A student decided it would be a good idea to help me read his homework by inserting translations of “difficult” Spanish words into English. Just in case my Spanish vocabulary is poor.
I love people condescending to me for no reason.
18 responses to “Condescending”
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Write to him you aren’t sure what the English word means, and whether he could include Ukrainian / Russian translation too. 🙂
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Why did I get horrible ad inserted in the adjective U ?
I didn’t do it, of course. What, one can’t write U – word any longer without getting “buy one” ad?LikeLike
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Are you sure there is no malware on the computer you are using? This happened to me once, a malware installed itself and started inserting ads into every other word.
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I wanted to ask, how many languages do you know on mother tongue level and which?
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Russian, English, and Spanish. Speaking is easiest in Russian, reading in English, and writing in Spanish. 🙂
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Why is reading easier in English than Russian? How can it be, if you studied at school & uni there, and read a lot in Russian?
Also I wanted to ask about foreign tongue studying. I noticed that after graduating from school, even already during 2 last years of high school, one hardly learns new English words. I suppose, it means that level of English is much lower than mother tongue, but stopped raising despite reading blogs and some books. Have you noticed anything like that? How did you solve the problem in your English studies?
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I think it’s because I learned to read English before I did Russian. Nowadays, I get distracted very easily from reading in Russian, it’s hard to concentrate on a page.
My vocabulary grows all the time but I don;t know a better way for it than reading. It makes sense to copy out sentences containing new words and then try to incorporate similar sentences into your own speaking.
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I would have thought that the student was unsure of the meaning of the word and was clarifying what s/he meant. I did that a time or two when I was taking a language course. If I thought of a word, but thought maybe it might mean something different from what I thought, I would be inclined to do some such thing. Are you sure that the student thought you might not know the word??
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Maybe he wasn’t sure he was using the right word and was trying to indicate what he meant to say?
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Condescending or not, I don’t think the student should do that.
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Condescending or not, I don’t think the student should do that.
I do not agree with that, David Gendron. For example, I have had students write the word “homomorphism” on a topology final exam. The word they meant was “homeomorphism” which is quite different. If the student had written something like (1-1, continuous and with continuous inverse) I would have probably realized that he was just not very good at spelling, not that he was clueless about the mathematics. I strongly suspect that this was the kind of thing happening here; Clarissa’s student was unsure of the word and needed to explain the intended meaning.
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OK, I agree with everybody. I overreacted. I get very cranky when I have to get up at the ungodly hour of 8 am.
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No need to be angry, but I don’t think a student should do that (or at least, ey can give an explanation in Spanish) in a language course.
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“I don’t see what is different about a math course here.”
Because this is a Spanish course and this student gave his explanation in English, not in Spanish.
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Because this is a Spanish course and this student gave his explanation in English, not in Spanish.
OK, fair enough.
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And again, in a math course, he should do that if he’s not sure of the meaning of a word.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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