Nora Goodfriend-Koven

Nora is in all respects a wretched human being. She can't do or say anything nice to the students in her class. She penalizes people for tardiness, for example, and is obsessed that someone might get away with being late. She makes notes to herself during class to record late arrivals. During exams, students may not leave class, even if they become sick. Her first words to a student who had joined the class late were You know that you now have an F in the class, don't you? (Unexcused absences result in failure, and this student had missed the first few classes because she had been on a waiting list to get in.)

The health care interpreter course runs two semesters. Speakers of all languages meet together for the class sessions conducted by Nora and break into separate language groups for Saturday afternoon classes taught by language coaches. The language coaches are native speakers of another language who have worked as health care interpreters. In my class, we had Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russian groups. I gather from talking to my classmates in the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russian groups that their language coaches were quite good and that they did quite a bit of practice interpreting. The Spanish language coach, however, was useless. Unlike Nora, Carlos Vargas is a nice guy, but he doesn't do his job. Instead of having his students practice interpreting, he spends his time telling anecdotes. These anecdotes were occasionally relevant to the subject of cultural differences, but they were a poor substitute for practice interpreting. Carlos often repeated the same anecdotes, so they became less useful as time went on. In the entire second semester, when we met in our language groups more often than in the first semester, the Spanish group practiced interpreting just once.

In addition to being unpleasant, Nora is a hypocrite. She frequently discusses public health issues such as smoking, junk food consumption, and diabetes, but is herself obese. It's strange that she doesn't see the irony of a health educator who is dangerously overweight. She never cut students any slack for being late but once started class at hour late because she had to pick up her husband at the airport late the previous night and wanted to sleep an extra hour. She has a policy of answering students' cell phones if the phones ring during class. She never actually carried through on this threat in my class but said that she has in her other classes. In any case, we spent a lot of time talking about how health care interpreters have to maintain patient confidentiality. There are many ways in which answering other people's cell phones could violate their privacy a child might be calling his or her parent, for example, or someone might be getting a call from a doctor about an HIV test. Nora apparently hasn't considered or ignores these issues. Finally, staff members at San Francisco General Hospital told some of my classmates who were doing practice interpreting there that students have been telling Nora for some years that Carlos does his job very poorly. Despite this notice, Nora continues to employ him, with the result that Spanish-speaking students are deprived of the practice they need.

There is no reason to put up with Nora's unpleasantness, as her class is for the most part a waste of time. We spent a huge amount of time on two group projects relating to cultural differences, for example. Both projects were worthless and wasted many, many hours. Two or three class sessions, rather than two semesters, would have sufficed to cover the useful lessons, such as interpreting in the third person and conducting a pre-session briefing for the patient and health care provider. We had some useful speakers on medical topics. A much better way to learn the medical terminology required by an interpreter, though, is to take a medical terminology course (CCSF offers these courses).

Most of my fellow students, in all four language groups, disliked Nora. I advise students to avoid Nora under all circumstances. I recommend that they look into interpreter training programs offered at other institutions.