“Let such teach others who themselves excel,
And censure freely who have written well.”
~Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (ll. 15-16).
According to Pope you can only criticize someone else when you are an expert in the field yourself and you can only be a teacher if you excel in what you teach. When we were discussing his An Essay on Criticism during Literature class last Thursday, we came to the conclusion that this is not exactly necessary. There are plenty of well-known musicians who have been taught by teachers who have never become famous themselves; there are plenty of good literature critics who have never written a book themselves; some students can perfectly tell us whether a teacher is good or bad.
Thursday evening, the last class of the day is Philosophy of Science. This class is being taught by a woman who studied Dutch language and culture and once upon a time followed a course in secondary education but never taught there. This was probably for her own good, because – let me tell you – the students would have finished her off.
She probably prepared herself for teaching this course about four years ago by making PowerPoint presentations that are overflowing with text. She uses these presentations over and over again and this year is no different. After having taught this course for several years, you would expect someone (a teacher) to be able to come up with great, memorable, funny, exciting examples and anecdotes. But no. She just reads aloud what’s on the slides; oftentimes mispronouncing names of certain philosophers or scientists or not being able to pronounce them at all.
At the start of this semester, she informed us about obligatory attendance. In other words, we need to be there all the time in order to be able to participate in the exam. Because she is such a horrible teacher and she doesn’t add anything to the slides or the book we need to read, you often find students rebelling or just doing other stuff during class (like marking tests). For someone who teaches a Master’s of Education course this is pretty bad teaching!
Then there’s something else bothering me about her, which has nothing to do with her teaching skills. The pants she wears are always too tight. You can see “everything”. This has led the students to lovingly call her Cameltoe. Since we’re in a building where they also teach people to become primary school teachers and we’re in a classroom where they’re probably practicing their blackboard writing skills, we got a little treat last Thursday. There, in big white letters, was the perfectly written word Kameel which is of course Dutch for camel. Coincidence? I think not.
