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[unikorento]

Today I had a four hour lecture on French phonetics. Out of the seven students taking the class, I was the only one who showed up.

The lecturer, aside from being French, is also insane.

It was awkward.

Comments

[unikorento]

Yes. A normal lecturer would have gone "fuck it, I wasn't feeling like phonetics either. Read that for next time." This one? Not a chance. We went through each paragraph in two chapters, and he interrupted himself constantly to make sure I was getting it. I wasn't, because the class was in French, and he speaks fast, and the topic was the physics of how sound is made and perceived. To make sure I wasn't just nodding along, he asked me questions, and wouldn't let up until he got what he wanted.
Now, this sounds like a good idea from a teaching point of view, but is a huge, huge faux-pas over here. In a culture where every child knows that if they don't have anything to say, they shouldn't say anything at all, being made to guess at things in front of an authority figure is very, very uncomfortable. I could take it, since I knew he wasn't doing it to torture me or anything, but I would so have loved to just throw something at the man.

Then he wrote up a mini-exam and showed it to me, and said "we're going to have this next time. No need to tell the others." >.