“We had to find a way to make second-year French not suck.”

I love it! This is sooooo what language education should look like.

from “Languages Plus”, Inside Higher Ed, 23 July 2010
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/07/23/languages

…as Timothy L. Wilkerson, an associate professor of French put it, “We had to find a way to make second-year French not suck.” In the traditional composition class, as he explained, “Everything you do is wrong. Everything you do is circled in red and everything has to be rewritten and often by the teacher.” Prior to the curricular changes, the French department was struggling. It wasn’t uncommon for Wilkerson to teach upper-level literature courses with just three students. But after he taught an intermediate French course on the natural environment this year – the title of the French-language text he used translates as Ecology for Idiots – three of the students from that single class signed up for a French minor, Wilkerson said. “It taught them something about the world, in French, that they didn’t know. It was all bad news unfortunately,” Wilkerson said, cheekily.