I go to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I'm only on my second semester, and already I've been frustrated by the seemingly inordinate amount of TAs who can barely speak a lick of English. I've read a few different articles about the dramatic increase in the number of adjunct profs, etc. I'm curious if it's similar at most other schools, because this seems like a rapidly increasing problem to me.

Essentially, from what I understand, colleges are bringing in as many adjuncts as possible because they come much cheaper than full-time professors, which can often result in a lesser quality of instruction for students. Obviously TAs are a different beast, but Miami seems to have a niche for finding fresh-off-the-boat foreign students who speak poor English and are seemingly out of touch with the norms of American education.

I had an adjunct professor for English first semester; he was the star of my thread regarding pursuing a grade change. Some of you may remember him as the guy who forced his classes to write a final paper on transexuals/intersexuals based on 3 very graphic films, one featuring 'dickclits', etc. I also had an Asian calculus professor who spoke very choppy English that was difficult to understand. From talking with numerous other students, this seems to be a fairly standard experience for calculus professors here.

This semester, I've been treated to a TA straight out of Ghana, who apparently took a sprint English speaking course just before this year. He leads my discussion session for Intro to Botany, and has made the experience miserable. He tells us we have a 6 question quiz, with his sample question being 'What part of a flower produces fruits? Answer: The ovaries.' This leads the entire class to believe we're in for a fairly simple quiz just ensuring we've done the reading. Instead, we come in to a 20 question quiz, where that 'sample question' is merely one part of a 4 part question and hardly indicative of what the quiz would be like.

Then he spends half of the last session lecturing about how the vast majority turned our last assignment in using the .docx format instead of .doc or .txt . Never mind the fact that it's somewhat ridiculous to refuse to accept anything but outdated technology in a university setting, but it's completely asinine to spend that much time on something so minuscule. After every 2 sentences he says, "Everyone understand? Cool" with a ****-eating grin after the 'cool' that leads one to believe he took a course on common English slang terms to "americanize" him much the way they have customer support use American names when they answer phones in second/third world countries. Of course, I end up with a 31/45 on the assignment. I'm the type of student that knows when I've done a good job on an assignment, when I've half-assed it, and when I've completely bull****ted it. I'm confident I did well on this, yet I get a high D. His grading has struck me as fairly suspect, and I think this may stem partially from his limited vocabulary and working use of English.

I'm curious to hear what others have to say regarding these types of situations. Quite frankly, given the high (and rising) costs of a college education, I think it's ridiculous that universities are providing a lesser product and doing so at every opportunity. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a hardcore racist or anything along those lines (I've dated an Asian girl for the better part of 6 years for those thinking I just hate Asians and chose to rail on my calculus prof as a result), but I'm getting pretty sick of having these TAs/profs when shelling out ~20k/year. It's really off-putting to say the least.

have really only ever had one TA whose english speaking abilites interfered (imo) with his ability to teach the recitation. it was a calc course which i understood pretty well so it didnt bother me but ya what you're going through sucks. the ta's at my university (if they aren't native speakers) must pass a written/spoken examination

ive had worse english speaking TA's though so really its the luck of the draw imo. most upper level courses i've taken rely less and less on the TA as a primary form of instruciton

When I was in school, many of my adjunct professors had real-world experience and connections that trumped the tenured faculty, on account of the fact that they hadn't been in academia for the past 20 years.

OP, thats depressing to hear. I graduated from Miami U. in 2006. I only had 1 TA that fits in with what you're describing and that was freshman year english as well.

My advice would be to suck it up, go in to talk to said "teachers" as much as possible to ask questions, get advice on problems/homework etc. This will at least show that you're committed to them, which, in all honesty in my experience, translates to better final grades.

That being said, once you get into your major at Miami, all the professors are phenomonal. I switched from Economics to Journalism while at Miami and had all great professors in both programs soph-senior years. GL

I can see how this can be very frustrating for someone like you who's trying to study hard and get good grades..
I think what you can do here is get other students to protest with you..
If you take it to the professor or someone in the department, they can view it as some sort of racism or just discrimination because none of the other students never complained about it.
I'm thinking if you can get like 10%-20% of you classmates to agree with you and take it to higher authority, something can definitely be done..
And by something I mean the department or the professor letting the TA know about the complaints and tell him to try harder, etc. which in turn can create an angry TA who can barely speak English to make your life more miserable..
I highly doubt they will get a new TA in the middle of the semester..more like impossible..maybe in the following semester if there are many complaints..
so i guess you can just suck it up and try to adapt to his teachings and such or take the chance and form a group

Unfortunately, complaining won't help this semester or any other semester. They hire the least expensive, qualified applicants for the job. It tends to be that in certain fields, many of those folks are not native speakers. They pass the TOEFL and that's all they need. There's nothing you can do about it except go to a different school.

Yeah, I'm not expecting anything to change (or going to waste my time fruitlessly in any attempt to do so), was just kind of venting and looking to hear if this situation is similar at other schools.

I didn't get into my first two choices due to the fact that I didn't work hard at all in high school. I've considered transferring and this might lead me to do so. I'm happy with the social life and have joined a fraternity so leaving now would be hard (especially leaving behind in-state tuition), but I may revisit my original first choice, UVA. Not sure how difficult it is to get in as a transfer student.

This is becoming more and more common in the math and computer fields. I am a computer science major, and I've resigned to the fact that I will probably not be able to understand a majority of my teachers as I get into upper level courses.

I particularly hate my software development teacher, who, in addition to barely speaking english, this is first semester being a teacher instead of a TA and it is obvious he doesn't know what he is doing. All of our homework is written strangely that makes it hard to understand. He is also constantly changing deadlines, assignments, etc. 3 times this semester I've worked on a project, just to have the requirements changed and have to go re-write parts of it, or have trouble even doing them because he is so vague and hard to understand on what he wants us to do. Then, the average midterm score in this class was 60, with 75% of the class failing (mind you, this shouldn't be that difficult of a course) and he doesn't seem to understand that maybe he isn't teaching the material well.

I actually got into an argument over him once over counting a question wrong on an exam because I used the term "overwrites" instead of "overrides", and I told him I should get credit because I can't understand the difference in the two when he lectures. At least he gave me half credit.

haha, try having a COMM professor who is 5 months fresh from china and knows VERY poor engrish.... lol, my school is notorious for this

Just got a text from a girl in this class. She missed the last three weeks of class and as a result, got a lecture today. Not a slap on the wrist...he kept her for an hour and 20 minutes and talked about how the American education system is a joke (certainly can be an argument made for that) and we all just go to school to party and don't care. I can't imagine having to go through that.

Why did she miss the class and does she have anything less than an A in that class? If she is doing medicore/poorly then its obviously her fault, but I still don't see why the teacher should say anything becaues its her future. I only attended my discrete mathematics class 4 times or so, just the first day and tests. I got a 100% on the first midterm. So if the teacher ever tries to give her **** she should be able to just say, "Look I'm doing really well in the class just doing the reading outside, I don't get much out of the lectures that I can't get from the reading."

On a side note, I do really hate how most kids just come to college to just party. It's really a shame that they aren't taking advantage of such an opportunity.

As for the thread. I had a linear algebra teacher and physics teacher. One was straight from Africa, and the other from China. They were impossible to understand, but I just read the book outside of class and got an A.

What is really lame about this is that most of these intro classes could be taught pretty effectively by someone with english ability, a teaching manual, and no other knowledge of the subject. But for 20k a year you can't even get that. I only had one prof that was a total disaster as an undergrad, it was a CS class and he had just came from china and barely spoke english. I went to about 1/3 of classes but got an A.
Anyway I find it rare for to draw somebody that is so bad at english that their lectures are hard to understand. I'm sure it depends on field, but most decent schools get enough qualified applicants that they can choose to only accept people who get a reasonable toefl score. But what you do get oftentimes is someone from china where the teaching style is way different (absolutely sucks) and the class ends up being almost impossible as a result.

i've taken a few science courses with TA's of indian descent. While I have no doubt that they'll conduct great research in their fields and be a positive force in these sciences, they suck ass at teaching and it really ****s up the system. One of many reasons that I hate college and most things about it's system of operation.