Bad Teachers Equal Bad Learning
November 21, 2009 | ama83
They come in all shapes, personalities, and temperaments. The nice thing about going to college is having some partial choice in the teachers you have to be stuck with for the next 3-4 months. Unfortunately, we cannot really know which teachers are good or bad until we have actually experienced them ourselves.
Fellow students can try to direct us with choosing instructors, but there always seems to be those teachers that have half of the students adoring them while the other half hates their guts. No matter what, we are bound to endure some classes with teachers we cannot stand, but are forced to endure.
The problem with having a teacher you dislike is that it can make it difficult to actually get your homework done or pay attention to the lecture. In more extreme cases, I have heard of students actually dropping classes because their teacher was such a jerk.
I once had a literature teacher who made me contemplate reporting her. She prided herself in causing doubt in people’s religious beliefs. She would tell stories of having debates with people who would walk away from the conversations feeling defeated. She actually referred to God as a “dick” in class once.
The annoying part of it was that many of the students in the class actually liked and admired her. For the life of me, I could not understand how anyone could admire this woman who insulted other people’s ways of living.
If you really dislike a teacher, you may be inclined to rebel a little and break some of the rules that teacher is enforcing. I always dreamed of doing this, but somehow could never bring myself to do it since my desire to have a good grade always drove me to try my best. But then, there are also those teachers who do not think that your best is good enough.
In creative writing, grades are supposed to be distributed according to completion of the assignments and progress with the material. Anyone who has taken a creative writing course can attest to this. However, this was not the case in a particular poetry class I had taken one semester.
This poetry teacher gave himself such airs that he believed the only correct way to write poetry was his style. Obviously, poetry has evolved and altered into many different styles, but this instructor believed that his way was the only right way.
Being a fan of Poe and Shakespeare, I admit that my own style of poetry is more old-fashioned and this teacher disliked it very much. He graded my poems low, so I did my best to alter my style according to what he was teaching. I look at those old poems now and barely recognize that it was my own writing because I had bent so much to this teacher’s will, and yet it still was not good enough. After completing all of the assignments and changing my style according to his directions, I still ended up with a C. Having taken many other creative writing courses, including other poetry classes, I can honestly say that my style was never bad enough to earn anything below an A before or after that particular poetry class.
So, how do we handle these kinds of teachers? Do we just suck it up the whole semester and suffer through it? For me, that was the only answer I knew. However, if there is ever a teacher who performs some kind of harassment, or blatantly insults students, the incidents definitely need to be taken to the dean. Just pray you’re not dealing with a teacher who has tenure. But that’s a subject for another blog.
Hence the title of the course, “Creative Writing” – this implies that we should use our creativity of writing. Some teachers, I will say, are just too ridiculous…most unbending.