Opinion: Romance language classes inadequate

By: Ishrak Ramzan

Bonjour. Hola. 你好. 안녕. These four greetings represent the different languages that are currently available for students to take at MHS. While the diversity in laguage offerings should be commended, unfortunately, the quality of the courses themselves tends to be rather poor. With the current world that we live in constantly growing more interconnected, it is truly  lamentable that our school does such a subpar job of educating its students in foreign languages. In this piece I want to comment on  trends I have witnessed personally, in addition to what I have heard from peers about their respective experiences.

My first and strongest gripe with how foreign languages are taught at MHS is the sluggish pace at which content and topics are proceeded through. To name prominent examples, in both the Spanish I and French I classes, by the end of the year the only verb tense that had been discussed was the indicative present.   There are also numerous classes where by the end of the year, only around half of the total content of the textbook is covered, exemplifying the department-wide slow pace of curriculum.

At the same time, the textbook often strictly defines the material that is discussed in class, which leads to two separate issues. First, it meant that a lot of the content or vocabulary we learned about was frankly, not that practical. Instead of learning about relevant things, like what to do in an emergency, or the casual jargon of a region, weeks were spent learning how to talk about largely frivolous things such as camping. The second problem was that such reliance and fixation on the textbook, combined with the painfully slow progression through said textbook, mean. Learning another language should be based upon interactions with other humans. As such, it would do a great deal of benefit if classes emphasized more casual listening and speaking, as much of what one does with language is communicate with others.

Finally, I would like to point out that a fair bit of blame for the poor foreign language education at MHS lies with the student population. There is definitely a significant amount of student apathy towards foreign language in general, stemming from a wide variety of sources which need not be delved into here. However, teachers also constantly capitulate to students, catering to the   , proving a major obstacle to moving through content. A class should not spend over a month merely reviewing the same grammar point repeatedly.