Dear Korean Professor,
I am writing this here because I fear that if I don’t let it all out here, I’ll end up saying something I regret on my end-of-year course evaluations.
I hate the way you run our class. There is a distinct difference between teaching and reading the book to the class. You do not teach. In now way could anyone call what you do “teaching.” Flashing a powerpoint on the screen and then flipping through them at lightning speed doesn’t help. Have you noticed how we all basically quit taking notes? There’s no point. And if we can’t read the slides fast enough, do you think we’re actually learning anything?
Here’s my problem. I feel like you don’t give a shit. That’s the general impression I get. You don’t really give a shit if we’re actually learning anything. You do your part, “teaching,” and that’s all you have to do. It’s completely up to us to do the learning, and it doesn’t matter if your teaching style is not conducive to any sort of understanding. If we don’t understand, oh well, come to office hours or ask a friend. The office hours thing might be a good idea if the thought of having to talk to you one on one and explain why I don’t understand didn’t make me want to scream my head off at you. I cannot stand the thought of talking to you; if I were, I might lose my patience and say something I regret.
So you think your only responsibility is to do your “job” – hand out quizzes, give out exercises (that you don’t give nearly enough time to complete), and make powerpoints. And you feel like you’re doing a good job, I mean, a lot of the kids seems to understand it pretty well, right? So why change anything.
But you see, those students getting A’s ALREADY FUCKING SPEAK KOREAN. Their A’s aren’t a testament to your marvelous teaching skills, but rather to their PARENTS who already taught them Korean. They come to the class with a whole repertoire of vocabulary and grammar knowledge. They may not be perfect, but there is still a general understanding of the language. I would say that over half of the class came to school already speaking Korean. That leaves the rest of us not knowing what the shit is going on.
But you’re already a great teacher! See all the A’s! See how well they write? Speak? If other students don’t understand, they need to work harder, come to more office hours, get a friend to study with. That’s your fucking solution – partner up with a student who already knows Korean. And on the surface it’s a wonderful, logical idea. But here’s the thing – students aren’t teachers. Their job is not to teach me. They have no responsibility to teach me. They are not in the class to teach me. And more than than, they don’t WANT to teach me, so when you try to partner us up, they just want to do all the work themselves so we can be done quicker. They don’t want to take the time to slowly go through, word by word, explaining everything. And I can understand that because they didn’t take the class to help the other students (although their unwillingness to help me really does NOTHING to help me feel welcomed and included in the class). When you just pass me along to a Korean speaking student it sends the message to me that you don’t care enough to make sure I understand the grammar. You’d rather someone else explain it to me.
It’s really fucking humiliating and unprofessional on your part to say, “You, be partners with so-and-so. Everyone else, pick your partners.” Really?! I don’t appreciate being called out every class period like that. It’s bullshit.
I really dislike the way you organize your tests. It pretty much copies the text book – you take an entire exercise and retype it on the quiz. I guess your logic is that it’ll make it easier to study, but it doesn’t help me understand anything. Memorization doesn’t mean comprehension. Plus, I don’t have time or energy to memorize all the passages in the textbook on the chance that it’ll show up. If it were based on comprehension and how well we understood the grammar patterns, not if we can remember this random vocabulary word, I might do better. Again, I can see your logic, but it’s bad logic and isn’t helpful. At all. It also makes you seem lazy, like you don’t want to write your own test.
I do understand the difficulty in teaching a class with mixed levels of understanding. You want to challenge the upper level students without leaving the lower level ones behind. Here’s the thing, you ARE leaving the lower levels behind. You would rather push and help the upper level students, but to me there is so much racial undertones in that decision.
The upper level students are full Korean, speak Korean at home, grew up with both Korean parents. Some even grew up in Korea for a duration. They are Korean-Americans. I, on the other hand, am not. I don’t know what the fuck I am. Ask the Asians, especially the older ones – there’s no way in hell I’m Asian, not a real on anyway. I don’t speak the language, eat the food, hang out with Koreans. But ask the White kids what I am, they’d adamantly say “Asian, of course.” I’m habitually asked, “What ethnicity are you?” (Side note to blog: It’s a HUGE turnoff when you ask me within an hour of knowing me about my ethnicity. Why does it matter? Why the hell does my ethnicity have to be a interesting topic of conversation?) So you see, I don’t really fit in either group. One group is emphatically telling be, “But you’re that, you’re that.” They don’t let me forget. But the group I’m supposed to be a part of doesn’t want me. Often times ignores me. Tell me “You’re not that.”
You exasperate this problem. You’d rather help the upper levels, the “real” Koreans or Asians, than the rest of us. Maybe this is not your intentional message, but it’s the one I get everyday. By deciding that the upper level Korean students should be focused on, it means that they are more deserving. I’m not a real Korean, so why bother, right?
This probably isn’t your intention. And maybe I’m totally off base on all of this. Maybe you LOVE teaching us, and you work your ass off to make those powerpoints and you’re really concerned for us noobs in Korean. Maybe you see all your students as the same and don’t make the racial distinction. But that’s not what it looks like from my side of the table.
Too often I dismiss how I feel because I tell myself that I’m overreacting or I should just get over it. Why am I being so emotional, I ask myself. But every single day I have walked into Korean class for the past three semesters I have felt unwelcome and an outsider. No one gives a damn and they treat me like I’m a burden. And it’s gotten to the point where, no, you know what, it’s not just a “bad attitude” problem on my part. Maybe, just maybe, for once, it’s a little bit of an everyone else problem too.
This is my long list of complaints with your class, some things about you personally, others with the culture of the class, which you probably can’t control. Some things are issues I need to work out on my own, issues I wasn’t even aware I had to work through until I took Korean. But honestly, taking Korean is the decision I regret the most since I’ve come to UVA and it’s gotten to the point where I just don’t give a damn anymore. So long as I get that C in the class, enough for it to count towards my foreign language requirement, I don’t give a shit.
Here is my letter of resignation.
Signed,
This Girl