Why isn't there a Circle of the Stupid in Dante's hell?

My worst class at NIE features an English Literature instructor who can't speak proper English ("Please stapler [sic] your papers."), comes late to class, spends all the time talking about herself rather than teaching pedagogy, and doesn't appear to know anything about literature.

I had the occasion to ask her once why she had assigned Chekhov to her secondary school English Literature students. The question was straightforward enough, and I would have been quite satisfied if she had, say, acknowledged the problems inherent in translating Russian to English and explained that her classes on Chekhov had been focused not on Chekhov's diction, but on his characterisation. Instead, she replied, "What's wrong with Chekhov?" I was too stunned to muster a polite reply, and she quickly moved on to something else. No one in class to my knowledge has yet to obtain from her a concise, coherent answer on anything but the most elementary of queries.

Several lessons later, we read an English translation of a Chinese poem and completed a vocabulary worksheet based on that translation. Never mind that Chinese and English are radically different languages. Never mind that there exist innumerable English poems that could have served her needs much better. (Had she spoken the previous sentence, she would have said "poetry" instead of "poems" -- she does this all the time.)

The scary thing is that she has an MA in English from NUS and an MA in Theatre Studies from New Zealand, serves on the executive committee of the English Language and Literature Teacher's Association of Singapore, and has spent the last couple of years as an English Subject Head in a number of secondary schools. I pity her former students. At least all of us know that we're being taken for a ride.
Posted by kungfuzi at 11:15 pm |