Just One More (Sorry!)

I thought we had reached the pinnacle of stupidity with Melibea prostituting herself to feed her father. But no, the real culmination to the course has been reached in another essay which informed me that Juan y Juana of Miguel de Unamuno's short story "Al correr los años" are a typical North American family. 

This reminds me of this old joke where a professor asks the class, "Do you have any questions before we proceed to write the final exam?" "Yes," a student says. "What is the name of this course?"

The name of our course was Survey of Spanish Literature. I have no idea what kind of a weird mental perversion could have led anybody to assume that Unamuno's Juan and Juana were North American.

What Melibea and Lazarillo Have in Common

I know that those of my readers who are not Hispanists must be sick and tired of this kind of posts, but I have only four final essays more to grade, and then I promise that no more posts like this one will appear. I simply need to share this with my colleagues because otherwise I will explode.

A student just informed me that Melibea and Lazarillo de Tormes have a lot in common. For example, they both have to make a living by prostituting themselves. When Melibea's father discovers that his daughter has been selling her body to put food on their table (sic!), he becomes distraught. Lazarillo, in the meanwhile, sells sexual favors to a blind man AND to his mother's new husband.

Of course, there are also some differences between these works of literature. For instance, La Celestina belongs to the Romanticism while Lazarillo de Tormes is a Realist PLAY. 

Now, a question for everybody. Is this student doing this just to bug me? This cannot possibly be written in earnest, right? Right?

Romantic or Not?

So here is a story for you. A man and a woman get married after a very long engagement. She can't get pregnant for a while, and the husband gets distraught because he needs to have a child to prove his masculinity. Finally, the wife gets pregnant and the husband rejoices.

Over the years, they have 8 more kids. The wife adores them all, but the husband doesn't even remember the birthdays of any of the kids (except the first one who proved his masculinity). Giving birth to all these kids and taking care of them changed the wife's body. She is not as thin as she used to be, and there are now a few wrinkles on her face. So the husband loses interest and starts walking around all miserable because his wife is not 20 anymore. Obviously, the husband didn't get any younger either over the years. None of that matters to the wife, however, who loves him as much as ever.

One day, the wife catches the husband kissing a picture and suspects that he is in love with another woman. It turns out, however, that he is kissing the portrait of her from 20 years ago, when she looked young and fresh. The wife is delighted, they kiss and make up.

This is the plot of a short story by Miguel de Unamuno. I have bored you with this because I'm trying to figure out what it says about my students that they unanimously categorized this as "the most romantic story ever" and loved it more than any other text we read in our course because of its "happy ending."

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Confused and Cautiously Optimistic

OK, I don't know what's going on here, but I'm grading final essays in my literature course, and five essays in a row are just brilliant. I was dreading this round of grading because I fully expected a fresh batch of "Cervantes would be an OK writer if only his characters were less weird" kind of statements. But these essays are phenomenal. At least, the five I have read so far are.

Is it possible that all my hard work paid off? I'm actually enjoying myself reading these essays. Wow.

P.S. As of now, I have graded 11 essays and loved all of them passionately. Am I a good teacher, or what?

The Individual Approach in Teaching

Because I'm a sucker for punishment (a.k.a a very responsible educator dedicated to the intellectual well-being of her students), I allow students in my literature courses to send me rough drafts of their essays as many times as they need before handing in the final version. I go over the rough drafts and make extensive comments on how the essays can be improved. This, of course, makes the end of the semester particularly brutal for me. However, when all that pays off, I feel really fantastic.

There is a student who, for the longest time, couldn't understand what it meant to write an essay in a literature class. Over the course of 4 rough drafts, this student regaled me with statements of the "La Celestina is an interesting work of literature" variety. With every new version of the essay, I kept nudging and pushing the student towards engaging with the text critically, towards learning the difference between describing and analyzing. And this morning, finally, the student sent me the fifth rough draft that has actual analysis of the text. This version of the essay is still not perfect, of course, but it is engaging, lucid and free of trivial observations and annoying generalizations. 

It is my firm belief that all you need is to awaken students' critical faculties once. Just one single time. The moment when a person has their first taste of what it means to become free of the constraints of received wisdoms and produce a critical opinion of their own, they will never go back to regurgitating boring platitudes. This is what my role as an educator really is.

I feel very happy right now. 

How to Talk to Students Without Getting in Trouble, Part II

Another important rule of interacting with students is that, no matter how close your relationship with a student is, it is never a good idea to comment on the student's weight or physical attributes. I had this male professor who kept bugging his female students with questions like, "How much do you weigh? Have you been gaining weight? Are you sure you don't eat too much?" I am blessed with having a very healthy attitude towards my body, so whenever this professor greeted me with "You are getting really fat, Clarissa. Why are you so fat?", I had no problem responding in a jocular tone, "Well, I never be as fat as you, professor" or "You know how much I admire you, so I'm trying to emulate you and get as fat as you are." However, students who had body image issues or even had a history of eating disorders suffered greatly. 

It's a good idea to avoid touching students when it isn't absolutely necessary. There was this professor who really liked my hair. I like my hair, too, and I understand how one might feel the compulsion to touch it. However, it would get really annoying to be sitting at the library or working in the stacks and feel somebody grab my hair and tug it. I'm especially sensitive to people touching my head, so it was extremely annoying. I couldn't do the same thing to the professor to teach him a lesson because he had no hair I could tug.

Self-deprecation is a tool that many professors use to show students that they are human and to make the students like them. I, however, believe that self-deprecation is counter-productive in the classroom. Not only all of my colleagues, administrators, staff members and janitors are completely 100% fantastic, but so am I. If there is something that I don't know or forgot to do, I just say so without engaging in a self-deprecating rant that would only make everybody feel uncomfortable. Students are not my therapy group and it is not their job to make me feel better about myself. 

It is often hard to keep one's cool, especially at the end of the semester when work accumulates and tempers get frayed. I saw a very soft-spoken and polite colleague last week yell at a student in a way that made even me feel scared. I'm sure that the student really messed up to make the professor this angry. I also think that yelling is a completely normal and healthy way of venting one's frustrations. However, I believe that it is only permissible to yell at people who have no problem yelling back at you. When you have a person who is powerless in their relationship with you, raising your voice is just abusive. When I feel that I'm about to explode, I just leave and take a walk around the building while trying to breathe very deep. This usually helps to contain the anger. Blogging about it is another great venue of releasing pent up anger.

You can find the first part of this post here.

Vengeance Is Mine, I Will Repay

I just finished creating the final oral exam for my refuseniks, which is how I now refer to the students in my Spanish language class who consistently refuse to speak Spanish. Oh, it is going to be one painful exam, people. Of course, for the students who actually did the activities I brought to each class session, this exam will be nothing but total, unadulterated fun. However, it will imply a lot of pain and suffering for those who used class time to discuss (in English) the comparative merits of their manicurists. (I'm not kidding, my friends. It got so bad that I even taught them how to say manicure, nail polish, nail file, etc. hoping that they will at least get something out of the course.) I have a lot of manicure lovers in that group.

I can't wait for that exam.

How to Talk to Students Without Getting in Trouble, Part I

From Spanish prof's great blog (that isn't written in Spanish, so everybody can head over there and enjoy it), I discovered that Dr. Calvo might have made some remarks that are perfectly acceptable in a Spanish-speaking country but that might have been used against him in a culture of prissiness that has engulfed the American academia. I also come from a different culture, one that enjoys a much greater freedom with words, has a dark sense of humor and is the opposite of prissy. With my colleagues and administrators, I'm always as outspoken and outrageous as I am at home (or on this blog). The students, however, are a completely different matter.

I cultivate a huge distance from my students. You wouldn't think that if you observed my teaching because my teaching style is very laid-back, I make a lot of jokes, and tell funny stories all the time. The distance is always there, however. For one, the jokes and the funny stories I tell are only and exclusively about me. Yesterday, for example, I alleviated the tension during a very difficult lecture on post-modernism by telling the story of my 4-year-long hunt for a bathroom cabinet in my own apartment.

Another rule is never ever to discuss other students when they are absent or ask any questions about them. Even the most innocuous comment of the "I see that John isn't here again" variety can get interpreted badly. As for other professors, the administrators, other courses, the university at large, the staff members, the lab workers, etc., I only refer to them in extremely positive terms. "Professor X is really fantastic and the Dean Y is the best ever" are the only comments students will ever hear from me, even if I dislike both the professor and the dean immensely.

As everybody must have noticed by now, I have very strong political beliefs. My convictions, however, never get into the classroom. Whenever students express their opinions on political issues, my only response is, "This is very interesting. Does anybody want to respond to this?" A passionate feminist who writes an essay condemning machismo has just as much of a chance to get an A for her paper as a Conservative student who writes an anti-immigration piece. As long as the essay is structured the way it should be, is well-written, coherent, and well-argued, I couldn't care less what political beliefs it supports. 

I had a student once who kept trying to bait me by saying things like "Feminism is just stupid" or "I'm sick and tired of feminism." I always responded to such comments by asking the students to return to the reading and discuss some very technical aspect of the text. It is not my place to educate students on feminism or politics. I teach Spanish language and literature. Everything else is left outside of the classroom. 

Giving Up

A time comes when one has to recognize that it's impossible to be successful every single time. Sometimes, you have to admit defeat even in things that you are normally very good at. So today I have finally recognized that I failed utterly and completely at teaching my Intermediate Spanish II course. 

I really gave it my all, people. I planned each class as if it were going to be observed by the Chair, the Dean and the Chancellor. I prepared original activities for every single class session. I put on videos, created word games, lab activities, and board games tailored specifically to this group's needs. And after all that effort, I am handing out graded mini-quizzes today and the students (every single one of them, too) say "Thank you." Can you believe this? After all my efforts, after a long conversation we had at the end of our last meeting about the importance of using Spanish in the classroom, they cannot even bring themselves to say "Gracias." Two weeks before the end of the semester I can't even get them to say "thank you" in the target language.

Of course, I could have stopped in front of every one of them and insisted they say it in Spanish. I have been doing just that since January, though, and it hasn't worked. I asked, I exhorted, I explained, I threatened, I insisted, and then I hand out oral activities and they proceed to do them. . . in English. "What are you doing??" I ask them. "Oh, you mean we should do this in Spanish?" they respond, staring at me with huge, completely sincere eyes. (Once again, I taught this course at this university twice before, never had this problem. Or any problem, actually.) I start telling them about the oral exam we will have next week. "Will it be in Spanish?" the students ask again. Do I need to mention that they ask this question in English?

So I just gave up and withdrew from this course and this group both emotionally and intellectually. I'm sorry that I've been harping so much on this subject but this is so frustrating that I will either blow off steam here, on the blog, or my blood pressure will start going up.

Grant

So I just got the news that I have been awarded my first grant. Among other nice things, the grant will give me a course release from one of my courses next semester. The goal of the grant is to offer me time and resources to prepare my trademark Hispanic Civilization course as a blended one. I also get money for technology that will make the project possible. It's good to know that I can write a winning grant. This comes just in time for my Birthday next week.

This grant is the very first step in a multi-stage plan to move half of my teaching load online. Everybody will benefit in the end: the students who have family and work obligations and find it difficult to attend all of their courses in person, the administrators who will get to retain students we would have otherwise lost, and, of course, me.

I will share my experiences of creating a blended and an online course on this blog.

Tired

I'm tired, people. As I'm preparing for my Birthday trip to St. Louis this weekend, I need to do everything well ahead so that the grading for next week is done, the classes and the mini-quizzes are prepared. I've been working since 9 am today with a short nap during the day. And there is still a class to prepare and mini-quizzes to grade. 

In my Survey of Spanish literature course, we finally got to the stuff that represents my main area of specialization. We will be reading two of my favorite writers Luis Martin Santos and Juan Goytisolo from tomorrow on. And it turns out that it is a lot harder for me to prepare classes on these writers than, say, on Arcipreste de Hita or Espronceda whom I know and like a lot less. It is very difficult to squeeze all the knowledge I have on these authors and everything I have to say about them into two short lectures. I could probably spend the entire 50 minutes assigned to the lecture on Goytisolo quoting his work from memory.

When I first read Goytisolo's greatest novel Count Julian, my Spanish was still pretty weak. Most of Goytisolo's literary allusions which abound in the novel went right over my head. Still, the very first sentences of this novel, whichI consider to be the best novel of the XXth century not just in Spain but anywhere in the world, gripped me like no text had ever done before or since:

harsh homeland, the falsest, most miserable imaginable, I shall never return to you: with eyes still closed, it is there before you, enveloped in the blurry ubiquity of sleep and thus invisible, but nonetheless cleverly and subtly suggested, foreshortened and far in the distance: with even the tiniest details recognizable, outlined, as you yourself admit, with such scrupulous accuracy as to border on the maniacal: one day. another, and yet another; ever the same: a predictable sharpness of contour, a mere cardboard model, in reduced scale, of a familiar landscape; burning beneath a fiery sun perhaps? or enveloped in lowering clouds?: impossible to say: an unpredictable climate, this. 

Mind you, no translation can do justice to Goytisolo's text. It is worth learning Spanish just to read the novel, in my opinion. The best thing about this novel is the pure, undiluted rage that the narrator expresses towards every accepted piety he can find. And then, after declaring a cruel war on stereotypes, cliches and reductive ideologies, he ends up creating his own set of stereotypes and binary oppositions that is just as reductive that the one he battled against. Count Julian loses his war against ideology but his spectacular defeat produces the most magnificent and profound work of literature I have ever encountered.

This, of course, is my own reading of the novel. Many people would disagree with it. That is precisely where Count Julian's power resides. It is a novel that establishes a dialogue of its own with all readers who are ready to abandon themselves to the breathtaking adventure of reading it.

And now I think I'm ready to go and prepare my class. Blogging rocks, everybody.

Pregnant Student versus a Hungover One

Reader J. kindly sent me a link to a blog post of a woman who is going to college while pregnant. This blogger / student felt sick and had to leave class early. The professor took off participation points. Now the student is planning to complain:

 I have to keep going to class until I’m really in labor, and school is pretty far away.  My Tuesday class is a reasonable half hour away, but my Wednesday class is 90 minutes away in traffic.  If I started hard, active labor at school, I have no idea what I would do.  Also – get this – I left class early last Tuesday because I was so sick I couldn’t see straight, and my professor actually had the balls to dock me 20 out of 25 possible Participation points just because I had to leave.  Clearly she’ll be docking me ALL 25 Participation points for each class I miss while I’m doing a silly little thing like trying to have a baby, so I cannot take off a single extra day other than what is absolutely necessary.  (And yes, I am SOOO writing a letter about that.)

Now before I proceed to comment on this post, I need to explain that I'm the most laid-back professor in the world. If the students tell me they need to miss a quiz or an exam or that they can't hand in the paper on time, I never even ask them why this happens. I just reschedule. Every single time. My students see that I do everything I can to accommodate their needs, so they never abuse my niceness.  There was a single instance in my entire teaching career when I didn't accept a student's final essay that was handed in late. The reason why I made an exception for that student is that he handed in the essay a week after the date when I had to enter the final grades into the system. Other than that, I have not been known to make students' lives difficult.

Participation grades, however, are a different matter. In order to get your participation points, you need to . . . well, participate. In discussions. In class. I once failed a student who handed in perfect written assignments but missed 80% of classes in my Advanced Spanish Conversation course. As hard as I tried to explain it to him, he refused to realize that a course on conversation implies engaging in conversations and participation involves participating. As understanding as one might be of the students' personal circumstances, one cannot give participation points to somebody who was absent. Participation in absentia is not possible. It defies all logic to give participation points to someone who is not in the room.

The reason why I never ask students for the reasons why they need to miss class or hand in assignments late is that I have no interest in working out a hierarchy of special needs or problems. In the discussion thread that follows the post I quoted (if you manage to wade through the childish vocabulary and infantile oohs and aahs), several commenters refer to this woman's situation as being "special" because she is pregnant and, as a result, different from the situations of those students who can't come to class because they are hungover from their last night's party.

There is no doubt in my mind that her pregnancy is very special to this woman. It must also be very special to her relatives and friends. For strangers, however, of which her professor is one, it is neither more nor less special than another student's hangover. Both the pregnancy and the hangover are the results of the choices these students made as adults. In my capacity as an educator, I don't think it's my place to judge whose choices are more legitimate and deserve of greater consideration. All I need to know is that the student wasn't there and, as a result, didn't manage to participate. 

We all would like the world to stop and pay special attention to our all-important issues. And, of course, everybody is intimately convinced that everything to do with them is especially important. However, adulthood consists of realizing that we are not the center of the universe and the world at large couldn't care less about our pregnancies, hangovers, illnesses, absences, or grades. 

Teaching Writing

I have two very good groups of students in my literature course this semester. I'm very proud of them because, except for two native speakers of Spanish, these kids learned to speak the language at our university. And now, when they are in their junior and senior years, they can read, analyze and discuss works of literature from La Celestina to Tiempo de silencio. One thing, however, that it's consistently difficult to get them to do well is to write an essay. I'm not talking about their linguistic limitations here, just the actual knowledge of how to construct a good piece of writing. 

The training that students get in how to write well is often seriously lacking. To give an example, they have all been told ad nauseam that they need to come up with a good thesis for their essay. However, nobody took the trouble of explaining that "Cervantes is a famous author" or "These two short stories have some differences and some similarities" are not good theses. They also have no idea that inane statements like "All works of literature have characters" or "Everybody wants to be happy" do not add anything valuable to a piece of writing.

It also seems to me that some enemy of humanity taught many of my students that it's a good idea to pluck out statements from each paragraph and repeat them (often verbatim) in the conclusion. There is also this annoying strategy of starting a new paragraph with the same sentence that concluded the preceding one.

The students seem genuinely surprised when I tell them to avoid generalizations, trivialities and not to copy-paste the same sentence into different parts of the same sentence. They are also shocked to find out that I don't like them to copy-paste things I said in my PowerPoint presentations into their essays as their own statements.

Teaching Reading

In my language courses, I'm really good at teaching grammar and conversation. What I suck at, paradoxically, is teaching reading. Even I am bored with my reading activities, so you can imagine how much my poor students suffer. All I can come up with in terms of fun reading activities is summarizing each paragraph in their own words and acting out scenes based on the reading. Which, yet again, turns into grammar and conversation activities.

Does anybody have any advice to offer? Any interesting activities that accompany reading short texts in the classroom?

Professor Arrested for Shutting a Student's Laptop

I just read the following story in Inside Higher Ed:

Frank J. Rybicki, assistant professor of mass media at Valdosta State University, shut the laptop of a student who was allegedly web surfing as opposed to taking notes. She filed a complaint (reportedly about a finger or fingers that were hurt when he shut the laptop) and the university's police arrested him on a charge of battery. The Georgia institution suspended his teaching duties there, although not his pay. Reached on the phone, Rybicki confirmed his arrest and suspension, and said that he had been told by the university not to answer questions about the incident. He did say that the article and comments in the student newspaper, The Spectator, were accurate. That article quoted students who saw the incident as saying that Rybicki closed the laptop amid an argument with the student over his view that she had been on websites not related to the course.

In this situation, both the student and the professor acted in a very unintelligent way. The student is obviously an idiot who has no interest in getting an education. There are students who are so behind in class that they have no idea what's going on. They can't participate or contribute anything to the discussions, which makes them feel stupid. In order to save face, they hide behind their cell-phones, laptops and iPods. I have a students like that who always have their iPhones at the ready in case I give out an assignment they cannot complete, or often even understand.

The professor in this situation showed himself to be as unintelligent as the student. What's the point of jeopardizing one's career for the sake of a student who has no interest in learning? You can't force a person to learn against their will. You can take away all their gadgets and chain them to the desk. And they still will not learn. 

In my teaching, I made a decision a long time ago to concentrate on those students who do want to learn and forget about the snoring, web-surfing, texting losers. They are destroying their own chances at getting educated. Why should I care about that or about anything in their sorry lives? I actually prefer that such students sit there with their noses stuck into their laptops and iPhones instead of distracting the entire class with stupid jokes and idiotic comments. I wish that Professor Rybicki had done the same instead of putting his entire career at risk for the sake of a silly hope that a stupid, ignorant student can be redeemed.

Appreciation of Literature

"Out of all the texts that we have read in our Survey of Spanish literature course, which one did you like the most?" I ask my students.

"The short story by Unamuno," they respond unanimously.

"Why?" I ask.

"Because it has a happy ending!" they say completely seriously.

Now I'm wondering what I have done wrong in this course to get such a result.

Where Do Such People Come From?

In my language class there is such a thing as an oral exam. Students go to the lab, record their responses to the activities, save them in an audio-file, and send the file to me by email. For those who don't know how to attach a file to an email (yep, such people do exist), I provide a flash drive where they can record their audio files. 

Last Monday was the last day when students could do the exam. On Tuesday, I went to the lab to collect the flash drive with the exam and discovered that it had mysteriously disappeared together with the midterm oral exams of five students that were recorded on it. 

Of course, when the class started, I asked the students if one of them had taken the flash drive by mistake. Nobody had any idea where the flash drive was. I interrogated people who worked at the lab, they looked everywhere, the flash drive was not to be found. You can imagine how it made me feel to find myself in a situation where five midterms disappeared. Exams are always my responsibility whether they are done in the classroom or in the lab. The five students whose exams were lost also were not enjoying the situation. The lab workers felt horrible. The person supervising the lab workers (and a good friend of mine) felt even more horrible. 

So on Thursday I come back to class and tell the students that, unfortunately, the flash drive hasn't been recovered and their exams are lost. At which point, a student gets up, saunters lazily to my desk, throws the missing flash drive on it and says, "Oh, here it is. I took it home last week." The five students whose exams she dragged home in such a cavalier manner looked at her in angry and mute astonishment. 

I was livid, people. I immediately assigned an activity to the class and left the classroom. I knew that I had to take a walk, have a drink of water, do some breathing exercises before I could return to the classroom and be sure that I would not inflict any harm on this horribly inconsiderate student.

I mean, where do such people even come from? She takes the flash drive home (something which I expressly told students not to do), fails to show up for class next week, and doesn't even write an email to inform me that MY flash drive that contains exams belonging to five OTHER people is in her possession. It later turned out that she recorded an empty file instead of her own exam, so all this was for nothing. 

In the seven minutes that I was away from the classroom trying to get myself together, the students whose exams were on the flash drive must have had a talk with the student who took it home. When I came back, her cavalier attitude was gone, and she was weepy and apologetic. If this doesn't teach her a lesson, then I don't know what will. 

It is mind-boggling how rude and inconsiderate some people are. 

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Need to Grumble

It's one of those days when one would be much better off staying in bed and not moving at all because everything comes out wrong. First, I attempted to show a movie in my class and, of course, the same idiot who always disconnects the stupid equipment disconnected it again. Which meant that I had to crawl around on the floor messing up my clothes and shoes for 15 minutes trying to connect the equipment. And I have no doubt that when I show up for the second section of this course later today, it will all be disconnected yet again.

After I managed to get the movie to start playing, I remembered that there was a sex scene in it. I had forgotten about the scene completely because I find it to be so innocent as to be fit to show to children of any age, let alone university students. So now I have no idea whether it would be considered appropriate by my Bible Belt students. The movie is called Butterfly. In case you are curious, you can watch this scene in the following video. If you do, please tell me whether it was a horrible idea to show it in class. It only lasts about 4 minutes altogether.

After the class, I remembered that I'd forgotten to have breakfast so I decided to have lunch. But the stupid University Restaurant had a pizza day today. Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous? Who on earth feeds professors with pizza for lunch?

It isn't yet noon and I'm already in a very grumbling mood.

Copyright Laws Prevent Students From Learning

A group of freshman and sophomore students contacted me this semester with an initiative to organize a Spanish club. They love Spanish and want to get together to engage in language-related activities. One of the things they planned is a Movie Night. They want to get together every couple of weeks, watch a movie in Spanish, and discuss it afterwards.

And then the students discovered that copyright laws prevent them from engaging in this educational activity. In order to organize a single movie watching session, they'd have to fill out a stack of paperwork and pay several thousand dollars. Which means, of course, that there will be no Movie Night.

I know I wrote about this before but it just makes me angry to see such a great student initiaive crushed because of some ridiculous laws that make absolutely no sense.

Annoying English

The students I have in my Intermediate Spanish class are very good. The absolute majority really wants to learn the language. They are very receptive and enthusiastic. However, months into the semester I still can't get them to stop speaking English in class. I have done all I can to explain to them that it's the most counterproductive thing they can do. They sabotage everything they achieve by switching into their native language every two minutes. Every class session, I beg them to stop using English pretty much every five minutes. I'm getting to the point where I'm almost waking up at night, screaming "No English here!" 

What annoys me is that they have had three semesters of Spanish before coming to my class. Normally, people who taught them in the SPAN 101 and 102 courses are supposed to put a stop to this habit of speaking English in Spanish classes. Many of my colleagues, however, don't want to make the effort, and use quite a lot of English in class. Retraining their students afterwards is an incredible drag.

It's one thing when language classes are taught by somebody who has been trained as a language teacher. Often, however, college administrators think that anybody can teach a language as long they are a native speaker. This is patently untrue. There are many things about language teaching that need to be learned before one can proceed to teach a language class. Of course, it saves a college a lot of money to hire a bunch of underpaid, unqualified instructors and let them do whatever they want in class. The results, however, are that our students take a lot longer than they need to learn the language.