Get me out of here... please...

I'm depressed.

And I mean it (This term has been pretty much overused in this century). I'm not upset. I'm not just feeling blue.

I am d.e.p.r.e.s.s.e.d.

School and work keep flooding into my life like Hurricane Katrina trashing Gulf Coast and flooding New Orleans.

I can't go on.

I really can't.

I just want to leave everything behind and claim my life back.

* * * * *

After attending a few lectures of my Master programme, I really think I've made a terribly wrong decision to pursue a Linguistics degree in Chinese University.

The department is dominated by Mainland professors and Mainland students. Don't get me wrong. It's not a racial issue. But as my major is English, I do prefer a mix of professors with different ethnic origins so as to gain a more extensive exposure.

Moreover, the Mainland professors would naturally switch to Putonghua during the lecture not for the sake of giving a linguistics example but because they went short of English to express themselves.

And tonight, I attended a compulsory core course about phonics and phonetics, however, ironically, the lecturer kept making unforgivable pronunciation mistakes: she said "systim" instead of "system", "syllable" instead of "syllabus", "pronounciation" instead of "pronunciation", "read" (/ri:d/) instead of "read" (/red/) in past tense, "semister" instead of "semester", "sitress" instead of "stress", "situdy" instead of "study"; she couldn't pronounce /th/ and her /d/ was tooooooo strong...

The list went on...

Prof. Barley (who is an *cough*expert*cough* of the benchmark test and taught me how to handle it in PGDE) suddenly looks charming when standing next to her. The only pronunciation difficulty she has is with /j/ and /g/ (and maybe some intonation problems as well).

I can assure you this is not a problem with the accent. And I don't want to be mean. To be frank, I don't care about these things if it's just another course about morphemes and things like that. But this course is about phonics and phonetics and the lecturer couldn't even make a good demonstration of how to accurately apply the skills in real-life communication. I dare say some of my students can do a better job than her.

She said she was going to teach us how to pronounce some 300 IPA in this course. I'm sure she can pronounce them all well. But I doubt if being able to pronounce every single existing IPA correctly means being able to pronounce a single word properly.

When I looked at the lecturer (who is a PhD degree holder), I'm not convinced.

I really have had enough of all these unprofessional professors and lectures. How can I tolerate them for 2 years!