I’m writing this to vent and maybe also to get a general idea of what other people think, so feel free to comment.
Being a student in my last semester, I can’t help but wonder, how most people see their life, and themselves in it. In the last few years I finished a lot of different courses and all of them have one thing in common: most of the work is done with presentations. You might say: that’s a good thing; people learn how to talk in front of others, express themselves clearly and use modern media in the process. Sadly I have to say that on the receiving end, this usually is nothing but boring.
How is it, that in a room full of people who study English, most of them are unable to speak two sentences in a row without raping the English language on the level of vocabulary or grammar. All of them have had extensive studies in the field, for at least six to seven years before they even started their university studies. At this moment I should probably mention that I’m a student at Trier in Germany, so English is not the native language, but acquired through second language studies in school. So yes, to attain the level of somebody whose mother tongue is English, is very difficult. But if you have difficulty expressing yourself and don’t know the grammar of a language, why would you study it at a university? Worst of all, most of these people are planning to become teachers and TEACH our children later on. To come back to the topic of presentations, the lack of language skill is the first problem you will encounter when you are part of the audience during a group presentation. Most of the time, the person who tries to present a topic (and remember this is with the goal of TEACHING everybody in the room something) has no idea how to express him/herself in a comprehensive way. This usually ends in a stuttering, and searching for words, that makes it difficult if not impossible to follow. Second, and that is something that I had to witness again today with painful agony, is the lack of technological knowledge.
Ok I consider myself to have a knack for technology, be it a computer or a simple DVD-player, but I’m still under the impression that it doesn’t take a degree in quantum physics to work either of those two. I’ll just take today’s example to make my point: A group of three students was doing a presentation on Fritz Lang’s movie “The big Heat” and for this purpose they had planned to show several scenes during their speech. However it seemed to be utterly impossible to work the DVD-player to a point that I had to ask myself if the design of a remote control is still too difficult for a UNIVERSITY STUDENT!!!! The play, pause, stop, forward, rewind buttons have been around for over twenty years now, nobody changes them, the design is so universally standardized that you could work it even if the language aids written besides the buttons where in Japanese. Still this group did not manage to skip to a different scene without excessive rewinding, and forwarding and sometimes even restarting the whole DVD just for the fun of it. I was under the impression we were in the 21st century and technology was not new to us, but apparently some of us still cook with fire and roll a stone in front of their cave at night.
Considering that it takes at least five years to finish your studies in Germany (six years to be realistic) it is disappointing that you have to waste your time, sitting through unprepared presentations where you are supposed to learn something only to listen to people jabber on about eeeh, aaah, oooh, I can’t remember the word, what was it, where was I, etc. Leaving the room after such a session and feeling dumber than before was not what I had in mind when I signed up for my studies…
Being a student in my last semester, I can’t help but wonder, how most people see their life, and themselves in it. In the last few years I finished a lot of different courses and all of them have one thing in common: most of the work is done with presentations. You might say: that’s a good thing; people learn how to talk in front of others, express themselves clearly and use modern media in the process. Sadly I have to say that on the receiving end, this usually is nothing but boring.
How is it, that in a room full of people who study English, most of them are unable to speak two sentences in a row without raping the English language on the level of vocabulary or grammar. All of them have had extensive studies in the field, for at least six to seven years before they even started their university studies. At this moment I should probably mention that I’m a student at Trier in Germany, so English is not the native language, but acquired through second language studies in school. So yes, to attain the level of somebody whose mother tongue is English, is very difficult. But if you have difficulty expressing yourself and don’t know the grammar of a language, why would you study it at a university? Worst of all, most of these people are planning to become teachers and TEACH our children later on. To come back to the topic of presentations, the lack of language skill is the first problem you will encounter when you are part of the audience during a group presentation. Most of the time, the person who tries to present a topic (and remember this is with the goal of TEACHING everybody in the room something) has no idea how to express him/herself in a comprehensive way. This usually ends in a stuttering, and searching for words, that makes it difficult if not impossible to follow. Second, and that is something that I had to witness again today with painful agony, is the lack of technological knowledge.
Ok I consider myself to have a knack for technology, be it a computer or a simple DVD-player, but I’m still under the impression that it doesn’t take a degree in quantum physics to work either of those two. I’ll just take today’s example to make my point: A group of three students was doing a presentation on Fritz Lang’s movie “The big Heat” and for this purpose they had planned to show several scenes during their speech. However it seemed to be utterly impossible to work the DVD-player to a point that I had to ask myself if the design of a remote control is still too difficult for a UNIVERSITY STUDENT!!!! The play, pause, stop, forward, rewind buttons have been around for over twenty years now, nobody changes them, the design is so universally standardized that you could work it even if the language aids written besides the buttons where in Japanese. Still this group did not manage to skip to a different scene without excessive rewinding, and forwarding and sometimes even restarting the whole DVD just for the fun of it. I was under the impression we were in the 21st century and technology was not new to us, but apparently some of us still cook with fire and roll a stone in front of their cave at night.
Considering that it takes at least five years to finish your studies in Germany (six years to be realistic) it is disappointing that you have to waste your time, sitting through unprepared presentations where you are supposed to learn something only to listen to people jabber on about eeeh, aaah, oooh, I can’t remember the word, what was it, where was I, etc. Leaving the room after such a session and feeling dumber than before was not what I had in mind when I signed up for my studies…
1 comment:
So true my friend :)
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