On 29/02/2012 11:21 AM, Doug Freyburger wrote:
> Bob Terwilliger wrote:
>>
>> Heh... When I attended the University of Florida, one of my friends was
>> in a calculus class taught by a Korean professor who couldn't speak
>> English well enough to be understood. So the professor would write
>> equations on the board, and if anyone had questions, he'd just write the
>> same equations again.
>
> A lot of college students report experiences like that in one class or
> another. There doesn't even need to be alanguage barrier for it to
> happen.

I was never good at math but my worst year was the last one in high
school when we had a Chinese guy who used to scribble theorems across
the chalkboard. I would be trying to write it all down, really not
understanding. As he got to the end of the side blackboard he would go
back and start erasing it saying "change to shoot purples". After a
while we realized that he was saying that he want to change it to suit
his purpose. When we got into calculus he was talking about terms like
teeter, dirty, hooomahgaw.


I would not have taken any math at university except that I was majoring
in a social science and had to take probability and statistics. Son of a
bitch if my math professor is not another Chang, though this one spoke
better Enrish.