Obviously my bad attitude is coming back to bite me in the ass (even tho the attitude used to be good and has been worsened by outside influences - honest I was not born so negative and jaded! - product of my environment here in this bastion of intellectual prowess and responsibility)... today in the first hour of orals I had nothing but NFAs. Usually they mix it up a bit but these 3 made sure to sign up for the last possible moment - didn't help of course.
To clarify, I do not hold anything against people who can't learn languages and can not acquire any Functional Ability whatsoever. There are things in the universe which present uncommon challenges to me, so I know there are things that certain people really cannot and will not ever master.
However, it does make for difficult oral interviews. The moreso since I sincerely try quite hard to bring something out of each person that is at least slightly communicative, partly so they won't feel they've failed so utterly, and partly to try to average out their grade. Call it an on-the-spot curve. I always ask more questions of someone who messes up the first few in an attempt to bring their interview grade into an OK range. I do understand how nerve-wracking it is to be in one of these interviews. (See, I'm not a total hardass - I used to be quite decent, and continue to manifest vestiges of this quality on rare occasions.)
Sometimes people are so completely lost tho that there is no saving them or their grade. Such was the case with these three. It is sad but from a practical standpoint, even tho I appreciate how difficult the interviews (and in fact All Things French Or Foreign Language-related) are for these people, it is nonetheless stressful and tedious from my end. sigh.
At Arizona we had a foreign language waiver for which people could apply. If someone went thru 1 or more semesters of a foreign language and experienced hardship above and beyond the norm, they could petition, with the recommendation of their former instructor, not to have to do a language. For certain majors this was sufficient, for others they then needed to take a reading course in a foreign language as a substitute (we had those in Ohio, too - many of my earliest tutor students, when I was in undergrad, were people struggling thru the reading courses -- see I do understand that languages are truly inaccessible to many people). Oh do I ever wish we had something along any of these lines here for these poor linguistically-challenged souls, of which there are more than a few.... (And not just so that I don't have to have them in class, honest.) But of course such options belong to the category "Things that make sense but with which we don't trouble ourselves since it's related to that vague idea of... of... um... er.... oh! I got it: Education!... rather than to Football." I guess if a big enough percentage of football players ever have significant trouble with languages someone will think of addressing this concern...
On the other hand usually they have no problem here pandering to students for things which I consider to be far less worthy (which came first, the entitlER or the entitlEE?!) so it's a little puzzling that they wouldn't start throwing out core curriculum if enough people complained about its difficulty... Quite boggling. Probably a direct correlation between the amount of monetary clout behind the students who complain. Obviously not enough affluent students have griped yet about the right things.
So the linguistically-challenged middle class students are still basically fucked.
Yeah so now you know I'm not only sick of the entitlement generation but also a reverse-snob, economically-speaking. If that's the worst thing you ever learn about me here, then yay you.
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