My opinion about some teachers4 min read

As I am leaving Strasbourg in some weeks, I can safely tell you my opinion about the teachers here in Strasbourg as they will only have two weeks to be mad at me.

In case you are one of my class mates you will probably be able to guess who I am talking about but as I think that pointing at someone and saying “You are nasty!” is very unpolite, I will not name any teacher in particular but rather tell you my opinion in general about the way some teachers teach here in Strasbourg.

My fundamental motto is “Shit happens, now we’ve got to deal with it”. Instead of shouting and being angry about some bad thing that just happened or that just went wrong, I prefer to shout once, take a breath and then see how we can resolve the problem that just appeared. Mistakes are human and I will not blame anybody for doing mistakes. And when something goes wrong, I am the last one to squeal to the teacher. Instead, I will help to fix it or tell the others my thoughts about what we should do differently. This will reduce anger and will ensure that everybody learns from the mistakes we do. If we shout at each other for every mistake, we will waste time, no one will learn anything, we will all feel bad and won’t be motivated to finish the exercise.

I am talking about this because I see some teachers here being angry at me because I do stuff wrong. And I don’t know if this is really the case or if my perception is wrong, but I have the feeling that they are mostly angry at me and not at others, but this might really be just my perception. It occurred sometimes already that there was a teacher who just pulled the instrument out of my hand asking me in a very upset way if I ever did what I was just about to do before and if I know in the slightest what I am currently doing. Man, I am in the last year of my bachelor studies! I hope that I do know what I am doing and in most cases, I’ve already done it at least once before. But the last time I did it might be some weeks or even months ago so I will need some minutes to remember every single detail about how to do it. So obviously, I do make mistakes. As I just said nobody is perfect, I am not neither. But instead of shouting at me, you could just as easily explain what I just did wrong so that I can learn from it.

So, this is one type of teacher here and kind of the reason why I am writing this article. Unfortunately, there is not just one teacher of that kind here, there is a small hand full of them. On the other hand, I know another teacher that I absolutely love, just because he actually helps and tells us what we should do better. But unfortunately, there is only one teacher of that kind, but that is better than nothing.

Next there are teachers who just tell us what to do but never explain why. So, we just repeat what they did without understanding what and why we do it and if there is just one single change in the environment, we are screwed.

I’m not saying that teachers in Munich are perfect, I know many professors whose way of teaching just makes everyone in the room sleepy in an instant but I think that mostly the first kind of teacher is well less present in Munich which makes the atmosphere a lot better.

Ok, so what is now left to do is to write a good and catchy conclusion. But I have no idea what to say apart from what I just said. So, let’s just write that I have no idea what to write and it should be fine? Well, you have to judge whether you share my point of view or if you think that things are different. In any case, let me know what you think and spam that comment box down there (Really, spam it!)