Our school system started foreign languages in grade school. I picked French because it sounded prettier than German or Russian. For some reason, it stuck with me (Merci, Madame Fueger!), and things like grammar made more sense there.
(But then I could apply it to English; so I know why you say “If I were to do that…” C’est le tense CONDITIONELLE! … which I never learned from my hippie English teacher (Merci, Miss MoonDoobie!)
I dropped it due to sports and long science labs, but I kept reading the occasional book (and a Bible from a friend) in French. And hearing it on TV, where I’ve even heard some Quebecoise… at least the swear words.
And knowing any romance language makes the others a breeze… my kid is constantly amazed that I can guess correctly at Spanish or Italian words/phrases/conversations.
It didn’t help much in France… they all wanted to practice their English instead. Where it really came in handy was in other countries. If a native and I didn’t speak each others’ languages, but each knew un petit peu de Français, then we’d be talking slowly and using easy words.
Our school French in Toronto was also international French (or as our teachers called it, “Parisian French”). A few had studied at the Sorbonne, and spoke beautiful Parisian. Problem was, that it wasn’t Quebec French. I’ve been to France exactly once, and was easily understood; I’ve been to Montreal and elsewhere in the province of Quebec dozens of times, and struggle to make myself understood. Well, at least I can read the signs and the newspaper.
I also agree with the over-emphasis of French grammar and other mechanics (anybody remember having to fill out those verb charts?), over conversational French, at my Toronto schools. Heck, I didn’t fully understand English grammar until I studied linguistics at university; how the heck could anybody expect that a class of 13-year-olds would know the difference between the imperfect tense and the pluperfect tense, and when to use them? Or what la voix passif was, when we had not yet learned about its equivalent (the passive voice) in English class? I managed, and actually did well, but I had classmates who grew to hate French, because French class meant grammar drills, verb conjugations, spelling tests (correct diacriticals in the correct places, else you were marked wrong), and vocabulary quizzes, over and over again. We never got to use what we learned in a conversation.
Later, I would go on to learn Russian. Our lessons did include grammar and mechanics, but there was a great emphasis on conversational Russian, to the point where at least one hour a week was devoted to nothing but conversation. Any topic was fine, as long as you spoke Russian, and our teacher was there to help if we got stuck. We made plenty of errors, I’m sure, but the teacher didn’t interrupt as long as we made sense to her. It was fun, and we got to find out how the language was used in practice. A better way to learn a language, IMHO, than all those grammar drills, verb conjugations, spelling tests, and vocabulary quizzes we endured in French class.
Not something I learned, but the most useless assignment I ever had.
In a high school math class, the assignment was probability Two other students and I sat and spent a good part of the class flipping a penny to prove that it would be 50/50 with a large enough sample. The other guys would excitedly call the teacher over when we had 10 or 15 heads or tails in a row and the teacher would tell us how great that was! I never went back to the class again or school hat year again.
History classes were useless - all we did was memorize dates and battles and stuff that might be useful if they came up in Jeopardy. Plus, being the 60s and early 70s, it was largely White Male History. We were never taught why things happened, whether because of what came before or the people involved, and how what happened may have affected today. So I hated History. But as I’ve watched documentaries and such as an adult, I find much of it was really interesting.
I also thought learning Mythology was a waste of effort - it felt like we spent way too much time on it in 9th grade.
Mythology is fun but not so practical. However, if you study ancient civilizations, knowing what they believed helps you understand their lives and relations with others. You are right, we also spent time on this, though I liked it.
History was a mishmash of dates, exaggerations and something I thought was full. But it isn’t. I had a very gifted history teacher in high school and took ancient history, modern history and politics with him. These courses were wonderful. You could understand every news event and the long history behind every modern conflict after a semester with this guy.
Man, oh man, I had just the opposite: junior year History, the teacher showed movies with almost no discussion, so we had to sift through different movie-makers’ slant on history and figure it out for ourselves. We caught him napping in the back a few times.
That reminds me of my 10th grade history teacher who for every section we would watch a different “historical” movie. We watched Lawrence of Arabia which took an entire week of classes at 50 minutes a class for the World War 1 portion. For World War 2 we watched Saving Private Ryan, for the post-war America section we watched Forrest Gump, for the Space Program we watched Apollo 13, and for Vietnam we watched Apocalypse Now.
There were other movies but it was clear my teacher REALLY liked to not teach for weeks at a time.
He encouraged students to read the paper and pick out an article of interest to them. He spent about one-third of his time going over modern news. Who ruled a country? What were all the relevant things about that place? Why was there conflict? What was its historical, economic, religious, social and philosophical origins? Why did it matter now? The only reason he could teach this way was his knowledge was immense. Most high schools probably do not have such passionate or knowledgeable teachers. Book learning was pretty limited. He was a religious man but kept this and political biases to himself.
He spent one third of his time teaching history, emphasizing things like theories of capitalism and Marxism and military theory, why key events were important now, with a lot of emphasis on understanding battles or events and very little on dates. He never showed a film.
The other third was getting students to do a detailed full-class presentation on a relevant topic. I did the Vietnam War. Standards were high, everyone in that class did a great job on challenging and relevant topics.
Credit where credit is due, Mr. Terry Osia, my sophomore World History teacher, did go into the whole cause-effect of history, detailing the how and why of historical trends and events. I haven’t used World History for anything practical in a day-to-day sense, but he made history one of my favorite subjects in High School. It probably says more about Mr. Osia, as a knowledgeable teacher with a passion for the subject and an engaging personality.
My World History teacher was such a waste of protoplasm. He would spend way too much class time talking about his family (not like ancestors, but his wife and kids) and the stuff they did. One of his favorite topics was “taste treats” - the snacks they’d have while doing whatever family things they did. If I’d been interested in History, I’d have hated him even more.
Most of the English grammar I know was learned from other languages. That said, I strongly feel language teaching should prioritize spontaneous spoken communication. Understanding the reply and anything else in spoken media is next. Writing anything is often less important than that, and grammatical rules are even further down the list. It is better to try than worry about trivialities. My teaching often emphasized the reverse order.
In French. the worst for me was not the subjunctives, but the historical tense. Hysterical.
Obviously to know a language well is to know all of it. But if you use some simple form of past and future this is enough to get on with talking at length. If you like or need the language enough you can choose to go deeper.
No longer a thing. We spent some time at weekly assemblies. Sang O Canada and God Save The Queen. School songs. The Lords Prayer. A brief Bible reading. Songs like Onward Christian Soldiers. This was at an Ontario public school back in the day. Not meant to be a religious place at all. It did not bother me then and still doesn’t much. It was how things were then done. But it is no longer, due to mostly sensible laws. I hope things are more inclusive given all that.
I hated math, until i had an application for it. I got into doing inventory work and discovered things like standard deviations and their value for managing fuzzy product flow situations.
Suddenly I was building monster spreadsheets that could help with several of our forecasting and stock balancing issues as well as production planning tools…
The location of the company I worked at shut down a few years ago as no longer profitable…I like to think its because I wasnt there to keep them pointed in the right direction.
In one of Richard Feynman books (it might have been Surely you’re Joking), I read that he attended lectures and tutorials while at Caltech in a different subject each year just for experience. Once he had to do a presentation in biology and started to draw a diagram of a cat’s organs on the board to make a point, and all the other students chorused ‘We know that!’. His response was ‘Have you really memorised it? All I did was learn how and where to find the information’.
He was not a fan of ‘memorisation’.
C.S. Lewis rather charmingly described the passage like this:
St. Mark indeed mentions the clothes more explicitly than the face, and adds, with his inimitable naivety, that “no laundry could do anything like it.”
I love Richard Feynman but not every job has the same skill set as physics. You can learn medicine from first principles, but you can’t practice medicine from first principles.
He is surely right, though, when he says physicists have the same sense of beauty and grandeur as poets (though not usually the eloquence), and understanding what one can about celestial phenomena does not take away from that, but rather adds to it.