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.
Clarissa's Blog 
Teaching grammar is so easy, way easier than preparing and evaluating presentations on “culture.”
If high school loves giving college credit, I feel that sometimes I should be offering high school credits instead of college ones.
Ol.
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The problem with these high school courses is that the teachers speak very little Spanish. They can’t teach grammar because they don’t know it.
I was recently observing a freshly minted school teacher of French. She struggled to say “August 8th” in French. It took her several tries. And it still was incorrect both on the level of the grammar and the pronunciation. Then she tried to pronounce “le calendrier” and it sounded like “lo calendy”. A student asked her if French had its own slang and she said that she didn’t know but probably not. I’m still traumatized from witnessing this rape of the French language.
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Oh yes. Absolutely. I saw that too. In Ontario, the new French immersion program got rid entirely of grammar teaching. We have started to witness the negative effects of this policy in our classes. Students think they talk French, but no.
Here, many students use “vous” to talk to each other, which also indicates that on top of grammar, culture is not taught in high school.
Ol.
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My child’s dual enrollment classes, state of SC but I don’t if it’s a statewide thing or just her school, were run by various universities – faculty with graduate degrees in their field (PhD or MFA, generally, though I think there was one excellent history professor teaching with just an MA), hired by their community college or state U to teach that school’s course for that school’s credit. More than one university was running classes in the same high school building at the same time, based on what territorial divide I do not know.
Really just an extension of a very old program in SC that let high school students sign out of school and go attend college classes, had a friend who went to MIT in the late 80’s after doing dual enrollment at the nearest state U for math and science in high school.
Whether the colleges are creating rigorous courses is another question, definitely a concern as the universities have a financial incentive to admit generously, but at least they are the ones responsible for their respective school’s standards. Liberal arts syllabi all lined up with what I recalled from undergrad, and professor’s content was right in line with the kind of challenging discussion that’s part of college; I’ve heard BIO 101 ran a little light.
We of course are not a very progressive state.
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Our system is like a mockery of what you describe. It’s like we heard vague rumors about what exists elsewhere and tried to recreate it in the clumsiest way possible.
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“we heard vague rumors … and tried to recreate it in the clumsiest way possible”
Cargo Cult Academics… though now that I think of it, Cargo Cult thinking seems to be an integral part of the neoliberal mindset – build a crude facsimile of something that exists within a complex production system and expect to have the same results (or better) than the system.
It’s like a person in a drought is trying to think of what could help. “hmmmm people in places where it’s raining carry around magic sticks that open like flowers… I know! I’ll make a giant magic stick with a round thing on top… for sure it will rain then!”
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One is reminded of that $30m subsidized grocery store Mamdani is supposed to be building in Brooklyn.
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Yes, there’s such a problem of starvation in this country that government groceries are crucial. I have no idea how people will even survive until 2029 when the store will finally be built.
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