Second english essay.

Intente alejarme del error, pero escribir en ingles sigue siendo complicado para mi. Ojala les guste. Mejor, ojala lo lean.


Everyone has had a bad teacher on their lives. Schools and college tend to provide that. They can be distinguished by their incompetence, difficulty to communicate, inability to assume and correct mistakes, lousy class material, bad attitude while teaching and sensitivity to criticism.

I’ve had a few of them and their influence, by making me hate some subjects, helped me to decide what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Making my way away from physics closed a few doors, leading my career decision to the humanity field, for an example. But I guess I was lucky, because I love to write and I would have done everything to make that dream come true.

What if someone really wanted to go for engineering and that bad teacher destroys his/her illusions? How can that affect the rest of that life? My guess is that those circumstances lead to disappointment and to try and not succeed. A bad class can change lots of lives.

As an affected person, I guess I can speak with authority about this matter. It’s a kind of wisdom learned only by experiencing classroom exile, academic vendettas and another teaching countermeasures against free thinking and hyperactive minds.

One of my latest experiences showed up at the semester B of 2009. Rafael Solarte was the man in charge of teaching me “Oral and Written Communication” and I was really excited with the class. Back then, I thought that someone could teach me how to write and I wanted to learn how to do it in my new college. But this class was an entire mess. At some point, I thought that he was doing on purpose everything on his hands to make four credits of my first semester at UAO really miserable.

Being leaded by self-help books, he tried to expand his optimistic message by quoting his favorite authors in an oral and written way. Also, with his so-called life experience, he quoted himself on most classes to exemplify good choices and good writing. Before losing most interest on the class, I heard that when he was young, shyness was all that he knew. What came after was not good enough.

His bad class didn’t make me question the value of what I was studying. They really made me question myself about what was I going to do with this academic waste of time and how to get some payback for so many lies told, so many wrong examples and so many misleads on important topics...

The only thing I had left to do was to create conscience of this issue.

Unfortunately, the way I chose to do it was not the appropriate one. Most things that I did during that class turned out to be experiments to see what could piss Solarte off.

One of the first things I did was to mock him about his self help books. A few years ago, after going through a personal crisis, I started thinking that people deep inside knew the solution for their issues, and that the only thing between the depression and the well being was the courage to take the right path. He knew that from me, right in front of the classroom. He tried to defend himself with no success.

His mistakes during classes earned him severe criticism from me. Since my expectations were high, as mentioned before, I thought the class would be interesting, useful and filled with knowledge. His reiterated mistakes led me to participate in an attempt to correct some of them, but it was no good, so I started laughing at him in most cases, and spreading the mistake to my classmates so they could laugh.

But I didn’t laugh always. Two occasions made me think again about the way that I had chosen. One time, he dared to say that economy had nothing to do with culture. In another class, he mentioned that he was going to teach us how to make money by reading and writing. Knowing something about anthropology, and feeling profound respect for the labor of a writer, I was truly outraged.

By mocking him I had forgotten that the inability to learn was the main reason to burst out that way. I had lost consciousness.

When I realized that, it came to my eyes too that I was fighting against his ignorance all alone. Almost everyone on the classroom laughed with me while doing it, but when important decisions had to be taken they felt pity for him, or just backed down on complaining with the college.

Most students just want to attend and approve, and they feel that their learning process is complete by staying with the knowledge that the teacher offers… Their inability to distinguish a bad from a good one marks them with a bad formation on their careers.

But I could tell the difference, so I made an important decision. After trying Solarte’s path, joke path and indifference path (basically trying everything), I reached the moment to step up by myself. The main issue became to correct with more arguments.

It would have been hypocrite from me to affirm that I stopped making fun of him. The truth is that I just left the cruel ones and really got focus on the academic field. This class was becoming an obstacle instead of a stage, so it had to be crossed at all costs. I could feel that he didn’t like me and that his feelings were somewhere between anger and fear. The desire to approve the class went over the animadversion.

I also found out that the only reason that kept me from failing was the fact that I’m a good student and my performance was on top of most of the people there with me. It made me laugh, to be honest. Being responsible and good at my thing gave me the opportunity to insult the lifestyle of a teacher…

So I kept delivering homework’s on time, with fine and complete answers. Even improving his exams and workshops, which were filled with mistakes and conceptual confusions.

I guess that was the most effective action to lift the level of the class, and to epistemologically piss of this guy. He started testing me during class in an attempt to discredit me, and proving that he was wiser than me. I remember this occasion that he told me to lead a forum about a very long and meaningful text from William Ospina, right at the beginning of the class. Despite the fact that I had read it just a few minutes before, the classmates agreed that my class was the most complete, fun and interesting at the time.

At the end of the forum, he asked us to resume the entire reading with one word. The class had been so great that Solarte felt like giving away notes for the good performance. I answered according to the text (what was said there) and he gave me a low grade. The beautiful thing about it was that with the text on hand, I proved him wrong and he upped my grade

I could have fun that way. All the papers I made for that class included that my learning process had nothing to do with him. By making awe of other classes, teachers and disciplines, speaking of life experiences that had nothing to do with the class, and still making a point for each one of the assignments, I was effectively letting him know that he wasn’t teaching me anything, and that he was an idiot.

Mid-terms and final exams came through painfully and slowly, but things were better after this decision. At the end of the semester, my grades were great and I had gone thru Rafael Solarte.

Personally, I think that the constructive criticism is overrated. There’s no way to repair, and there’s no way to create awareness of this issues without destroying some. But it’s a fact that without the desire to improve, destruction has no meaning.

Making fun of these situations might be fun, and bothering a bad teacher leaving him defenseless can leave a warm feeling inside, but there’s neither real learning nor knowledge there. Bad classes became a worst waste of time that way.

The responsibility of the well being of the class is also in charge of students and, if we care, teachers will be better. Learning save us hundreds and thousands and millions of year of evolving. Arguing in favor of a good education, and being punctual with academic duties, is the way to make a difference in college; and to save time, suffering and concerns.

I found out soon enough.