I stayed after class tonight and talked with my english teacher about her past/present classes.
apparently in my own class (she's seen proof of their backgrounds), we've had a stanford doctor, a professional singer, and a bunch of other professionals taking the class just so they can write pretty decently (this is EWRT 1A). these people have to take an actual english class when what they really want is a tutor. my teacher said that she would suggest to the students that they drop and go to like english 100b (to learn sentence structure or something) instead. that's why by now like 50% of the class has dropped (recently) because they were too proud or stubborn to take the english they actually needed. my teacher would talk to them on the first day if it was obvious they weren't the normal english student (foreign student/adult with graduate degree) but they would all assure her that this is the class they want, even after she said that this class isn't going to teach them what they need to learn. is this sort of problem with professional people having to take classes or programs to relearn their english skills common?
she also told me of a Taiwanese woman who's a professional technical writer in Taiwan but that she wanted to do a book on Taiwan's "silicon valley" in english so she would go to the writing lab (tutoring area where teachers proof read your writing) and submit the book basically in separate parts. My teacher was the one she would go to and she could pretty easily catch on so my teacher told her that what she was doing was going to get her a copyright lawsuit cause it's not her writing. so she asked what she needs to do here and my teacher said write about any superfluous sort of thing (you are there to improve writing, not your homework/books) so the woman came back and wrote an essay about getting screwed (fucked). my teacher said there is no way you can write about that because it's just not proper and the woman said everybody's writing about it and they argued so much they went to the librarian and the librarian actually brought up a book saying all the things you can't write about in american society and getting laid was in there. the woman still kept bitching and my teacher asked if she wants to talk to the dean about it. the Taiwanese woman left and my teacher never saw her again.
english classes are pretty fucked up.
