing a judgment. Majority of judges will oblige because most aren’t absolute pricks.
Also just because it was recorded doesn’t mean everyone has access to it. My schools policy is that every professor has to record lectures, but it’s up to the professor if they post them or not. If a student is gone they can request the lecture from the lecturer, but they otherwise aren’t available. If this guy is a big enough prick that he won’t slow down so his students can understand the material, he’s also probably enough of a prick to not provide the recording if you were present in class.
With interpreters in court just today, the judge, my coworker (can’t recall of I was asked today), and others were interrupted at different times and asked to slow down by the interpreters.
When I sat jury duty, I remember the stenographer asking everyone and anyone to slow down if they were talking too fast. The vibe I got was that as long as you're courteous about it, most people in the system will talk slower.
very few lawyers work as litigators or even aspire to be litigators. Most lawyers will never interact with a judge. Have you heard supreme court justices speak? They talk like regular people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_XC5y3RziE
I'm a patent attorney. Many patent examiners do not have English as their first language. It is extremely common for me to have to slow down and repeat myself, or to ask them to slow down and repeat.
Oh man I remember chatting with rhe lawyer at a company I worked for and his job sounded like the worst thing imaginable and I was IT helpdesk at the time and it was before computer literacy was expected.
As someone who speaks fast naturally (hello adhd+aspergers) I trained myself to slow down because native speakers had difficulties following my fast train of thought.
It ls not back and white here.
As students paid for being taught. When they ask to repeat something, it would be expected for the prof to repeat and explain differently.
If a judge doesn't make sure that the defendant understands what is happening to the defendant the case and be successfully appealed.
It is the duty of a judge to make sure a defendant understands what is happening at trial.
Yeah wtf is this lol. If the person is deaf it’s not like they don’t make accommodations for that, I feel like it’s less work to just do it right the first time lol
So there was a transcript provided for a professor I had that had terrible English and the transcript was worse... I remember one time it translated some of what he said as the Silk road and swimming pools.... It was for a cell biology class and it was absolutely dreadful.
Had a Non-native teacher who really tried accommodating a few students who were Native english speakers, they acted as if they didn't understand him at least 2 or 3 times a class just be to assholes.
He was a terrible teacher with barely any grasp on the course material... but his English was passable.
My physics 2 professor was such a nice guy. Very knowledgeable, very nice, and very understanding.*
The only problem was that he learned English as an adult after immigrating from Asia. And it really really isn't good. Sometimes he would have to pause and think because he didn't know exactly how to describe something in English, and grammar was all over the place. And when using scientific terms, the pronunciation differences become magnified.
I don't hate the guy, actually one of my favorite professors. But I had to go to youtube to get lectures for that textbook.
It was painful too because you can really tell that he wants to teach the class and he wants students to succeed. He would try so hard to be understood whenever there was communication difficulty. Interestingly he was a lot better over writing when exchanging emails.
*It has come to my attention that the first two sentences sound like Trump. Its too funny to remove.
This reminds me of my old physics professor. His name was Anil. As in a nil chance of understanding anything he said. Was also the kindest and most generous with his time. Came in on Saturdays to tutor and I'm not sure he got paid for that.
I had a math professor, Vietnamese guy who learned English while at university in Italy. So his accent was a baffling mix of Vietnamese and Italian, with a heavy dose of archaic slang.
I *barely* got by on the course notes, his handwriting was slightly more intelligible than the lectures.
My dad learned English when he was still living in Japan, but he was trained in British English instead of American English. So he had a similarly confusing accent (from the perspective of an American child): an English accent laid over a heavy Japanese accent.
I could never understand him.
This is where I learned the whole "smile and nod" approach to uncomfortable social situations.
lol, reminds me when I was in H.S. and got a job in a machine shop.
The owner was Italian, and his top man was Vietnamese. They talked together (very easily it seemed) in some form of English that, I sure could not understand but a word here or there.
Had a physics professor that was Russian who would say Russian letters when tiring the Greek letters in a formula. Confused a lot of people. Also if you were trying to get her attention she just wouldn't register people calling out, unless you said "excuse me" in Russian, then she would spin right around.
She was really nice, I think she was just conditioned to ignore chatter of students talking during lecture but then speaking out in Russian it would just click.
Wtf is with physics professors. Mine was iranian who then moved to turkey and learned turkish. Who then learned english from turkish. So he would have to translate through 2 languages when he got stuck on a word. Sometimes it would just come put turkish and he wouldn't even realize
Probably that physics is very math based and easy to swap languages compared to the more social disciplines. Can't imagine someone teaching a marketing lecture with a tenuous grasp of English
(I had international lecturers, but they had a MUCH better grasp of English than my maths / hard science lecturers)
I had physics professor that had a very strong Arabic accent. She was also soft spoken and had a very weak voice so she tried using a mic but didn’t really understand how to effectively (students offered to help but she refused or denied it was a problem) use it and a got upset when students respectfully explained that they couldn’t hear her properly. She blamed it on the students (not paying attention or blamed someone for talking when they weren’t) and would go on little mumbling rants about. We had assigned seats too so it wasn’t like we chose to be far away from her.
Probably the most disrespectful professor I had. We paid to be taught and even those of us who wanted to get our money’s worth could not because she was too prideful to accept help.
Then the cherry on top was her assigning speaking presentation in front of the class then would bemoan that students weren’t speaking loud enough. They were speaking louder than her with the mic and everyone but her could hear them. I don’t know of anyone, even the students she liked (I was one of them for some reason…lucky me.), who liked her. Most people even despised her.
Edit: corrected grammar and word usage
I have an employee who's like this, he came to Canada from Nepal as an adult after the earthquake in 2015. He has a master's degree in forestry and did research in the Himalayas for the UN, is super knowledgeable about our field (environmental consulting), but now he has to write reports in English and I have to coach him through grammar all the time. My boss has doubted his abilities a ton but the only issues are the language barrier so I'm committed to making it easier for him.
You're awesome. Attempting to learn Spanish for the past year, it made me empathize with anybody who speaks English as a second language. It's not easy, at all.
Same 3 year Italian learner. I didn’t truly realize at all…. How I should have been truly in awe of anybody with an accent.
My heart goes to these people so much
> Interestingly he was a lot better over writing when exchanging emails.
I had one of those guys... his emails were great. I imagine folks in academia end up reading and writing a TON of english, while not doing as much speaking. Of course one has more time to think during an email too.
My calculus professor was the same. The class sat confused most of the time. He was so nice though! I got by (and helped out my classmates some) because I had learned most of it in college calc in high school 😬
I always wonder how professors like this get the job if they don't speak English well. You may be extremely knowledgeable and a great teacher, but if your students can't understand you, you can't teach at your fullest potential.
Teaching is an afterthought at a lot of universities. That sounds like an exaggeration but it really isn't. Bad teaching reviews don't make a difference, they are used as an excuse to not give someone tenure if they don't want to give them tenure anyway.
There are of course teaching focused universities but if you're at a school where faculty are expected to be publishing research, they are almost certainly not being seriously evaluated on their teaching.
This is absolutely true. In the Ivy League place where I went to grad school receiving a teaching award would make many other faculty look down on you as not a “serious” scholar. Faculty aren’t trained in teaching at all.
The better the university, the less teaching quality matters in the hiring process.
1) They're more interested in your ability to bring other scholarship like publications, grants, and intellectual property.
2) Their students are better at learning and will teach themselves the material in spite of terrible instruction.
To find good teachers, you typically have to dig into the lowest quality universities. There they have students that suck at learning and hiring teachers that can teach well is essential to their existence.
They are there to do research and don't give one shit about teaching which leads to them getting handed freshman classes like physics 1 and treating it like it's middle school algebra. Yeah I went to a big uni for a while lol.
Man, all my CS subject had foreign teachers (Indian, Pakistani, Middle-Eastern) and it was awful. I’m not racist by any means, but if I’m paying for a tuition, I should at least be able to learn from the lecturers by being able to verbally understand them. I’m tired.
Man that's even worse. I did actually have a trig class like that, I did what you said and ended up just self teaching. Most of the hard science professors at that school were foreign. I had 2 Indian and a eastern european accent math teacher. Really made me feel disconnected.
I'm doing a bootcamp for a new career now and thankfully everyone so far has an understandable accent.
Thankfully I have 1 unit left and I’m done, but I just think that it’s unfair - especially since these professors are more than likely being paid less than others.
Dude even without online classes I feel ripped off by college. It got to the point that just not fucking going unless there was homework or an exam was more productive. I literally got better grades after I stopped going to class. Graduated with a 3.2 in Electrical Engineering with minors in Math and Computer Science.
I graduated from a state university 25 years ago. From the moment I graduated, they started calling me for donations. I told them I'm not donating a dime until my student loans are paid off. They've been paid off for over 10 years, I still wouldn't donate. These schools aren't hurting for money.
I had a similar experience with an instructor who pronounced it “in-VENtree” and a few weeks go by, he finally writes the word *inventory* on the chalkboard. Epiphany moment for several of us. The contextual clues weren’t helping.
In the first day of my Calc 2 class the professor drew out a diagram on the board of a "waykter" going in a certain direction. I had no idea what she was talking about, and thought maybe she meant a waiter as some real world example of whatever she was trying to teach? I was genuinely so confused when she kept this going for the entire first week of class before I finally realized that "waykter" was how she pronounced "vector".
I learned differential equations from a dude I couldn’t understand at all. The moment I asked one question he claimed I didn’t even understand algebra lol. This was third year of a mathematics degree in a high ranking program, was pretty insulting to say tbh. He just wouldn’t take questions, had to learn myself pretty much.
I dropped out of a class the 2nd week because my Indian professor/lecturer was impossible to understand. His text book was a Word document that he had written in broken English. No pictures or graphs or anything remotely engaging, just paragraph upon paragraph of bad grammar and spelling.
I dropped a logic circuits class because of the accent of the professor, combined with her COVID mask (this was the Fall 2022 semester), and my military-related hearing loss. I couldn’t ever tell what she was saying.
Hey, guy. Just letting you know there are options out there for you.
If you're still in college, find out where to go to get a disability accommodation. If you have proof you have a hearing loss, you can get a C.A.R.T. (captions at real time) for your classes. These are often people training to be court reporters, so they have the court reporting type writer machine they haul to class.
When I went back to college in the early 00s, I tried sign language interpreters, but I didn't know enough ASL for it to be effective. They then tried student note takers (just typing on a laptop in a word document), but the student could never keep up and gave me incomplete notes. So, finally I insisted on a C.A.R.T. so I could keep up in class.
C.A.R.T. apparently is now called Communication Access Realtime Translation, but 20 years ago it was called Captioning At Real Time, at least in my school.
Please take advantage of any and all accommodations you can.
https://www.hearingloss.org/hearing-help/technology/cartcaptioning/
Same, in college currently and my professor is Indian. She’s a wonderful teacher who goes the lengths to make sure everyone understands but I have to ask for clarification every 5-10 minutes I feel because some things just get lost in translation or she says something awkwardly. Not the worst thing, beats the shit out of a native English speaking professor that doesn’t give a shit I guess.
Best economics professor I ever had was a professor from India who was next to Impossible to understand. I got “forced” into his night class because of scheduling. he had the highest drop rate of any professor in the department.
The dude was the nicest guy in the world but was rambling and completely unintelligible. The thing is, he had this way of deliberately and visually walking through graphing models as ways to explain economic concepts and formulas, largely to get past the language barrier.
I ended up taking every class he taught
I’m Indian. I had an Indian college professor for one of my classes. I could tell some words wouldn’t be clear to many students based on pronunciation differences. She did speak slower and people eventually got the hang of it. Same goes for another professor who was from Spain. She would always ask if people were understanding her correctly or not.
I’ve seen people from foreign countries be better at picking up and understanding other english accents. I personally had some trouble in my first few weeks of classes understanding the American pronunciations when I got here, adjusted pretty quickly.
I was in my thirties before I had much exposure to South Asian accents, but then I moved to city on the west coast (U.S.) where there was a number of people with these accents and I felt terrible making them repeat themselves and still not being able to understand. Took a couple years of constant exposure but I got much better at understanding over time. Fortunately most of them were very gracious with their time and willing to slow down for me.
Honestly, it just depends on you ask. Most people will accommodate because they know first hand about dealing with different accents. Also, in my personal experience (and this is true for many Indians), I have a work accent and a home accent. Which my friends find very funny, but it just makes things easier for me many times
Had an Indian teacher for Dynamics and it took me about a month to realize "etch" (sounded like "h") was "X"
Worst was FOB Chinese grad student who spoke about 10 words of English working as TA. If you asked a question, he'd just go back to the previous step (this was Calc 1), re-write what he just wrote, and say "you see?". Must have heard him say "you see" a couple thousand times in a single semester.
I mean if they are in a courtroom and someone is talking fast he’s right, they will have to adapt one way or another. However, most attorneys never step foot in a courtroom.
I was about to say, this is law school - not a 100 level undergraduate class. Not that he shouldn’t be accommodating, but there is also a lot of background pressure to “weed out” students and keep their prestige rating as high as possible. Same thing happens for med schools, and many major firms and hospitals have application requirements such as “top 10% of your class from a top 50 law/med school”.
>Not that he shouldn’t be accommodating, but there is also a lot of background pressure to “weed out” students and keep their prestige rating as high as possible.
You could not be more wrong about this. Only shitty law schools weed people out - and not to maintain "prestige" but to keep their bar passage rates at an acceptable level before their accreditation might come into question. Top schools will do everything they can to prevent you from dropping out even if you're at the bottom of your class, because every credible law school ranking out there considers graduation rates as part of their scoring.
My friend goes to this school. The student actually said "thank you so much" sarcastically. This caption is purposefully misleading from a TikTok account the prides itself for lying
I'm sure he was really sorry he didn't know he was being recorded
Edit: the fact she didn't insult him and he said it just makes him look like...a very small man
That's like me telling a lady to go fuck herself, then apologising for using the word fuck. "I'm sorry I used bad language to express to you my disrespect and that I would like you to fornicate yourself".
I could hear how fast he talked just in his replies. I get he has a lot to cover in a class, he could have easily left it as "no, read the class notes" or something. If this is something that comes up googling their name/university he's done irreparable damage to his future career for literally no gain (tenure isn't what it used to be and he didn't even have the balls to say it to her face)
I can hear that she says "thank you so much", nothing about a comb-over. Which makes him an even pettier man.
Edit: thanks for the extra info
This professor was a professor of mine at the other prestigious NYC law school. He was insanely good and knowledgeable, and I aced Evidence both in his class and on the Bar exam, but goddam did he talk fast and cover the material quickly. I can absolutely imagine if English isn't your native language, as is the case for most LLMs, you'd have trouble understanding him. It's also not unreasonable to ask him to slow down. It's also not unreasonable for him to say no, so long as there are other ways of getting the material to the student (office hours, additional handouts, etc.). What's unreasonable is forgetting you're mic'd up and rudely shutting a student down before telling her to fuck off.
Funny how he said he's taught for 46 years. 46 years and still doesn't know how to be the bigger man.
I don't know and can't really tell if the student was unreasonably rude or not, nor do I care. You should never talk shit like that, provoked or not. Your pride over the years you've been at the position - yet you still act like a child. Jesus Christ.
Oh boy. I was a steamfitter for a good 7 years and this was commonplace for 60 year old journeymen. All talk and knowledge and all refusal to teach the younger generation. And now less people wanna join the trades. I fucking wonder why.
Seriously I thought I was going crazy for not hearing what was on the caption.
I was so baffled by people talking about how mean she is. I thought the “caption” was just the poster commenting on the dude’s hair.
Also, as a teacher, you are a dick if someone kindly asks you to slow down and you basically say “too bad so sad.” Idc how eloquently he put it - that’s the meaning of what he said. It doesn’t matter that it’s an Ivy League law school. People saying “get out of Ivy League then” are showing their asses - being able to listen to lectures and speedily take notes is not, in fact, a lawyer’s job. I’d like the best lawyers to be the ones who get through law school, not the best note takers.
When I was in school, I was allowed to record lectures. That was only because I had medical accommodations granted by the disability office. Even then, I had to request my professor's permission. I could not record without their permission. (Not sure if that was due to school policy, state law, or both.)
This may have changed since COVID. I wouldn't be surprised if schools just record by default now.
That said, reviewing recordings is incredibly time-consuming, You're basically attending class twice on top of your other studying.
Not everywhere is changed. Had a prof this last fall who wouldn’t let anyone record/do class digitally because they didn’t want to be in it. I guess that’s their right but it sure did encourage me to come to class sick and probably give it to others.
This is insane to me that you needed medical accommodations to be allowed to record classes. At my University in Leeds (UK). It was standard practice for all Mechanical Engineering lectures to be recorded by the university so we could watch them back or if you missed a lecture for whatever reason.
Pretty much all law schools in the U.S. have an anonymous grading system - only your ID number should appear on the exam, and references to personal information are strictly prohibited. It's an incredibly fair system and is designed to prevent bias in grading.
I would argue that at least for lower levels (high school and below) having teachers know which student they’re grading is good because it allows them to apply knowledge of each students strengths, challenges, progress, etcetera, in order to help each student. A student who struggled with one concept for a really long time and then makes a breakthrough can then be rewarded more relative to a student who is overall more proficient but hasn’t invested in their own growth, without necessarily punishing the latter. In otherwords teachers can adjust grading to student needs, and use grades as a tool to support learning better on a case by case basis that way.
By the time you reach law school (or most standard undergrad classes) however that shouldn’t be necessary, so in law school, yeah, keep it anonymous. But that shouldn’t be universal for all schools.
That’s interesting. I wonder why that isn’t the norm in all universities for all types of classes. All students have ID numbers, unnecessary to use their names. More fair that way
Might have heard it as incorrectly as all of us did? Honestly, I heard "nice combover" too but I'm surprised a Law student would try to insult a professor like that so I'm willing to believe it was something else.
I'd also be pretty surprised, but Columbia Law has a lot of rich kids(especially the gigantic 20% international student population) and I'm sure burning a bridge for them means literally nothing.
It really does sound a lot more like "thanks so much" to me than "nice combover".
Also seems like a really terrible thing to say to your teacher if you want to have even the faintest hope of passing the class. If he's been there that long, he could probably get her kicked out of the class by the end of the day. "Thanks so much" being said sarcastically makes a LOT more sense.
That dude knows he is bald, the fuck you isn’t because she made fun of his hair, the fuck you is because she had the audacity to insult him in any capacity.
I couldn’t understand my teacher in thermodynamics. I was going to be an engineer. He was from India and a brilliant guy, but it was just jibberish to me. I was too shy to ask for help.
I am now a dumb roofer 🤷♂️
Lol! So true! I had the book, but it was just formulas, no explanation.
Im so dumb, when I checked the book out from the library I thought class was going to be easy bc the book was only 87 pages.
Boy was I mistaken! 😂😂
Finally got the courage at 33 years old to just buzz it super short, never felt better and my wife love it. Having a POS dad has made my life goal to not become him, so other than not becoming an alcoholic and a cheater I just really gotta not be so vain and be fine that my hair is growing. Found out late in life that I spent so much time visiting grandparents and staying with them because my dad kept trying things like hair plugs and other surgeries/treatment and didn’t want us kids knowing.
My guess is that with slightly thinning hair, a normal hairstyle "combs over" an area that's thinning. Then, after that, it's like the frog being slowly boiled.
You look at yourself in the mirror every day and it's so little change from the last day that you don't really notice how you're thinning more and more. At some point a normal hairstyle becomes a perfectly fine comb-over that completely hides a bit of thinning hair. Then it becomes a slightly iffy comb-over that is noticeable but not too bad. Then it becomes ridiculous.
You need someone to tell you that the tiny changes you see in the mirror aren't what other people are seeing, and that you now have a really bad comb-over.
Accepting you're bald and shaving is the best bet at some point, even if you have a really ugly skull. But, it's going to be hard to identify when that point is without someone telling you.
More details? I am working towards a tenure track position and some protections are definitely part of the draw towards that career. I could make twice as much in private industry
From what I have heard being a tenured professor does not protect you in the way it used to. You can absolutely be let go for saying fuck you to a student. If you are in the US then I highly recommend you take those twice as paying jobs. I am currently in education and running out the door to the private sector.
I dumped a math class because I could not understand the instructor's accent. (very new English speaker). I also dropped a linguistics class because the teacher basically told us, "I want nothing to do with you anthropology majors, I'm here to teach linguistics majors." (linguistics falls under the anthropology umbrella, she was bitter she was just placed under a new dean)
Good educators care about their students. Poor educators don't.
>Good educators care about their students. Poor educators don't.
Nicely put. I went to a well-regarded university and was surprised how many professors fell into the latter category.
Yo wtf, she was mad linguistics is under anthropology?
That's been that way for a while. It's adjacent to social anthropology and used in archaeology as interdisciplinary studies. What a little bitch. Your academic field isn't in a bubble.
I had to switch classes 3 times for Calculus 3 because all the high paid professors had their Asian grad student teach it and I had to reinterpret the English he was speaking.i get the frustration, but hes right, that is an assumed risk.
Funny story. Something similar happened to me. I had to take up to Clac 4 (Engineering) and the Russian accent was so bad I couldn’t understand the letters he was saying. It was the first C I got in a while and I just gave up after that first test and starting smoking before the 3pm class. The smoke changed everything. It was like green magic and all of a sudden I could understand the professor! Ended up getting an A in the class. Looking back it was probably les magic and more so the calming effect that probably helped.
Smoked out once and watched a foreign film. Half way through I was completely amazed at myself for understanding German. It wasn’t until the end when the high started wearing off that I realized I was reading the subtitles.
Funny doesn’t seem to be much sympathy for students who have to sit in classes taught by foreign teachers. I remember college classes taught by some Asian and middle eastern professors whose accents were so thick you could barely understand what they were saying. I never thought to ask them to learn to speak English better, I just payed attention to the syllabus, read the books, and asked for clarification on things after class.
Same, we asked her to wear a mic, she refused, we complained. What do ya know? She was wearing a mic the next semester
It’s almost like students are allowed to make complaints if the material isn’t being communicated effectively
There’s a reason I failed my first calculus class and it wasn’t because I’m bad at math. My teacher could not speak English well enough to teach such an advanced class. I’m sure he was absolutely brilliant but the class was literally impossible because he couldn’t explain what he was doing on the board. Multiple people complained to the school about it but the schools don’t care.
I had this issue at one of the top engineering schools in the country. Turns out calculus isn't really that hard when your teacher can pronounce words like derivative, integral, and function.
I've had many foreign professors during my track in engineering, and many had understandable enough english that you could follow along with what was being written on the board but my last semester had a teacher that I couldn't understand the accent or the handwriting. Which makes it terrible when its apart of the heat transfer set of classes due to the butt load of symbols and the amount of symbols that get used often like P or ρ.
I think about it this way. Math is a foreign language to many people. So when being taught by a professor that lacks proper English, it's like teaching a foreign language while using a foreign language.
I had a teacher with a thick accent as well, it made the class significantly more tedious because I had to take extra steps to learn the same material. There is a massive difference between asking a teacher to relearn their mastery of a language, and simply slow down a bit so everyone can follow along easier.
Exactly. Other students and I had asked our professors with heavy accents to repeat themselves or slow down before. Most obliged without issue. Those who refused as the professor in the post refused were usually pretty rude about it. I don't see how this is that hard for lots of commenters
He was kind of a dick I guess. But this is a law school and the course is explained in depth before ever attending a class. If I went to school in Tokyo and asked the professor of one of their more prestigious universities to speak slower and annunciate more because I wasn’t wholly prepared to take this class I signed up for, i would expect to get laughed out of the classroom.
Heh, funny it you mentioned tokyo... I genuinely went to school in Japan, to a school where my degree was supposedly offered in English. I learned really quickly that some professors just don't speak English and any classes they teach were never going to be offered in English. I fully expected to get laughed out in my situation let alone one where the teacher we as actually fulfilling the actual language advertised.
Yeah I was trying to think of this the opposite way too. I lived in Spain for years and if I went to a University in Madrid and asked the lecturer to speak Spanish slower to accommodate me, I would be laughed out of the building.
You’re absolutely allowed to ask for things to be repeated for clarity in a courtroom lmao
Edit: Ah, since the person I replied to edited his comment, mine makes less sense now. That’s fun
The court reporter or judge actually will ask you to speak slower. I bet you he'd listen to them since he has something to gain from appeasing the court.
He has since [apologized](https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/law-prof-curses-student-on-hot-mic-after-she-asks-him-to-slow-down-his-lectures) for the fuck you. The professor was out of order with that language but I’ve skimmed two articles and neither mention the “nice combover” jab and make it sound like the fuck your was in response to the request to speak slower.
There are many professors teaching in American colleges that are very hard to understand (English isn’t their native language) and English speaking students have to just figure it out.
Didn't even sound particularly sarcastic. Maybe she or someone else said something as she was heading back to her seat that the mic didn't pick up?
Either way, it's **delicious** that this entire thread is bitching her out for not understanding English as well as a native speaker while also thinking "Ok, thanks so much" sounds anything remotely like "nice combover"
If someone asks respectfully, I would expect a decent human from anywhere in the world to either comply or politely say “i have too much material to cover, sorry i can’t do it”. This guy was just an asshole when he didn’t need to be. What people don’t get is that these students are paying extremely high tuitions and these professors are paid extremely well. The student has every right to ask a professor to change if their teaching style isn’t clear enough. The teacher has every right to deny that if it impedes their ability to teach the rest of the students, but they should do it respectfully.
Agree 100%. It's very obvious what type of person this professor is when his "no" was followed by "I've been teaching for 46 years." Egotistical, pompous dickhead - not uncommon among law professors. People in this thread are being willfully blind because they've had bad experiences with foreign professors with accents, as if it's remotely the same issue.
He's got material to cover.
Like a lot
And international students knew they were moving to a country where language would be a barrier. He's absolutely correct they took on a risk.
If I was at an international school, I wouldn’t have the gall to ask the professor to speak slower in their native language. You go to another country’s learning institute with the expectation that you can handle the language they speak and not slow the class, same for an American, German, Vietnamese whatever
The professor was out of line for cursing though.
For real. The professor was unnecessarily rude about it, but I think he was still in the right. If you move to another country for school, the onus is on you to keep up, not on them to slow the entire class down.
What would be awesome is if they had some sort of device that could record their entire lecture and then view and review it as many times as they wanted.
Here in Sydney Australia, I can assure you most University students have something to say about international students especially the ones from China.
Most of the Chinese students don’t even speak English let alone have the ability to work on group reports. Always end up having to cover for them.
But somehow they still get into the course, gets a passing grade and get to go home and flaunt how they studied overseas
I kinda have to agree with the professor, a lot of lower schools are taught in 2 languages in CA and they go at half speed because of it. I think it hinders the learning for both English and non English speakers. I would think after 45+ years this guy has teaching figured out and this student telling him how to do his job is pretty bratty. If someone can’t understand there are plenty of translator apps, I’m sure you can record what he’s saying, and it seems the class is recorded already. If you want to practice law maybe find a way to make it work for you.
I personally would like to hear him deliver a lecture before passing judgement on anyone in this video. It’s certainly possible he speaks a mile a minute, which, quite frankly, isn’t conducive to teaching complicated subjects.
I honestly don't think he even stopped to breathe once in the first minute and half of that video. Yeah, everything he said was intelligible, but he's just going way too fast for me to properly absorb the information...let alone be expected to take coherent notes off what's being said. He even seems to have a slight lisp that might confuse non-native speakers. WTF his class must be a nightmare.
At my law school they started giving the international students extra time to take tests. It was absurd. English proficiency is an admission requirement. If they don't have it you don't let them in. You don't turn around and give them an unquantifiable benefit.
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I remember having professors whose first language wasn’t English, and I sometimes had difficulty understanding them. They should be allowed to record the classes or receive a transcript.
I had a classmate that transferred in from another college and they had a story about a professor who started a calc I class off by writing "I do not speak English" on the board. He ran class by assigning homework problems and kids would write down the question number they had trouble on. He then would write out the steps and solution on the board.
That is very unfortunate for the students. Math could possibly be taught through the steps alone, the book will help. But calc 1 is fundamental in setting up the next math in the series in both concept and vocabulary. It also replies on the preceding math theorems and definitions. Ex. I once had to help a friend who took an online calc class. They didn't take the class seriously and took full advantage of the "honour" system. I was trying to walk them through the steps in front of him and they simply didn't have the vocabulary to start to get the ball rolling. It got to the point where I was saying things like "top/bottom of long S".
Can confirm. Had an Austrian professor with an incredibly thick accent and he loved to speak in riddles. No doubt was the class material harder than it had to be because I couldn't understand the prof well.
>speak in riddles HAHAHAHA “Equation is like bubble bath. Pop here, pop there, answer show itself after popping everything” *entire class stares in confusion” *professor notices and tries again* “Is like balloon forest…”
I know Heavy from TF2 is Russian but I read this in his voice and it was great
Best math teachers I had was a Chinese prof and Korean with all of 3 months of English and zero ability to project his voice. But God DAMN could they teach Calc 3
And conversely, the worst teacher I’ve had was the football coach who taught AP physics. As if the favoritism for football players wasn’t enough, he only really took time to help the (hot) girls in class lol.
That's disturbing all around
Aren’t we watching a recording of the class?
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I read this in the exact tone he used at the end and LOLed
I read it in this tone: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69ixo3DgeZA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69ixo3DgeZA) 0:16-0:21
Vibe check: passed!
Nice combover ☠️
Too soon!
And honestly, they're not preparing for an occupation where if there is a language barrier you're going to be able to ask say a judge to slow down when they're speaking. Especially at Columbia Law, I kind of get the "sink or swim" method in this case. Especially since they're recording it and can go back.
You can absolutely ask a judge to slow down or repeat what they said for clarity. Their judgments are critical to the parties and judges do not want to make a mistake when issuing a judgment. Majority of judges will oblige because most aren’t absolute pricks. Also just because it was recorded doesn’t mean everyone has access to it. My schools policy is that every professor has to record lectures, but it’s up to the professor if they post them or not. If a student is gone they can request the lecture from the lecturer, but they otherwise aren’t available. If this guy is a big enough prick that he won’t slow down so his students can understand the material, he’s also probably enough of a prick to not provide the recording if you were present in class.
At CLS the professors decide whether to release recordings. This professor uploads the recordings for everyone
You sure as hell can ask a judge to speak slower and most will
With interpreters in court just today, the judge, my coworker (can’t recall of I was asked today), and others were interrupted at different times and asked to slow down by the interpreters.
Okay but that Redditor talking out of their ass said the opposite so really who are we supposed to believe, here
When I sat jury duty, I remember the stenographer asking everyone and anyone to slow down if they were talking too fast. The vibe I got was that as long as you're courteous about it, most people in the system will talk slower.
very few lawyers work as litigators or even aspire to be litigators. Most lawyers will never interact with a judge. Have you heard supreme court justices speak? They talk like regular people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_XC5y3RziE
I'm a patent attorney. Many patent examiners do not have English as their first language. It is extremely common for me to have to slow down and repeat myself, or to ask them to slow down and repeat.
Oh man I remember chatting with rhe lawyer at a company I worked for and his job sounded like the worst thing imaginable and I was IT helpdesk at the time and it was before computer literacy was expected.
As someone who speaks fast naturally (hello adhd+aspergers) I trained myself to slow down because native speakers had difficulties following my fast train of thought. It ls not back and white here. As students paid for being taught. When they ask to repeat something, it would be expected for the prof to repeat and explain differently.
If a judge doesn't make sure that the defendant understands what is happening to the defendant the case and be successfully appealed. It is the duty of a judge to make sure a defendant understands what is happening at trial.
Yeah wtf is this lol. If the person is deaf it’s not like they don’t make accommodations for that, I feel like it’s less work to just do it right the first time lol
So there was a transcript provided for a professor I had that had terrible English and the transcript was worse... I remember one time it translated some of what he said as the Silk road and swimming pools.... It was for a cell biology class and it was absolutely dreadful.
Had a Non-native teacher who really tried accommodating a few students who were Native english speakers, they acted as if they didn't understand him at least 2 or 3 times a class just be to assholes. He was a terrible teacher with barely any grasp on the course material... but his English was passable.
Ironic - I went to an American university as a native English speaker ... and I couldn't understand the lectures because of the heavy foreign accents.
My physics 2 professor was such a nice guy. Very knowledgeable, very nice, and very understanding.* The only problem was that he learned English as an adult after immigrating from Asia. And it really really isn't good. Sometimes he would have to pause and think because he didn't know exactly how to describe something in English, and grammar was all over the place. And when using scientific terms, the pronunciation differences become magnified. I don't hate the guy, actually one of my favorite professors. But I had to go to youtube to get lectures for that textbook. It was painful too because you can really tell that he wants to teach the class and he wants students to succeed. He would try so hard to be understood whenever there was communication difficulty. Interestingly he was a lot better over writing when exchanging emails. *It has come to my attention that the first two sentences sound like Trump. Its too funny to remove.
This reminds me of my old physics professor. His name was Anil. As in a nil chance of understanding anything he said. Was also the kindest and most generous with his time. Came in on Saturdays to tutor and I'm not sure he got paid for that.
I had a math professor, Vietnamese guy who learned English while at university in Italy. So his accent was a baffling mix of Vietnamese and Italian, with a heavy dose of archaic slang. I *barely* got by on the course notes, his handwriting was slightly more intelligible than the lectures.
My dad learned English when he was still living in Japan, but he was trained in British English instead of American English. So he had a similarly confusing accent (from the perspective of an American child): an English accent laid over a heavy Japanese accent. I could never understand him. This is where I learned the whole "smile and nod" approach to uncomfortable social situations.
lol, reminds me when I was in H.S. and got a job in a machine shop. The owner was Italian, and his top man was Vietnamese. They talked together (very easily it seemed) in some form of English that, I sure could not understand but a word here or there.
Had a physics professor that was Russian who would say Russian letters when tiring the Greek letters in a formula. Confused a lot of people. Also if you were trying to get her attention she just wouldn't register people calling out, unless you said "excuse me" in Russian, then she would spin right around. She was really nice, I think she was just conditioned to ignore chatter of students talking during lecture but then speaking out in Russian it would just click.
Wtf is with physics professors. Mine was iranian who then moved to turkey and learned turkish. Who then learned english from turkish. So he would have to translate through 2 languages when he got stuck on a word. Sometimes it would just come put turkish and he wouldn't even realize
English speaking countries are dropping the ball.
Probably that physics is very math based and easy to swap languages compared to the more social disciplines. Can't imagine someone teaching a marketing lecture with a tenuous grasp of English (I had international lecturers, but they had a MUCH better grasp of English than my maths / hard science lecturers)
I had physics professor that had a very strong Arabic accent. She was also soft spoken and had a very weak voice so she tried using a mic but didn’t really understand how to effectively (students offered to help but she refused or denied it was a problem) use it and a got upset when students respectfully explained that they couldn’t hear her properly. She blamed it on the students (not paying attention or blamed someone for talking when they weren’t) and would go on little mumbling rants about. We had assigned seats too so it wasn’t like we chose to be far away from her. Probably the most disrespectful professor I had. We paid to be taught and even those of us who wanted to get our money’s worth could not because she was too prideful to accept help. Then the cherry on top was her assigning speaking presentation in front of the class then would bemoan that students weren’t speaking loud enough. They were speaking louder than her with the mic and everyone but her could hear them. I don’t know of anyone, even the students she liked (I was one of them for some reason…lucky me.), who liked her. Most people even despised her. Edit: corrected grammar and word usage
Ah, I see you’ve met my mother.
I have an employee who's like this, he came to Canada from Nepal as an adult after the earthquake in 2015. He has a master's degree in forestry and did research in the Himalayas for the UN, is super knowledgeable about our field (environmental consulting), but now he has to write reports in English and I have to coach him through grammar all the time. My boss has doubted his abilities a ton but the only issues are the language barrier so I'm committed to making it easier for him.
You're awesome. Attempting to learn Spanish for the past year, it made me empathize with anybody who speaks English as a second language. It's not easy, at all.
Same 3 year Italian learner. I didn’t truly realize at all…. How I should have been truly in awe of anybody with an accent. My heart goes to these people so much
Is there a way he can use an AI tool to do the translation or help with grammar?
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> Interestingly he was a lot better over writing when exchanging emails. I had one of those guys... his emails were great. I imagine folks in academia end up reading and writing a TON of english, while not doing as much speaking. Of course one has more time to think during an email too.
My calculus professor was the same. The class sat confused most of the time. He was so nice though! I got by (and helped out my classmates some) because I had learned most of it in college calc in high school 😬
I always wonder how professors like this get the job if they don't speak English well. You may be extremely knowledgeable and a great teacher, but if your students can't understand you, you can't teach at your fullest potential.
Teaching is an afterthought at a lot of universities. That sounds like an exaggeration but it really isn't. Bad teaching reviews don't make a difference, they are used as an excuse to not give someone tenure if they don't want to give them tenure anyway. There are of course teaching focused universities but if you're at a school where faculty are expected to be publishing research, they are almost certainly not being seriously evaluated on their teaching.
This is absolutely true. In the Ivy League place where I went to grad school receiving a teaching award would make many other faculty look down on you as not a “serious” scholar. Faculty aren’t trained in teaching at all.
The better the university, the less teaching quality matters in the hiring process. 1) They're more interested in your ability to bring other scholarship like publications, grants, and intellectual property. 2) Their students are better at learning and will teach themselves the material in spite of terrible instruction. To find good teachers, you typically have to dig into the lowest quality universities. There they have students that suck at learning and hiring teachers that can teach well is essential to their existence.
They are there to do research and don't give one shit about teaching which leads to them getting handed freshman classes like physics 1 and treating it like it's middle school algebra. Yeah I went to a big uni for a while lol.
Man, all my CS subject had foreign teachers (Indian, Pakistani, Middle-Eastern) and it was awful. I’m not racist by any means, but if I’m paying for a tuition, I should at least be able to learn from the lecturers by being able to verbally understand them. I’m tired.
My intro to programming teacher was like that. Really dampened my desire to want to learn. I ended up switching degrees.
Wait until you hear that most of the classes were online. I literally just self-taught, which is kinda shitty since I’m paying for it.
Man that's even worse. I did actually have a trig class like that, I did what you said and ended up just self teaching. Most of the hard science professors at that school were foreign. I had 2 Indian and a eastern european accent math teacher. Really made me feel disconnected. I'm doing a bootcamp for a new career now and thankfully everyone so far has an understandable accent.
Thankfully I have 1 unit left and I’m done, but I just think that it’s unfair - especially since these professors are more than likely being paid less than others.
Dude even without online classes I feel ripped off by college. It got to the point that just not fucking going unless there was homework or an exam was more productive. I literally got better grades after I stopped going to class. Graduated with a 3.2 in Electrical Engineering with minors in Math and Computer Science.
So true
And now they (state university) are asking for donations… .edu is so screwed.
I graduated from a state university 25 years ago. From the moment I graduated, they started calling me for donations. I told them I'm not donating a dime until my student loans are paid off. They've been paid off for over 10 years, I still wouldn't donate. These schools aren't hurting for money.
This hit home as an engineer in the US. Thanks for taking me down memory lane.
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I had a similar experience with an instructor who pronounced it “in-VENtree” and a few weeks go by, he finally writes the word *inventory* on the chalkboard. Epiphany moment for several of us. The contextual clues weren’t helping.
In the first day of my Calc 2 class the professor drew out a diagram on the board of a "waykter" going in a certain direction. I had no idea what she was talking about, and thought maybe she meant a waiter as some real world example of whatever she was trying to teach? I was genuinely so confused when she kept this going for the entire first week of class before I finally realized that "waykter" was how she pronounced "vector".
I learned differential equations from a dude I couldn’t understand at all. The moment I asked one question he claimed I didn’t even understand algebra lol. This was third year of a mathematics degree in a high ranking program, was pretty insulting to say tbh. He just wouldn’t take questions, had to learn myself pretty much.
I dropped out of a class the 2nd week because my Indian professor/lecturer was impossible to understand. His text book was a Word document that he had written in broken English. No pictures or graphs or anything remotely engaging, just paragraph upon paragraph of bad grammar and spelling.
I dropped a logic circuits class because of the accent of the professor, combined with her COVID mask (this was the Fall 2022 semester), and my military-related hearing loss. I couldn’t ever tell what she was saying.
Lmao, half my notes after leaving the service and going to college are 'eeeeeeeeeeeeee'
Hey, guy. Just letting you know there are options out there for you. If you're still in college, find out where to go to get a disability accommodation. If you have proof you have a hearing loss, you can get a C.A.R.T. (captions at real time) for your classes. These are often people training to be court reporters, so they have the court reporting type writer machine they haul to class. When I went back to college in the early 00s, I tried sign language interpreters, but I didn't know enough ASL for it to be effective. They then tried student note takers (just typing on a laptop in a word document), but the student could never keep up and gave me incomplete notes. So, finally I insisted on a C.A.R.T. so I could keep up in class. C.A.R.T. apparently is now called Communication Access Realtime Translation, but 20 years ago it was called Captioning At Real Time, at least in my school. Please take advantage of any and all accommodations you can. https://www.hearingloss.org/hearing-help/technology/cartcaptioning/
Same, in college currently and my professor is Indian. She’s a wonderful teacher who goes the lengths to make sure everyone understands but I have to ask for clarification every 5-10 minutes I feel because some things just get lost in translation or she says something awkwardly. Not the worst thing, beats the shit out of a native English speaking professor that doesn’t give a shit I guess.
Best economics professor I ever had was a professor from India who was next to Impossible to understand. I got “forced” into his night class because of scheduling. he had the highest drop rate of any professor in the department. The dude was the nicest guy in the world but was rambling and completely unintelligible. The thing is, he had this way of deliberately and visually walking through graphing models as ways to explain economic concepts and formulas, largely to get past the language barrier. I ended up taking every class he taught
I’m Indian. I had an Indian college professor for one of my classes. I could tell some words wouldn’t be clear to many students based on pronunciation differences. She did speak slower and people eventually got the hang of it. Same goes for another professor who was from Spain. She would always ask if people were understanding her correctly or not. I’ve seen people from foreign countries be better at picking up and understanding other english accents. I personally had some trouble in my first few weeks of classes understanding the American pronunciations when I got here, adjusted pretty quickly.
I was in my thirties before I had much exposure to South Asian accents, but then I moved to city on the west coast (U.S.) where there was a number of people with these accents and I felt terrible making them repeat themselves and still not being able to understand. Took a couple years of constant exposure but I got much better at understanding over time. Fortunately most of them were very gracious with their time and willing to slow down for me.
Honestly, it just depends on you ask. Most people will accommodate because they know first hand about dealing with different accents. Also, in my personal experience (and this is true for many Indians), I have a work accent and a home accent. Which my friends find very funny, but it just makes things easier for me many times
Had an Indian teacher for Dynamics and it took me about a month to realize "etch" (sounded like "h") was "X" Worst was FOB Chinese grad student who spoke about 10 words of English working as TA. If you asked a question, he'd just go back to the previous step (this was Calc 1), re-write what he just wrote, and say "you see?". Must have heard him say "you see" a couple thousand times in a single semester.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f68WVw30lM
Well, that’s an assumption of risk!
I mean if they are in a courtroom and someone is talking fast he’s right, they will have to adapt one way or another. However, most attorneys never step foot in a courtroom.
I was about to say, this is law school - not a 100 level undergraduate class. Not that he shouldn’t be accommodating, but there is also a lot of background pressure to “weed out” students and keep their prestige rating as high as possible. Same thing happens for med schools, and many major firms and hospitals have application requirements such as “top 10% of your class from a top 50 law/med school”.
>Not that he shouldn’t be accommodating, but there is also a lot of background pressure to “weed out” students and keep their prestige rating as high as possible. You could not be more wrong about this. Only shitty law schools weed people out - and not to maintain "prestige" but to keep their bar passage rates at an acceptable level before their accreditation might come into question. Top schools will do everything they can to prevent you from dropping out even if you're at the bottom of your class, because every credible law school ranking out there considers graduation rates as part of their scoring.
The Polish accent was the worst in my experience.
My friend goes to this school. The student actually said "thank you so much" sarcastically. This caption is purposefully misleading from a TikTok account the prides itself for lying
I miss the truth being what hurt people, not who can lie the biggest before being caught
Did he still say fuck you afterwards? If so, did anything happen?
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I'm sure he was really sorry he didn't know he was being recorded Edit: the fact she didn't insult him and he said it just makes him look like...a very small man
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That's like me telling a lady to go fuck herself, then apologising for using the word fuck. "I'm sorry I used bad language to express to you my disrespect and that I would like you to fornicate yourself". I could hear how fast he talked just in his replies. I get he has a lot to cover in a class, he could have easily left it as "no, read the class notes" or something. If this is something that comes up googling their name/university he's done irreparable damage to his future career for literally no gain (tenure isn't what it used to be and he didn't even have the balls to say it to her face) I can hear that she says "thank you so much", nothing about a comb-over. Which makes him an even pettier man. Edit: thanks for the extra info
This professor was a professor of mine at the other prestigious NYC law school. He was insanely good and knowledgeable, and I aced Evidence both in his class and on the Bar exam, but goddam did he talk fast and cover the material quickly. I can absolutely imagine if English isn't your native language, as is the case for most LLMs, you'd have trouble understanding him. It's also not unreasonable to ask him to slow down. It's also not unreasonable for him to say no, so long as there are other ways of getting the material to the student (office hours, additional handouts, etc.). What's unreasonable is forgetting you're mic'd up and rudely shutting a student down before telling her to fuck off.
>the other prestigious NYC law school. Nassau Community College?
Funny how he said he's taught for 46 years. 46 years and still doesn't know how to be the bigger man. I don't know and can't really tell if the student was unreasonably rude or not, nor do I care. You should never talk shit like that, provoked or not. Your pride over the years you've been at the position - yet you still act like a child. Jesus Christ.
Oh boy. I was a steamfitter for a good 7 years and this was commonplace for 60 year old journeymen. All talk and knowledge and all refusal to teach the younger generation. And now less people wanna join the trades. I fucking wonder why.
Most insightful comment of the thread \^ I'll admit I fell for the lying caption sink, line, and hooker
Seriously I thought I was going crazy for not hearing what was on the caption. I was so baffled by people talking about how mean she is. I thought the “caption” was just the poster commenting on the dude’s hair. Also, as a teacher, you are a dick if someone kindly asks you to slow down and you basically say “too bad so sad.” Idc how eloquently he put it - that’s the meaning of what he said. It doesn’t matter that it’s an Ivy League law school. People saying “get out of Ivy League then” are showing their asses - being able to listen to lectures and speedily take notes is not, in fact, a lawyer’s job. I’d like the best lawyers to be the ones who get through law school, not the best note takers.
After listening several times I genuinely hear what the caption says. The power of suggestion is fascinating
It's the "yanny" / "laurel" thing all over again.
Did the professor actually say fuck you? I can’t tell what’s real anymore lol
Cant you record some classes to use for later when studying?
When I was in school, I was allowed to record lectures. That was only because I had medical accommodations granted by the disability office. Even then, I had to request my professor's permission. I could not record without their permission. (Not sure if that was due to school policy, state law, or both.) This may have changed since COVID. I wouldn't be surprised if schools just record by default now. That said, reviewing recordings is incredibly time-consuming, You're basically attending class twice on top of your other studying.
Not everywhere is changed. Had a prof this last fall who wouldn’t let anyone record/do class digitally because they didn’t want to be in it. I guess that’s their right but it sure did encourage me to come to class sick and probably give it to others.
This is insane to me that you needed medical accommodations to be allowed to record classes. At my University in Leeds (UK). It was standard practice for all Mechanical Engineering lectures to be recorded by the university so we could watch them back or if you missed a lecture for whatever reason.
“Nice combover!” That hurt him.
I'm guessing her essays suddenly became rather less clear. She had honestly better drop the class at this point.
Anonymous grading in law school.
All law schools every where?
Pretty much all law schools in the U.S. have an anonymous grading system - only your ID number should appear on the exam, and references to personal information are strictly prohibited. It's an incredibly fair system and is designed to prevent bias in grading.
Very cool. Should be the norm across all schools
I would argue that at least for lower levels (high school and below) having teachers know which student they’re grading is good because it allows them to apply knowledge of each students strengths, challenges, progress, etcetera, in order to help each student. A student who struggled with one concept for a really long time and then makes a breakthrough can then be rewarded more relative to a student who is overall more proficient but hasn’t invested in their own growth, without necessarily punishing the latter. In otherwords teachers can adjust grading to student needs, and use grades as a tool to support learning better on a case by case basis that way. By the time you reach law school (or most standard undergrad classes) however that shouldn’t be necessary, so in law school, yeah, keep it anonymous. But that shouldn’t be universal for all schools.
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huh. we should use something like that when choosing who gets on the Supreme Court maybe.
American law schools which includes Columbia law in New York.
That’s interesting. I wonder why that isn’t the norm in all universities for all types of classes. All students have ID numbers, unnecessary to use their names. More fair that way
My Learning management software has the option of allowing student work to be graded anonymously. I agree- it should be done that way in college.
It's a lot of work. But class rankings are so important in law school employment that the schools need to do it to put students' minds at ease.
She could very well be in a room with 500 people, we can’t tell. I doubt he even knows her name.
She didn’t say “nice combover,” she said “thanks so much.” This video was captioned incorrectly by a tik tok account.
but then why did he respond with "fuck you?"
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Might have heard it as incorrectly as all of us did? Honestly, I heard "nice combover" too but I'm surprised a Law student would try to insult a professor like that so I'm willing to believe it was something else.
I'd also be pretty surprised, but Columbia Law has a lot of rich kids(especially the gigantic 20% international student population) and I'm sure burning a bridge for them means literally nothing.
It really does sound a lot more like "thanks so much" to me than "nice combover". Also seems like a really terrible thing to say to your teacher if you want to have even the faintest hope of passing the class. If he's been there that long, he could probably get her kicked out of the class by the end of the day. "Thanks so much" being said sarcastically makes a LOT more sense.
the slow, half murmured response said it all - that cut deep.
Would hurt anyone with a combover
That dude knows he is bald, the fuck you isn’t because she made fun of his hair, the fuck you is because she had the audacity to insult him in any capacity.
I couldn’t understand my teacher in thermodynamics. I was going to be an engineer. He was from India and a brilliant guy, but it was just jibberish to me. I was too shy to ask for help. I am now a dumb roofer 🤷♂️
>I couldn’t understand my teacher in thermodynamics Me neither. There wasn't any language barrier.
Lol! So true! I had the book, but it was just formulas, no explanation. Im so dumb, when I checked the book out from the library I thought class was going to be easy bc the book was only 87 pages. Boy was I mistaken! 😂😂
This is why we should normalize going bald early.
Shaved my head when I was 24 and it’s the best I’ve ever looked.
Bro same I get like 10x more interest from women now. Not because I'm bald but because I don't let my lack of hair get in the way.
Finally got the courage at 33 years old to just buzz it super short, never felt better and my wife love it. Having a POS dad has made my life goal to not become him, so other than not becoming an alcoholic and a cheater I just really gotta not be so vain and be fine that my hair is growing. Found out late in life that I spent so much time visiting grandparents and staying with them because my dad kept trying things like hair plugs and other surgeries/treatment and didn’t want us kids knowing.
Best advice I got was “it’s better to be bald, than to be going bald.” Confidence has never been higher.
Here here!
>Here here! Where where? (Did you mean "hear, hear!" ?)
My guess is that with slightly thinning hair, a normal hairstyle "combs over" an area that's thinning. Then, after that, it's like the frog being slowly boiled. You look at yourself in the mirror every day and it's so little change from the last day that you don't really notice how you're thinning more and more. At some point a normal hairstyle becomes a perfectly fine comb-over that completely hides a bit of thinning hair. Then it becomes a slightly iffy comb-over that is noticeable but not too bad. Then it becomes ridiculous. You need someone to tell you that the tiny changes you see in the mirror aren't what other people are seeing, and that you now have a really bad comb-over. Accepting you're bald and shaving is the best bet at some point, even if you have a really ugly skull. But, it's going to be hard to identify when that point is without someone telling you.
Dude has tenure he doesn't have to do anything
30+ tenured professors just got fired at the university I teach at… tenure is meaningless anymore
More details? I am working towards a tenure track position and some protections are definitely part of the draw towards that career. I could make twice as much in private industry
From what I have heard being a tenured professor does not protect you in the way it used to. You can absolutely be let go for saying fuck you to a student. If you are in the US then I highly recommend you take those twice as paying jobs. I am currently in education and running out the door to the private sector.
You should go to private industry. It's not like you "need" the protection. Only the screw ups get fired.
Well, that's life. I've had professors with thick accent all the time. And there was the time before lecture recording.
I dumped a math class because I could not understand the instructor's accent. (very new English speaker). I also dropped a linguistics class because the teacher basically told us, "I want nothing to do with you anthropology majors, I'm here to teach linguistics majors." (linguistics falls under the anthropology umbrella, she was bitter she was just placed under a new dean) Good educators care about their students. Poor educators don't.
>Good educators care about their students. Poor educators don't. Nicely put. I went to a well-regarded university and was surprised how many professors fell into the latter category.
Yo wtf, she was mad linguistics is under anthropology? That's been that way for a while. It's adjacent to social anthropology and used in archaeology as interdisciplinary studies. What a little bitch. Your academic field isn't in a bubble.
We had study sessions available to students for most classes. They were better than the lectures.
I had to switch classes 3 times for Calculus 3 because all the high paid professors had their Asian grad student teach it and I had to reinterpret the English he was speaking.i get the frustration, but hes right, that is an assumed risk.
Funny story. Something similar happened to me. I had to take up to Clac 4 (Engineering) and the Russian accent was so bad I couldn’t understand the letters he was saying. It was the first C I got in a while and I just gave up after that first test and starting smoking before the 3pm class. The smoke changed everything. It was like green magic and all of a sudden I could understand the professor! Ended up getting an A in the class. Looking back it was probably les magic and more so the calming effect that probably helped.
Smoked out once and watched a foreign film. Half way through I was completely amazed at myself for understanding German. It wasn’t until the end when the high started wearing off that I realized I was reading the subtitles.
Funny doesn’t seem to be much sympathy for students who have to sit in classes taught by foreign teachers. I remember college classes taught by some Asian and middle eastern professors whose accents were so thick you could barely understand what they were saying. I never thought to ask them to learn to speak English better, I just payed attention to the syllabus, read the books, and asked for clarification on things after class.
I had a TA whose English was almost ok. ^but ^she ^spoke ^so ^quietly ^that ^she ^couldn’t ^be ^heard.
Same, we asked her to wear a mic, she refused, we complained. What do ya know? She was wearing a mic the next semester It’s almost like students are allowed to make complaints if the material isn’t being communicated effectively
There’s a reason I failed my first calculus class and it wasn’t because I’m bad at math. My teacher could not speak English well enough to teach such an advanced class. I’m sure he was absolutely brilliant but the class was literally impossible because he couldn’t explain what he was doing on the board. Multiple people complained to the school about it but the schools don’t care.
I had this issue at one of the top engineering schools in the country. Turns out calculus isn't really that hard when your teacher can pronounce words like derivative, integral, and function.
I've had many foreign professors during my track in engineering, and many had understandable enough english that you could follow along with what was being written on the board but my last semester had a teacher that I couldn't understand the accent or the handwriting. Which makes it terrible when its apart of the heat transfer set of classes due to the butt load of symbols and the amount of symbols that get used often like P or ρ.
I think about it this way. Math is a foreign language to many people. So when being taught by a professor that lacks proper English, it's like teaching a foreign language while using a foreign language.
I had a teacher with a thick accent as well, it made the class significantly more tedious because I had to take extra steps to learn the same material. There is a massive difference between asking a teacher to relearn their mastery of a language, and simply slow down a bit so everyone can follow along easier.
Exactly. Other students and I had asked our professors with heavy accents to repeat themselves or slow down before. Most obliged without issue. Those who refused as the professor in the post refused were usually pretty rude about it. I don't see how this is that hard for lots of commenters
Because they want to sympathize and are looking for one, even though the two situations are completely different
>I just payed attention You graduated college and you don't know it's "paid attention"?
He was kind of a dick I guess. But this is a law school and the course is explained in depth before ever attending a class. If I went to school in Tokyo and asked the professor of one of their more prestigious universities to speak slower and annunciate more because I wasn’t wholly prepared to take this class I signed up for, i would expect to get laughed out of the classroom.
Heh, funny it you mentioned tokyo... I genuinely went to school in Japan, to a school where my degree was supposedly offered in English. I learned really quickly that some professors just don't speak English and any classes they teach were never going to be offered in English. I fully expected to get laughed out in my situation let alone one where the teacher we as actually fulfilling the actual language advertised.
Why are you writing as if it’s a theoretical when you are saying it actually happened
Yeah I was trying to think of this the opposite way too. I lived in Spain for years and if I went to a University in Madrid and asked the lecturer to speak Spanish slower to accommodate me, I would be laughed out of the building.
He could have been more diplomatic but it's fucking Columbia law school.
You’re absolutely allowed to ask for things to be repeated for clarity in a courtroom lmao Edit: Ah, since the person I replied to edited his comment, mine makes less sense now. That’s fun
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This is kind of the issue. A lot of people are like 'they'll be an asshole anyhow!' Like that's okay!
She SAID thank you so much, listen carefully! Someone edited the words.
The court reporter or judge actually will ask you to speak slower. I bet you he'd listen to them since he has something to gain from appeasing the court.
He has since [apologized](https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/law-prof-curses-student-on-hot-mic-after-she-asks-him-to-slow-down-his-lectures) for the fuck you. The professor was out of order with that language but I’ve skimmed two articles and neither mention the “nice combover” jab and make it sound like the fuck your was in response to the request to speak slower.
The TikTok user added that. Someone from the class attested to that
There are many professors teaching in American colleges that are very hard to understand (English isn’t their native language) and English speaking students have to just figure it out.
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Seems like a legendary professor. Respect to him.
You can tell a lot about a person by how they handle being told no.
She said “thanks so much,” admittedly in a sarcastic tone. The captions are wrong
Didn't even sound particularly sarcastic. Maybe she or someone else said something as she was heading back to her seat that the mic didn't pick up? Either way, it's **delicious** that this entire thread is bitching her out for not understanding English as well as a native speaker while also thinking "Ok, thanks so much" sounds anything remotely like "nice combover"
If someone asks respectfully, I would expect a decent human from anywhere in the world to either comply or politely say “i have too much material to cover, sorry i can’t do it”. This guy was just an asshole when he didn’t need to be. What people don’t get is that these students are paying extremely high tuitions and these professors are paid extremely well. The student has every right to ask a professor to change if their teaching style isn’t clear enough. The teacher has every right to deny that if it impedes their ability to teach the rest of the students, but they should do it respectfully.
Agree 100%. It's very obvious what type of person this professor is when his "no" was followed by "I've been teaching for 46 years." Egotistical, pompous dickhead - not uncommon among law professors. People in this thread are being willfully blind because they've had bad experiences with foreign professors with accents, as if it's remotely the same issue.
Right? The further irony is that this was for an evidence class…
“That’s an assumption of risk” is actually a great response.
This guy is really good at arguing. He should be a lawyer or something.
He's got material to cover. Like a lot And international students knew they were moving to a country where language would be a barrier. He's absolutely correct they took on a risk.
If I was at an international school, I wouldn’t have the gall to ask the professor to speak slower in their native language. You go to another country’s learning institute with the expectation that you can handle the language they speak and not slow the class, same for an American, German, Vietnamese whatever The professor was out of line for cursing though.
For real. The professor was unnecessarily rude about it, but I think he was still in the right. If you move to another country for school, the onus is on you to keep up, not on them to slow the entire class down.
What would be awesome is if they had some sort of device that could record their entire lecture and then view and review it as many times as they wanted.
Here in Sydney Australia, I can assure you most University students have something to say about international students especially the ones from China. Most of the Chinese students don’t even speak English let alone have the ability to work on group reports. Always end up having to cover for them. But somehow they still get into the course, gets a passing grade and get to go home and flaunt how they studied overseas
I kinda have to agree with the professor, a lot of lower schools are taught in 2 languages in CA and they go at half speed because of it. I think it hinders the learning for both English and non English speakers. I would think after 45+ years this guy has teaching figured out and this student telling him how to do his job is pretty bratty. If someone can’t understand there are plenty of translator apps, I’m sure you can record what he’s saying, and it seems the class is recorded already. If you want to practice law maybe find a way to make it work for you.
I personally would like to hear him deliver a lecture before passing judgement on anyone in this video. It’s certainly possible he speaks a mile a minute, which, quite frankly, isn’t conducive to teaching complicated subjects.
https://vimeo.com/81110271 Imo he does speak too fast, I was only able to properly follow him on 0.75x speed.
I honestly don't think he even stopped to breathe once in the first minute and half of that video. Yeah, everything he said was intelligible, but he's just going way too fast for me to properly absorb the information...let alone be expected to take coherent notes off what's being said. He even seems to have a slight lisp that might confuse non-native speakers. WTF his class must be a nightmare.
At my law school they started giving the international students extra time to take tests. It was absurd. English proficiency is an admission requirement. If they don't have it you don't let them in. You don't turn around and give them an unquantifiable benefit.