Day 104 - Murder at Algonquin

I signed up for a French class (Beginner's 1) at Algonquin College a week ago, and today was my first class. And with the way it went, today is also my last class.

It was an unmitigated disaster. The teacher is completely inept. She did not have the syllabus ready, she did not a coherent lesson plan, she did not even know all the verbs in VANDERTRAMP (which a french educator should know), she did not even have the list of students (we had to write it down on a piece of paper). Basically, she did not have her shit together at all. Her teaching strategy is extremely curious: she literally opened the class by writing down the conjugation to etre and avoir, which any retard can just Google if he/she (oh sorry, en francais, il/elle) forgets. Then, she does the same thing except in Future simple and Past perfect form. Hello? This is Beginner 1. What the hell are you doing with future simple and past perfect in the first class of Beginner 1? I felt really bad for the poor Chinese girl in front that didn't even know what "je", "vous", "il/elle" means, she was clearly ready to die. This woman does not know how to teach.

The teacher was so god damn incompetent. Her piss poor teaching method actually sparked an argument between her and 3 or 4 classmates. Things were getting angry and people were getting pissed, snide remarks were openly and freely made by some of the more vocal classmates.

The problem with the grammar lesson (which is not what I was looking for) was that she does not actually explain the grammar coherently, because she is a poor English speaker, and apparently a poor grasp of the linguistic and grammatical principles of French as well. She just explains things in a way that only people that already know (and thus don't need to have things explained) would understand, so it was futile. It was obvious she had no plan, and she stated that she "just teaches whatever she wants", so she intend to not ever having a plan.

For the last third of the class, she FINALLY started to write down some damn dialogues, in forms of personal questions (where do you live, what's your name, etc). Things got considerably better, people got less pissed, but the teaching experience is still crippled by her absolute ineptitude, so most people weren't that eager and people were still pretty pissed. At that point, I knew I was not going to learn any French from her, and judging from the reactions of other classmates, I think a lot of people will ask for a refund.

What pisses me off is that this class is ridiculously expensive, like, 1.3 times more expensive than the Alliance Francais course. I thought that a college class is a safe bet because institutions like this would have a fucking clue, but then I learned that college administration, like the people that attend there, have mostly no fucking clue. Tabarnak!

Anyways, I'm going to get a refund on Wednesday. I still want to take a French class before I go to France, so I'm thinking of going to Alliance Francais in Ottawa. It's about 100 dollars cheaper, and rumor has it that it has a high satisfaction rate (although the Ottawa website does look sketchy, and did not have any evidence to back up the high satisfaction rate they claimed). We'll see. Apparently Alliance Francais is like McDonald's, the product quality is about the same, and they are interchangeable; you complete one, you can continue on at another place.