In Continuum.

Before we get to that, however, a rant. The whole career of teaching is, not just going to be based on what you know, but also on how you translate what you know to your students. What goes on in a classroom, for the most part, is about the lecturer or the teacher, strips down the knowledge that he or she already knows, and then disseminating them to the students who are supposed to receive and digest these information into a form that they can comprehend and understand. That is what is supposed to happen, of course, the whole process of communicating an idea from point A to point B. In order to do that, I feel, language plays a very crucial part to ensure the success of this transmission of knowledge. I don't suppose knowledge could have been passed down the centuries if they were written in a language that we could understand, if they were really languages at all. If they actually wrote those things down in gibberish, nobody would ever understand what he was talking about. A good command in language just seems to be an important factor to be a good teacher, I feel, and this China Man seems to have little to none of those. 

Everybody had a problem with the way that he spoke. His pronunciation was one thing, the inability to get his point across was another. Aside from all the gags about him pronouncing "election" as "erection" half the time, I usually find it difficult to understand his point. Or rather, I do understand his point, but there are times when I feel like he has a hard time proving to us that he is, in fact, a real professor. He comes to class a minute or two late all the time, but that is perfectly fine with me. His conducting of the class, however, doesn't sit right with me most of the time, and you can't help but picture all those money poured into this course go down the gutter when you see your lecturer reading word for word from the presentation slides. It wouldn't be half as bad if he actually prepared those slides - he doesn't. In fact, not only did he not make the presentation slides himself, he doesn't have the habit to set exam papers himself either. That, we guessed, because a paper set by him would have a lot more grammatical mistakes, for sure. 

Perhaps my expectations were too high (or, were they?), but the image of a mass communication lecturer in my mind would be someone who is very receptive of different opinions, different perspectives, to have an opened mind. This lecturer, however, seems to have been brought up in the kind of high context family we read about only in textbooks. He's a very traditional man, perhaps too traditional for his own good. I don't think he accepts change or new ideas very well, for some reason, always putting down new technologies and ideas that the class may propose during the lessons. There was a part of the lecture when we started talking about online piracy, and he asked the class if anybody has ever downloaded music from the internet. Of course, the majority of us have, and then he went on to say that he doesn't like the idea of downloading music from the internet because, according to him, the quality of the music isn't very good. Seriously? Shouldn't a mass communication lecturer at least know that the quality of music files on the internet has nothing to do with the medium in which it is stored? The so-called "bad quality" of the music has nothing to do with the fact that it was from the internet, but the way the files were compressed or ripped from a CD in the very first place. So, seriously?

That's trivial, so I shall let it slide. However, the topic somehow came to the one about homosexuality at one point, and he started showing his distaste for homosexuals in front of everybody. Keep in mind, of course, he wasn't half as insulting as Rosemary back in last semester, but he sure wasn't very open to the idea of two men, or two women, having sex either. He found the idea of homosexuals to be repulsive, and he said so with the presence of actual homosexuals in the lecture theater - I shall not give names, but I guess we all know who. I thought that was a little tactless, to say things like that. I suppose teachers have an obligation to not publicly proclaim their religious and political affiliations. Shouldn't the same be said about their opinions on other sensitive topics such as homosexuality? The last time a lecturer voiced her opinion about how "the chinese likes to cheat", there was an online petition against her within a matter of days. Words from a lecturer, no matter how mild, offends certain groups of people for sure, and I felt that it wasn't exactly very appropriate. And, he dislikes Ellen Degeneres simply because - she's a lesbian. Now, I'm not a soccer mom, but I love Ellen Degeneres. Who cares if she is a lesbian anyway, at least she has good taste (Portia is freakin' hot). 

We were going through the mid-terms paper the other day, and he flashed the questions on the screen in front of the class while he read out the answers. We were at question 13, I think, and apparently he was looking at the answer for question 14, and the answers were different (the answer for question 13 was A, while the answer for question 14 was B, for example). When he announced the wrong answer, everybody gasped and started arguing that the answer key must have been wrong. Now, you would expect a professor to check the question again and see if the answer key was wrong or not, right? No, he simply argued his way through as to why "B" was really the correct answer for question 13, when he was looking at the wrong question altogether. It surprised me as to how he could assume the wrong answer in a question and then argue his way through that he and the answer key were right, and that we were wrong. He noticed his mistake after some time, but at this point I was already appalled at how he could argue with us with the wrong answer. Keep in mind, that we are speaking of a supposedly "world renowned" mass communication scholar here. How did that happen?

The last straw finally came, when our presentations started rolling on Tuesday. You see, in his words, we were supposed to be given "up to fifteen minutes". In normal terms, "up to fifteen minutes" usually means that we have a maximum of fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes top, nothing more than fifteen minutes, however way you prefer to interpret it. The batch of people that went up to present on Tuesday certainly did not get the kind of timing that he supposedly gave us. All of them complained that his timing was "off", and that he only gave about twelve to thirteen minutes for each group, max. Now, two or three minutes may not seem like a lot in normal terms, but every minute is pretty crucial in a presentation context. You take two minutes off the actual timing, and you are left with a hurried and incomplete presentation that is definitely going to affect the quality at the very end. Still, my group adjusted before our own presentation today, we made changes and we compromised. I told my group that he'd probably give us about twelve minutes this time around, worst case scenario, and we'd have to play along with his game. 

So, our turn came along during the presentation, and I brought my iPod Touch along to the front of the class to give time to the rest of the group. As the presentation started, the China Man sat in the front row and gave his scheduled nods to the presentation slides, those random scribbling on a piece of paper, and whatnot. He told the class that we'd probably only get thirteen minutes for each group this time around, since we had eight groups instead of seven on Tuesday. He was rushing for time, and our timings had to be compromised - fair enough, since we already predicted the worst. By the end of Joyce's presentation, however, he held up his piece of paper with the number "2" written on it, which meant that I only had two more minutes to finish a four minute speech. Now, that was at nine minutes, and it said so on the screen of my iPod Touch. Nine minutes plus two minutes is eleven minutes, China Man, you promised two more. As a result, I had to rush through everything I had to say, and I had to skip a bunch of points which were make-or-break points of our paper. I was so frustrated by the time he flashed the paper with the number "0" on it that I wanted to tear out his throat and eat it. 

He claimed that he checked with the clock hanging on the wall in the lecture hall, but everybody knew that he had a problem with telling time. He kept referring to the class that presented on Tuesday as "yesterday" today. Wednesday comes before Thursday, sir, and we didn't have classes yesterday. I was so frustrated with the man that I left the classroom for a while to collect myself, perhaps to calm my nerves a little. It was frustrating to know that a fifteen minute presentation was forced to shrink till just eleven minutes, and I could have talked about so much more during my part. It made my part look under-developed, made me look bad. The worst part was by the time the lesson was done, we were actually half an hour before the time was supposed to end! Clearly, with eight groups, we would have made the time anyway, why the initial rush? All the groups could have took their time with fifteen minutes and finish the presentations in a comfortable pace anyway. And yes, the class ends at 1:45 PM China Man, not 1:30PM like you are always so confused with. 

I am glad to be rid of him, for now, and I sure hope that I won't get this lecturer when I eventually head to the States next year. I cannot bring myself to respect a lecturer who cannot tell the time, one, and someone who reads from presentation slides that he never made. That is not to mention the fact that he seems to have a problem with homosexuals, movies made in this decade, music from the internet, and all those things that might be deemed to be out of tradition for him. I suppose I can tolerate a narrow-minded lecturer, but somebody who is going to deprive me of my presentation time is not going to sit with me very well. That funny accent is starting to get on my nerves even as I am typing this very line, and it doesn't matter any longer if I do badly for this module. It just seems so out of reach right now, all thanks to our friend here. Somebody should buy him a watch to tell time, a watch with a stopwatch at least. His cheap imitation of a watch probably tells two timings - day time and night time.