FYUP teacher workshop fails to clear doubts – The Times of India

    Teachers want the practical part of the course to be conducted and evaluated internally by the colleges. Fifty-five of the total 75 marks are for continuous evaluation but the workshop report says otherwise. 

    “The 20 mark final question paper may be divided equally between theory and practice,” it says, “And the translation passage may be given both in Devnagri and Roman scripts.” This, in fact, is what teachers were most afraid of. “The university can’t force Hindi. Teachers said this at the workshop but it doesn’t reflect in the report,” says Harriet Raghunathan who teaches English at Jesus and Mary College and attended the workshop. 

    She adds that she teaches the Indian Literature foundation course — DU was forced to devise one after students from the northeastern states protested against the compulsory modern Indian language foundation course — and says the 17 languages are represented in her class of 35. That’s 35 students who don’t possess enough Hindi for a compulsory translation course and no teacher in college — or all of DU— is likely to know that many languages; neither is it feasible for the teacher to identify and request help from 17 “native speakers”, as the workshop report suggests, for continuous evaluation that’s meant to be on a day-to-day basis. 

    “There are also a lot of English teachers who are not good in Hindi,” points out Raghunathan. A teacher who had brought this up at the meeting was apparently told she shouldn’t have been given this course to teach if she doesn’t know Hindi. “The problem is with the premise that bilinguality has to be in Hindi and English,” says Sanam Khanna who teaches a Kamala Nehru College. 

    Another teacher at the workshop pointed out that the kind of translation being taught in this course is not likely to fetch jobs — that most agencies that employ translators require a more “rigorous” training.