>Its entirely possible that with some dedicated pencil whipping your legendarily bad Spanish teacher was turning in the best metric scores in the district. Not

>Its entirely possible that with some dedicated pencil whipping your legendarily bad Spanish teacher was turning in the best metric scores in the district. Not unlikely. And she's a good example in that she wasn't particularly bad with the material (except insofar as all foreign language education is kind of broken, but that wasn't her fault). But one of the most important things (if not the most important) teachers can do is cultivate in their students a genuine interest in learning about their subject. Instead, I came away with associations of being shamed for not getting things wrong, and of being accused of cheating for trying to extrapolate. This is, to put it mildly, averse to language acquisition. Anyway, the point is that you're absolutely right. Most of us in her class knew the material at the end of the semester. But knowledge is not very useful in and of itself. Unfortunately, I think that simple fact may be a very big piece of the puzzle, and it's one that the general public seems very far from flipping over.