High schools love offering college credit for their courses, and I’m now often asked to evaluate course syllabi in foreign languages to see if they are equivalent to any of our courses. It’s an enormous waste of time because I’m yet to see a single high school syllabus in Spanish 101 that would actually teach Spanish. Zero of the syllabi I get sent mention grammar. Instead, they require endless presentations on identity and “cultural” issues.
I keep explaining to the person who supervises these equivalencies for our university that there’s nothing I can do. If students can’t conjugate verbs in the present tense, I can’t say that they completed Spanish 101, no matter how many hours they spend prattling about identities in English in their high school class.
“At the end of this course, students will be able to maintain a conversation in the target language,” these syllabi claim. But it’s not true. You can’t maintain a conversation if you don’t know how to conjugate verbs, how to do do noun-adjective agreement or how to use object pronouns.
Everybody wants to teach ideology because it’s easy and nobody wants to do the hard work of making sure students can produce a simple grammatically correct sentence.
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