Ian Swenson .com

As the subject indicates, I now feel pity for my poor East Asian Societies professor, Dr. Kang. The poor guy expects so much and his class, sadly, is not equipped or enthusiastic enough to meet what he anticipates.

After a moderately fine lecture in the first half of class, he announced that we would be forming a large discussion group for the second hour of class. Mind you, this is the second day of class with one reading assignment under our belt and zero context in our pre-class knowledge banks. Before we rearranged the tables to make a square, he admitted that he spent 12 hours yesterday, Monday, preparing to meet our questions. He had troubles with the English translations of primary sources and went back to the original Chinese to cross reference and verify.

Poor, poor teacher … little did he know how few actually read the assignment (I read it, sad to say), how little comprehension there was beyond the surface level (I’m in that group), and how few people care enough to comment on it. The second hour degenerated into Dr. Kang essentially berating us/himself for the class’s lack of comprehension and interest.

Hopefully this might lead him to lowering his expectations and (please!) not spending 12 hours in prep for one class session.