This week has been a bit stressful for all of us internationals in my class. For some reason out professors are unsatisfied with our work that we have been doing.
Our history/literature teacher was very upset with our class last week. For literature we had to do an analysis of a poem that we read in class. A side note: when it comes to analyzing poems or anything really, I can not say it is one of my strong points even in English. I digress, but anyway, the week before we had a discussion about what an analysis was and how to do one properly, which was great because ever teacher wants an analysis done differently. So the next week we turned in our papers and the day after turning them in, we recieved them back and our teacher was very disappointed. No one got 100% but no one failed either but he was very dissatisfied with our work. He began yelling at us telling us we don't care about our work and didn't take time to do the assignment, we just wrote whatever we wanted and handed it in. He told us that we were the worst group of internationals and that we are lazy.
Now, how he got all this information from one assignment I don't know but, I can't speak for everyone in my class, but I personally worked very hard on my analysis. Sure, there were things in there that may not have been exactly what he was looking for, but that does not by any means mean that I did not try my best on the assignment. I am bad at analyses in English as it is so I knew this one was not going to be much easier. If I were lazy, I would not have even bothered to do the assignment.
The next class was not much better. The next week, we had the same teacher and he proceeded to tell us that all of our teachers had a meeting about our class about how we need to change our attitudes and how they think we are only studying abroad to travel and don't actually care about learning Spanish. The next class we had written and oral expression. This is a different professor and she came in and showed us an example of a badly written paper. It said, "Tengo una hermana, el es guapo y simpactico." For those of you who don't speak Spanish that means, "I have a sister, he is handsome and he is nice." Our teacher proceeded to tell us that this is a mistake that a person in level one Spanish would make and we all agreed. Then she continued and said that we had made those kind of mistakes on our assignments for her.
Pause: I know my Spanish is not that great, however, there is no possible way, that I would make this kind of mistake at my level of Spanish. If I did, I would ask to be sent home because I was probably very ill to even think that was correct.
Continuing, she too began telling us how much we don't care about our work and how our attitudes need to change about our work. She said she could not even grade our papers because we would have all failed and proceeded to hand back our papers. Generally when a teacher hands back a paper, even if it is not for a grade, there is some sort of marking on the paper. In this case, there was nothing. I raised my hand and said, " how are we supposed to know what mistakes we made, if there are no marks on the paper? It is impossible to make corrections to something that when we turned in we thought was correct but you are telling us there are tons of mistakes." So she took them back and graded them in class. Again, I don't know about everyone else, but my paper only had two marks on it and they had nothing to do with the problem she was indicating. According to what everyone else was saying, none of them had that problem either.
In my head I was appalled (and probably on my face too) that she would even think it was okay to hand back a paper that she said has so many mistakes but has not marked anything on the paper. If when I turn in the paper, We think is perfect, and it gets returned to us after being told it was terrible but there are no marks, how are we supposed to know what our mistakes are? That is a terrible teaching tactic to me. Furthermore, if we had made mistakes like that on our papers, that is a reflections on her teaching skills because she is the one who is supposed to be teaching us how to write correctly.
These teachers are going to drive me insane.
If I truly did not care about these classes, I would not wake up every morning at 8:30am to go to a bunch of classes that I am 85% sure won't even transfer over because I have taken them already, I wouldn't be doing assignments in advance, I wouldn't be taking notes/participating in class. Yes, there are 2 out of the 10 of us who truly do not care enough to either show up or when they do show up, they are disruptive or high on weed, or both. I understand that sometimes we make silly mistakes sometimes yes, but Spanish is not our first language. If it were, would I be in these classes in the first place? No.
None the less, I think it is very unprofessional to tell students that they do not care and tell them they are lazy and that teachers are having meetings about how they are only in Spain to travel and need to change their attitudes. Especially when there are only a few students who actually fit the bill.
If they think that me showing up, participating, doing homework, and asking questions when I don't understand in class is me not caring, I obviously don't know how to care about class. If they truly think I do not care about class, I will show them what not caring looks like: I am not even going to bother showing up to class and I am going to travel like they think I do.
Thank goodness for the beach, because if I was not able to get away this weekend and relax with friends, I would have been stressed out for the weekend.
Hasta luego,
Thanks for reading :) hopefully this next week will be better (it is only two days long!!!!)
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