Location: CLH A
Date: 14:00-16:00 Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
Professor: A. Mohammed
On Wednesday, June 4th, 2008, I attended a lecture about math. Actually, I attended the same course before. The professor is about 40 or 50 years old. He said that he has been taught math for 10 to 15 years. That the professor is non-native English speaker is the reason that I could not understand completely. It was the worst situation that I encountered in York University including YUELI. I sat on the back of the lecture hall. In the beginning of the lecture, the professor asked two students to go to platform, and write formula of limit on the blackboard. After that, the professor pointed at me and asked me to go there and write the formula on the blackboard. I felt scared at that time. I walked downstairs. I stood near him, and said “I am a YUELI student”. He asked me what YUELI is. “YUELI is an English institute” I answered. He shouted “what? You come here for learning English”. All students in the lecture hall laughed. I found that I could not communicate with him, so I went to the platform. At that time, I was afraid because I knew nothing. I just wrote something which was similar to the previous formula, but he said “if you came here last time, you know how to write”. I thought that I was de facto not here last time, but I did not say anything. Finally, he asked me to go back to my seat. After that, he said formula is simple if students spend few minutes to remember that. This lecture was about “limit”. He analyzed exercise in the first hour. Some students asked him several questions, he asked the students to ask some critical and correct questions; otherwise, students could not get the right answers. I thought that it was right because teacher do not have enough time to answer all stupid questions. All students seem to be patient and hard-working in this lecture. They too notes all the time. He also said students should have their own experience. They should do exercise by themselves. If they feel simple when they do that by themselves, it is fine; however, that students feel simple when they look at how teacher do is useless. In the rest of the lecture, he talked about the introduction of continue function. That part was more complicate. Fortunately, he made some graph on the blackboard, so I could understand easily.
1 comment:
I read Marcus's post about this visit, and I got the impression that people were laughing at least partly because the professor is no native English speaker either -- so why go to his class to learn English? That is, I'm guessing he was partly making fun of himself a little. Besides, all over York the native English speakers are definitely a minority.
But from you post it does sound like he's a rather sarcastic guy. I looked him up on the Math Department home page, and he has a website (well, sort of a website):
http://www.math.yorku.ca/~alipm/
plus, it looks like he went to university himself in Germany (so, he didn't even study in English, at least for his Ph.D. degree).
And then, this course is not something for real mathematics majors; it's more for other majors who need a little math to do their research. Sometimes a professor can get a little sharp when he or she has to teach a course designed for non-majors. What he's doing seems really easy to him, but it's new to the students.
Well, I'm sorry if it was embarrassing, but I also should say, congratulations on your bravery! I'm sure you know as much about math as some of the students in the course!
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