Is having a bad teacher REALLY an excuse?

90PercentGravity
Sun, 30 May 2010 21:21:07 +0000

I guess it depends what you are blaming them for. I used to tutor math at a community college and there was one instructor who taught off curriculum, and very poorly at that. He taught a developmental algebra class, but the material he covered was stuff you would find in upper division classes. He also didn’t use a book. Instead, he would hand out blurry print outs from web pages like wikipedia. Most of the tutors didn’t even know what he was covering. By the end of the semester his classes would be almost empty. Those who didn’t drop (generally for fin aid reasons) rarely passed, and those who did pass were rarely successful in the next class level.

Surely that is a “bad” instructor who can be blamed for a lot. Although, in that case I think the school was far more at fault. I always wished the students would get together and complain to the department head, but because of my position I couldn’t say anything negative about this person.

It was very frustrating because it made students feel even more insecure about their math abilities, and I think lead to a lot of students quitting school completely thinking they couldn’t “hack it.”