Hey, it’s me, I‘m back again with another highly critical negative post regarding language learning standards!!!

Yesterday I attended the German Comics Microcourse final project presentations, and wow were those some of the longest minutes of my life!!

The goal of this event was for each student who had been enrolled in the Comics Microcourse with Frau Preuss (a 1 credit hour upper division GERM course) to present their poster, which was a comic, to the group. Ideally, this would be reading the comic to us and explaining the motivation behind it, the creative process, and maybe some concepts they learned from the class. 

Let me start with the good things:

There were several students whose comics were visually appealing, or had interesting premises. The use of German vocabulary throughout generally was fitting and reasonable. The stories for the most part made sense. Several were funny or meaningful.

Now let me continue on with the bad things:

1. Most everyone (excepting maybe 2 students) enrolled in the microcourse was at too low of a German proficiency to adequately explain their poster, and in some cases could not even read, pronounce, or understand their own text they had put in their comic.
2. It was apparent in some students’ reading – intonation and emphasis, that they had absolutely no idea what the words meant as they said them aloud.
3. There were several students from first semester German courses in the room, so Frau Preuss kept interrupting to translate the broken German into English. Again, these are comics, and in my opinion we could have done without the constant translation, as the plot of the comics is really self explanatory. 
4. There were some students who had prepared a written-out speech to give with their comic presentation, but set it aside at the last minute and decided to “wing it”. This was a mistake that lead to incredibly inefficient presentations that were painful to sit through.

Super nitpicky things: several key grammatical phrases were just wrong every time, even for the higher level students. 

In my opinion, our standards for presentations have dropped to an embarrassing low. If this is the final project for an upper-division course, it should be engaging and be CLEAR THAT YOU PREPARED FOR IT.

Truly the worst thing is that the final presentation of the day was a capstone presentation over the German constitutions, and this was actually delivered very well, but had to be rushed due to the delays and poor presentation efficiency of the previous microcourse presentations. I personally would have preferred to hear more from Karl about the Constitutions and less from the Microcoursers.

I vow personally to crush everyone else in my classes in presentations from this day forth and compensate for the terror that has been inflicted upon me this semester.

With disappointment,

Audrey Hirchert-Walton