I know it’s kind of strange, seeing as I went on to study engineering, but the best teacher I probably ever had was my high school French teacher, Miss G. (Not that we called her that. We tended to call her Madame G_____ and she tended to sharply correct us that she was to be called Mademoiselle.) The time frame: 1989-1992. The place: a suburban high school in southwestern Ohio.
"Best teacher ever" stories are usually rife with warm fuzzies about how inspiring, encouraging, and passionate said Best Teacher Ever was, how she taught the writer to Believe in Herself or to Follow Her Dreams or some such. I’ll give Miss G. this: she was passionate about the subject, and she did a great job helping us to love the French language (enough that I went on to get a minor in it at college just for fun), and I was lucky enough to be a senior the year she said, "Oh hell, let’s make this the year I take a bunch of kids to Paris." But what I want to focus on is more mundane: her method, and how well it worked (at least for me), and how much I’d like to emulate it when it comes to teaching my own kids about language — their own langue maternelle and any foreign tongues we wind up working with.
Here are the main aspects that I remember from the French curriculum I studied:
- Preceded by an optional eighth-grade year of intensive phrase-based vocabulary drill
- 9th grade (French I) largely taught as a grammar subject from standard textbooks (this was a different teacher for me)
- Weekly passages of French text of a variety of types to be first copied in French and then translated into English, beginning in 1oth grade
- Classes and discussion conducted in French at least part of the time starting in 1oth grade, most or all of the time starting in 11th grade
- French III and IV (11th and 12th grades) were taught as a single mixed class, with a two-year curriculum of literature and advanced grammar topics
- Journaling beginning in 1oth grade
- Occasional French-language movie in class (Subtitles? Nope. If we were lucky we got French captions)
- Literary-critical essays and the occasional creative-writing project associated with each of the works we read — much the same kind of thing we were writing in our English classes, only in French
A couple of years after high school, and having taken exactly one college course in French, I did a summer at an intensive language program in Lyon. The students, predominantly Americans but with some other countries represented, were split into five levels based on a placement test; I placed in the highest level, well above several students who were college seniors majoring in French. Now, maybe I have an aptitude for the language, but Occam’s Razor suggests a better explanation: Miss G. kicked most college teachers’ asses.
Why’s that?
The preliminary vocabulary drills, a whole year of them, got us off to a good start. We spent a year counting, singing French Christmas carols, reciting lists of prepositions (All together now: dans, sur, sous, avec, au droit, a gauche, au centre; devant, derriere, la-bas, ici, pres de, loin de, entre!), going through interminable decks of flash cards: animals, office supplies, various kinds of verbs, sports equipment, you name it. I remember a whole unit on giving and receiving directions, learning to say sentences like "Turn right after you pass the red house; if you get to the railroad, you’ve gone too far." The advantage: By the time we opened a French grammar text on the first day of ninth grade, we already had a few hundred words to work with; we already had exposure to many grammatical forms, even if we couldn’t explain them; we already had an "ear" for the language. For every grammar rule we learned, we could immediately form dozens of sentences, without having to refer to a dictionary (or worse, to the short lists of "example words" that accompany the lesson in most grammar texts).
I’d probably rank as next most important the physical act of writing the French language. The extra step of copying out French texts before translating them immersed us in correct grammar and exposed us to a variety of writing styles. The essays and especially the journals we wrote forced us to turn to the dictionary to find the vocabulary, both everyday and specialized, that we needed to express our own thoughts or even just to record a day’s activities. I have no idea how she found the time to do it, but everything we wrote was returned with a dense overlay of red grammatical corrections. Some of the stuff we were required to rewrite correctly and return for a second look.
(A side note on this: Back in the late eighties/early nineties, high school students still mostly wrote out essays and assignments in longhand. I remember the final hours carefully handwriting the final copy on college-ruled paper, leaving every other line blank. Nowadays, I assume, more high school students prepare their drafts by computer. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, although I’m sure that the process of writing has changed along with it. But I feel sure that longhand-writing of at least some of the copywork, because it takes longer and because the pen is a more natural extension of the mind-arm complex than the keyboard, aids learning in a unique way.)
The third feature, of course, is immersion in the spoken language. Of necessity, it wasn’t total in the early years, especially in discussion of grammar, which inevitably has recourse to analogies to the mother tongue. But Miss G. tried to lecture in French at least a couple times a week even then, on things like geography or culture, and a great deal of our discussion of the books we read was conducted in French. Too, there were movies, which forced us to listen carefully to people who weren’t speaking all that carefully, and trained our ears.
I think you’d be hard-pressed to find an educator who didn’t agree that immersion is an important part of foreign language learning, although some of them would assume that children cannot benefit from it before attaining a certain level (an assumption with which I emphatically disagree). But copywork and drill have fallen out of favor with many educators. The exception are those who adhere partly or wholly to the philosophy of so-called "classical" education.
I’m convinced that drill and copywork are the main reasons I excelled in French at the high school level (along with every other student who went on to take French III and IV as electives, an admittedly self-selecting and elite bunch of high-achievers). I would like to apply what I learned there to the teaching of English grammar as well. The drill is less important, because the vocabulary is already acquired; but copywork can play an important role in the simultaneous learning of grammar, style, reading comprehension, literary ear, spelling, and penmanship (as well as the information contained in the texts used for copywork).
I’ve no doubt that my high school French experience heavily influenced my choice of homeschooling curricula types. Because of it, I applaud the memorization of facts, definitions, and basic concepts as a preliminary and prerequisite step to critical thinking, analysis, analogy, evaluation, and discussion. And I strongly believe that writing and speaking accurately and clearly on a topic is the primary standard by which "higher" thinking can be judged at pre-college levels. That extends to all subjects: language, mathematics, natural science, history, geography, politics. So you could say I’m a natural fit for Classical Homeschooling.
Tune in next time when I explain how my crusty high school geometry teacher influenced my philosophy of learning and probably helped turn me into a Catholic.
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