STUDENT’S INSTRUCTOR EVALUATION FORM
Course Name: The Intermediate Class
Instructor: Sam Allingham, Student: Madelyn Chen
Please comment on the following areas and be as specific as possible:
- What are the instructor’s teaching strengths?
When talking about language, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” These limitations, of language and of life, are beautifully pressed in Sam Allingham’s short story “The Intermediate Class,” in which protagonist Kiril’s experience learning German also teaches him about self-reflexivity. The diversity of students created by Allingham—particularly the unnamed instructor with his desperate passion for piano and his grasping for an elusive life purpose, and Kiril with his quiet observation and unnamable dissatisfaction with his life—these classmates bring out the beauty of everyday people.
What connects all of them is what Allingham alludes to in an interview as “the desire to learn a language is also a desire to make a change in their lives,” harmonizing language with self-transformation. This subtle philosophizing is the foundation of the intermediate class, caught between total unfamiliarity when beginning a language and the ease of expertise. Allingham captures this uncanny valley when he writes in English what the students speak in German, as in Kiril’s introduction of “I have name of Kiril…Kiril is me.” The awkward grammar that sounds like English as a second language is actually German as another language, translated to English, spoken by a Russian, and this act of translation creates art and new meanings. The philosophical implications of simple words like “why” in English are exposed when asked in German to struggling students. The act of translation between teacher and student, between artist and audience, between reviewer and subject, is at once intimate and distancing, because things are lost in translation as often as they are found.
- How can this instructor improve as a teacher?
The theme of translation naturally involves using German words and references, but Allingham leaves the reader to figure out the context. Ich kann kein Deutsch (I do not know German). So often I would have to pause and use Google translate, discovering that “tschüss” is bye and “natürlich” is of course, immersing myself in the class like one trying to learn the “secret language” hinted at and which I do not fully understand. Perhaps this is another simple beauty, that words are more poignant when they are somewhat mysterious, that you cannot fully understand everything. There were hidden meanings I found intriguing to research, but I had to do a bit of digging and I wanted more hints from Allingham that they existed.
This is the meaning in the Schubert piece the instructor plays at the end, which I discovered is a musical transcription of Johann von Goethe’s poem “Der Erlkönig,” about a child’s death by a supernatural being. Though Schubert is Austrian, his translation of the German Goethe’s literature into music is an act of translation that is made more interesting when considering that the literal translation of the poem and Schubert’s lyrics are different from those reflected by official translators, whose specific job it is to communicate these meanings and whose translations are an art just like this review, which translates my feelings to the reader.
- Any other comments about this course?
“Language, especially a foreign one spoken by two people still learning it, is a dialogue across time and space, with history and with your own self.”
-Me
“My goal is real talking! My goal is friends! But it is so hard to talk in the work life, the home life. And where are the friends?”
-Alejandro, a classmate from Intermediate German
“No one feels another’s grief, no one understands another’s joy. People imagine they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.”
-Franz Schubert
“Oh, you’re right, Alejandro, it’s too stiff, it’s too strict, too expensive—and it’s not enough. But we have to do something, don’t we? Isn’t something better than nothing?”
-The unnamed instructor of Intermediate German