This is a story that might be told in the future:
There was a student on a class trip to France who had quite an experience there. She was a fourth year 17 year-old student in a well-to-do school in Chicago and, although great at memorizing the things required by her textbook-driven teacher in the school’s AP curriculum, she never talked and didn’t really understand spoken French very much – but she was good at conjugating verbs and memorizing rules.
On her first day in Tours, at the class dinner that night, sitting next to her teacher, she asked where the bathroom was. Her teacher, knowing she was an A student, told her with a big smile to “go ask a waiter”. The girl did that, but when it came to actually asking the question, it wouldn’t come out. And, not having actually heard much French in class, she couldn’t understand anything the French people gathered around the bar were saying. She was stuck and she had to “go”.
At a certain point walking around the area near the bar trying to ask where the bathroom was, she couldn’t hold it anymore and pissed her new beige pants. The patrons at the bar noticed it and a few started giggling, thinking she wasn’t aware. Enough people laughing caused the girl to run downstairs to escape, where she of course found the bathroom, but of course too late.
Although she tried mightily, the girl couldn’t hide the stain from her classmates upon returning to the long table in the center of the restaurant, and for the rest of the trip she naturally withdrew from her classmates and teacher in the way that only teenagers can.
Months went by and the girl never really pulled out of her depression. Her parents tried and tried to talk to her, and had a notion that it may have been related to the French trip since her depression started then, but they couldn’t get to the bottom of it and finally made the girl go to therapy. In therapy, the girl got to the point where she could finally tell her parents what happened in the restaurant.
Now informed, the parents were furious. They wanted to know why the teacher didn’t just tell her student that the bathrooms were downstairs as in most restaurants in France. Next they wanted to know why she told the girl to go ask a French waiter, never having herself as a teacher heard her student speak French in class in spite of giving her an A each term. One thing led to another, and the parents, both lawyers, found out about the work of Blaine Ray and Stephen Krashen from a language teaching friend who was using comprehensible input in her classes.
The result? A lawsuit for emotional damages against the district for not teaching the girl enough French in four years to ask where the bathroom was or to understand enough French to find a bathroom. The result of the lawsuit? A $200,000 settlement on behalf of the plaintiffs.
Maybe it will take more such lawsuits to get school districts to change from the old ways of teaching languages. But the districts in general still don’t seem too motivated to align with the research and the standards just because it is the right thing to do. More events like this one, however, will. Money talks, as the saying goes.
There is another story about a teacher who initiated litigation against a school district in California because her language inservice trainings, done by Helena “The Curtain” Curtain, only taught her how to teach from a textbook, which out-of-touch-with-the-research training caused her classes to be so flat and boring that she sued. We’ll save that story for another time.
But yes, there are lawsuits already happening out there in our field, not many but they are actually starting to happen. It’s about time because a school district should never be allowed to align with what a textbook company says is best practices when we have so much research repudiating that fact.