Doctor Death

We have a lecturer who is pretty good, very easy to get along with, knows his stuff and conveys it well in an entertaining and easy-to-understand way. We have a tutor for the same subject who is not easy to get along with, does know her stuff but conveys it in such a haphazard and manic method that any semblence of understanding on our part is probably wrong. She talks in circles and is so frantic with what she’s trying to say that she will stumble over every thought and not explain a thing. Today’s real example:

(She appears at our table)
Tutor: “Doctor Death backlash, and no test for British doctors.”
Us: “huh?”
Tutor: “Doctor Death backlash, and no test for British doctors.”
(She walks away)
Friend: “Okay, she’s on drugs.”

Ten minutes later the tutor explains what we are supposed to do with the information she has just told us. Apparently they are two headlines from newspapers and we’re supposed to analyse them. We instead spend the rest of the tutorial analysing the poor communication skills of the tutor, who is such a scattered and hyper-stressed person that she does nothing to calm anyone down. Oh yeah, and she forgets to explain things during her explanations.

I am troubled by this tutor. I’ve had her before. I hoped that after 18 months she would have improved. Also, she told us to email her about when we would do our presentations. Magda and I said that we would do ours in week 8. I sent the email on Wednesday. No response. Today she tells us that week 8 is completely booked, so we’ll have to do it another time. Thanks. Thanks a lot.

Oh, onto the presentations, because this is quite funny. There are 28 students in the tutorial. We are allowed to work in pairs. We have presentations for the last 7 weeks of the semester. She will allow just 1 presentation per week.

[Do not be alarmed, you are now witnessing a great black hole in logic. Read that paragraph again if you need a good giggle for the day.]

Because my readers are quite gifted, you’ve already worked out that we would have to do 2 presentations a week to account for 14 groups over 7 weeks, so it’s a good thing that our tutor is not doing her Ph.D. in mathematics. It’s unfortunate that she’s doing it in something related to communication, but one day maybe she’ll be able to get a job at Fox News. That is, if News Corp don’t go completely bust before then. And they might.