Teaching all students with understanding

The first semester of my freshman year, I took finite math. Needless to say, I struggled pretty hard.

As I sat each day in that class fruitlessly trying to remember why I was drawing Venn diagrams, I would stare at the word problems on the screen and feel like I was trying to understand another language.

Stochastic processes? Bernoulli trials? I grasped at straws for their definitions every day, and my teacher was less than helpful to say the least.

But what if every class I took was like that? What if I absolutely struggled in each class just to understand what anybody was saying? And what if the teacher condemned me for not understanding what went on in class?

That’s a reality for many international students.

What makes it worse is so many professors and graduate assistants at IU are so ill-prepared to deal with these students that they end up treating them poorly.

With the price international students pay to come to school here, they should expect to be treated with patience, or at the very least given the resources to enable understanding.

One of my current classes is around 40 percent international, which is obvious because these students all sit together and mutter collectively under their breath trying to reach a joint understanding of what the teacher is saying.

In our most recent presentations, one of the international students obviously gave his presentation directly from the unreliable pages of Wikipedia. What really bothered me in this situation was how my teacher handled it.

She pulled him up in front of the class and spoke really slowly and loudly, “In this country, copying from a website is very bad. Do you understand?”

It was terrible. The student hung his head in embarrassment and shame, because, despite his mistake and his language barrier, he has emotions and he didn’t deserve to be paraded around like a monkey in the middle of class.

As a teacher, she utterly failed her students. She effectively taught about 20 students that this poor kid is an idiot. And her reason? He isn’t from this country.

Part of the magic of teaching is getting to lead students to knowledge, but instead she led him and the rest of us to the recognition of a barrier bigger than language between American and international students.

The perception is that they are stupid, totally unable to understand American customs or classes.

I constantly hear “Why would they come to America if they can’t even speak the language?” Well that’s a Test Of English as a Foreign Language requirement problem, but that doesn’t matter because they are here already. Why are we so insistent on pointing out all the reasons they shouldn’t be?

Would it kill us as students and teachers to try to make their experience a little easier?

We are all Hoosiers, and it’s about time we start acting like it. Until there are more resources for learning English so they can reach out to us for help, we need to reach out to them as students and educators.

We all deserve to look back on our college days fondly. Even finite might have been saved for me with a little help and understanding, but I guess I’ll never know. I just don’t wish that experience on anybody.

­— jkaneshi@indiana.edu