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Unbelievable Ignorance...
Jun. 20th, 2012 12:40 pmM's niece was visiting for the last week or two. She just graduated from university she's been attending in St Louis, she's going back to do her Masters.
She told a story which left me completely floored at the level of stupidity and ignorance that was on display at a University.
To whit: as an international student she was asked to attend a class to check her English skills. On arrival somebody said that if you were a first language English speaker you could leave. She got up to leave. The teacher stopped her and asked her where she was from. She said "South Africa" - the teacher replied, "then you'd better stay..."
So she had to do remedial English, even though she's a native English speaker. THEN she gets a C in her first essay... annoying given she's an English Major. She queries the mark and the teacher replies thus. "well honey, your spelling was just plain awful, putting in all those weird U's in places that they shouldn't be. And you used a lot of run on sentences."
D asks for an example of the later and is pointed to something that wasn't anything of the sort.
She then tried a different tack and said she'd change the setting on her word processor to US English but could the teacher supply a list of common words spelled differently by the English, Australians, Canadians and South African's - the teacher's reply was she didn't know that there were such words...
Respect due to D who then lodged a formal complaint, the essay was marked by another teacher who gave her an A and they finally agreed she spoke the language. Apparently because she's from Africa people genuinely assumed her first language was Swahili, even though the primary non-England language where she comes from is Zulu, and in the country as a whole it''s Bantu...
Other problems she hit were people asking where she came from. South Africa. No, where are your parents from? South Africa. No. Where are their parents from? Mauritius. And so forth until she said France about 200 years ago.
Also to her credit she'd then ask them where their ancestors were from and what gave them any right to call themselves American.
South Africa is a complicated country people, but not that complicated.
She told a story which left me completely floored at the level of stupidity and ignorance that was on display at a University.
To whit: as an international student she was asked to attend a class to check her English skills. On arrival somebody said that if you were a first language English speaker you could leave. She got up to leave. The teacher stopped her and asked her where she was from. She said "South Africa" - the teacher replied, "then you'd better stay..."
So she had to do remedial English, even though she's a native English speaker. THEN she gets a C in her first essay... annoying given she's an English Major. She queries the mark and the teacher replies thus. "well honey, your spelling was just plain awful, putting in all those weird U's in places that they shouldn't be. And you used a lot of run on sentences."
D asks for an example of the later and is pointed to something that wasn't anything of the sort.
She then tried a different tack and said she'd change the setting on her word processor to US English but could the teacher supply a list of common words spelled differently by the English, Australians, Canadians and South African's - the teacher's reply was she didn't know that there were such words...
Respect due to D who then lodged a formal complaint, the essay was marked by another teacher who gave her an A and they finally agreed she spoke the language. Apparently because she's from Africa people genuinely assumed her first language was Swahili, even though the primary non-England language where she comes from is Zulu, and in the country as a whole it''s Bantu...
Other problems she hit were people asking where she came from. South Africa. No, where are your parents from? South Africa. No. Where are their parents from? Mauritius. And so forth until she said France about 200 years ago.
Also to her credit she'd then ask them where their ancestors were from and what gave them any right to call themselves American.
South Africa is a complicated country people, but not that complicated.
