I am teaching two sections of Spanish 3. Students have no aural comprehension of Spanish, no speaking ability, no sense of syntax, and very little ability to read the readings in the textbook, which is a common textbook they are using for the third semester in a row.
Some of them say that in their last course, their grade depended on the work in the e-workbook, and the answers were at the back, so they just filled them in. That would explain a great deal but I do not know what they have been doing otherwise.
Some people have students they also had last semester. They say these students do not remember anything from last semester and keep asking questions like, “Does this have to be in Spanish?”
Qu’est-ce qui arrive, alors?
#OccupyHE.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Jesus! That just sucks so badly I can’t believe it.
It is pretty hard to take, yes.
You probably can’t do that, and there are a lot of reasons against, but I think at this point I would abandon any pretension to teach them Spanish and modify the class into some kind of “Hispanic Culture” class in English. That, if you are willing to tolerate the backlash from colleagues.
This is exactly what I want to do. We have to go in lock step because the dean wants uniformity so I am just failing them, but this is what I want to do.