What's wrong with these professors? Am I expecting too much?

It has been some time since I visited this forum for the last time. The reason is simple: I have been enrolled in a graduate program studying linguistics & translation theories.
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¡¡¡¡I have had some ideas about what it feels like to pursue purely academic studies and I¡¯d like to write them down here.
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¡¡¡¡The program is structured like this: there are about several dozens of courses available, each with a certain number of credits. Students have the freedom to choose from those courses but are supposed to acquire a total number of credits before being qualified for graduation. Some of the courses I selected area Western Literary Critism Theories, Cross-cultural Commmunication and a course given by an American literature professor, with a desguising name of ¡°American Social Economics and Culture¡° but dealing in fact with God knows what it is about the U.S.
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¡¡¡¡Let me start by saying something about my expectation of this program before coming to this university. I had done some research about this university and some of the famous scholars in this academic discipline, which had turned out many amazing results in compliment of these scholars. It goes without saying that I felt elated.
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¡¡¡¡Back to the campus life. The first day I went to one of the above courses, a middle-aged man came in and some students began to whipser to each other: this is the famous Prof.XXX. He is..., has ....things like that. From my previous research, I had learned that this famous scholar had hosted several national research projects in this discipline and was qualified as doctorate tutor.
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¡¡¡¡However, the only feeling I got after the class finished is that this guy really couldn¡¯t deliver a satisfatory performance in conducting this course in English, which, unfortunately and sarcastically, is supposed to be the study object, or at least the working language, in this course. The Professor conducted this course almost totally in Chinese, and those few words bumping out of his mouth revealed clearly to us that his pronunciation is, to give him due judgment, intolerable. But the worst part is yet to come: it seems this Professor had a powerful gift of haranguing on everthing that comes across his mind during his lecture, no matter how irrelevant his words were to this course. So we had to sit there and forced our thoughts to focus on some professor in Beijing writing to him one minute, and drifting to his interpretation experience (I¡¯m seriously doubtful about this) the other.
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¡¡¡¡As for the American professor¡¯s lecture, I have to say in the beginning everything seemed interesting. Usually the course is delivered this way: the professor had assigned us some reading materials and asked us to come to the course ¡°prepared¡°. He would first give a short lecture about the content we were going to study and, as he claimed, ask questions and host a discussion. However, as the course progressed, we came to find that this professor tended to neglect our feeling and just lectured on and on without leaving any time for our discussion or participation, and he spoke in such a monotonous and slow way that some of us (me myself included) sometimes even fell asleep before he finished his long harangue (the course lasts three hours one time and he often forgets to give a break).
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¡¡¡¡Fortunately, I have met a good tutor. He requires me to send him a report every week to brief him on my progress. I did so at first but soon came to find there existed a conflict between us:
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¡¡¡¡The academic training focuses on theoretic study, while my past experience had led me (wrongly perhaps) to think that what matters most is practice and that the best way to learn a thing is to practise doing it. However, as a student of translation, over the past two months, I have been exposed to a load of translation theories but received no formal practical training at all. And these theories, in my opinion, bears little or none on practical translation. I once broke this question with my tutor, he expressed emphthy and suggested that I "focus on the positive", without pointing out what was positive.
¡¡¡¡Yesterday I had a talk with a schoolmate, who is also studying linguistics/translation. He complained about his tutor being TOO busy getting involved in social activities to pay him enough attention. It is this very professor who hosted last week a lecture given by an internationally renowned scholar in linguistics. To be honest, his English is really LOUSY.
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¡¡¡¡I cannot help wondering: what has gone wrong with linguistics education and aren¡®t these professors ashamed of themselves?

 

My beef is with history professors (mine anyway). They put me to sleep with stuff I learned back in grade 3...and expect me to spout it back just like we were still IN grade 3. agh. I feel like a damn braindead robot.
not allowed to think or reason..jusr recite. Thank god I have no more general ed requirements after this semester

 

Threadstarter, I think you're standards are too high. From what I've heard, what you wrote is pretty much what I expect of my teachers. Anyways, my dad(might have been my brother, I don't remember) had this math teacher once who would write notes with his right hand, then erase them with his left hand. He would just walk from the left side of the board to the right writing. Now that's some bad fucking teaching.

 

yup thats what ive learned in the three and a half years that ive been studieng. university has some crap ass teatchers and you will never get used to it.

 

Sometimes people that are very knowledgeable in a subject, are not very good at teaching it to others.

 

Oh, the irony.

But really, that's what school is. It's pretty universal that you pick up the theory in school and the practice in the field.

And chances are, you'll wind up with some shitty profs. But to be fair, you sound like far from the perfect student, so maybe you should be blaming you're undergrad grades if you're grad program sucks.

 

Learning the basics and what generations of other people have though is probably worth knowing before forming opinions of your own.

Otherwise they might not really be worth hearing.

 

This greatly bothers me. I have yet to go into University, but I do hear of professors who are hired to teach an course in english, yet have great problems speaking it. I hope that I do not have a problem with this next year, but knowing that this issue is understood with a number of you, I am becoming quite worried.