On the way home from the prison I visited my old students, who are now teaching assistants, and met their new friends. They are now teaching some of the same classes I am and we discussed our difficulties.
One student, a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature from Mendoza, Argentina, was very grateful, as I was when I was his age, to have the M.A. now because it means he can teach in Comparative Literature instead of Spanish.
He said the language requirement is a complete waste. You incarcerate people in a classroom, forcing them to study a language when they have no desire to do so, and when to do so successfully means to transform oneself, which is far more than they are willing to undertake for any class. Then, para colmo, you force them into a commercial textbook program and torture them with it and with absurd grammatical details.
That articulates my experience, and explains why I am so convinced that academia is a torture chamber: I have the large torture chamber of the foreign language requirement attached to everything else. I have mentioned some of its pedagogical difficulties here; there are also administrative ones.
The meaning of it is, one must go entirely radical on this. Students who actually want to learn the language do so by doing work outside of class, as we know; we can continue to support this. But the class itself has to be on culture and on the nature of language, and teach some of the language so that those who want to work on more of it outside of class, can.
I am quite convinced of this and I can defend my proposal in greater detail — or, would like to formulate a more detailed defense of it.
#OccupyHE.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 