Hell's Curriculum

[pauraque_bk]

Oh, I think this, originated by laurelwood, should be a meme. What would your curriculum in hell look like?

Period 1: HISTORY- Wars Reduced Only To Dates of Battles and Maps of Troop Movements
Period 2: LANGUAGE ARTS- Books the Teacher Doesn't Understand
Period 3: ART- Modern Art Theory and Appreciation
Period 4: P.E.- Every Team Sport Ever Devised
Period 5: SCIENCE- Memorizing Facts about the Periodic Table
Period 6: MATH- Things With No Practical Applications Outside Advanced Physics

I couldn't come up with an actual art activity I would hate to do, but then I thought of all those horrible paintings at SFMOMA and how painful it would be to try to "understand" a series of 26 paintings of a red line (I am not making this up)... so yeah.

Comments

[bardsmaid.livejournal.com]

And then there's the foreign language class where you memorize inane dialogs full of conversational bits you'd never use in RL... or that make no sense within the target culture. (Yes, this very thing drove me to write my own undergrad Spanish text as a grad student. It was my Masters project.)

[pauraque]

Cool! That kind of thing is actually why I stopped taking French. In the earlier grades I had a teacher with near native fluency who could point out problems in the books, like things no French person would actually say. The teacher for the older kids was a lot less clueful, and would just go along with texts that even I knew were problematic.

[bardsmaid.livejournal.com]

I did this after living in Madrid for a year (and also after being very impressed with a French text I had in college where everything included was real, useful info about living in Paris. My goal was that if you used my book and were then somehow parachuted into Spain, you'd be able to actually function.

[pauraque]

It's funny, in material about little-known languages, linguists usually prefer to use for their examples things that native speakers spontaneously said in normal conversation. They only use non-spontaneous or made up sentences when there's no other choice. I wish similar standards were applied to well known languages when they're taught.