Robert wrote in a recent comment about DLI:
…[At DLI] if someone misses more than two or three days of class, they are dismissed from the program (I know of people who missed because of illness; that doesn’t matter, they missed and therefore were dismissed.)….
While reading those words I suddenly, in proustian fashion (I just wanted to say proustian), flashed back to an experience I had at Washington University in St. Louis in college many moons ago. It was summer in Forest Park near the Barnes Hospital complex and I met an attractive woman who had just gotten out of a mental hospital. (Needless to say, the relationship didn’t go anywhere because we were both pretty much crazy and not particularly well connected to planet Earth at the time so how to have a relationship?)
Anyway, I asked her why she had been in and – I am not making this up – she was in there bc she had been in a summer intensive Japanese language program at Washington U. that was like ten hours a day for two weeks and at the end of it she just cracked. I won’t go into the details but it was what Robert said that made me remember it. Wow. I remember feeling such compassion in my heart for her having to go through that.
Of course that was years and years before I even thought of teaching. I had majored in French at Washington U. but mainly only because I had no other major to declare and because Dr. Isadore Silver was there, at the time the world authority on Montaigne, and I just wanted to sit next to him when he taught (we sat in a round table format and if you got there first you could sit next to the master) and sneak looks into his book.
(His copy of Essais was like a geometry book with little notes and lines drawn from the notes to certain passages in the text. I was just interested in those French authors and I had no idea what to major in (some may relate) so I just majored in French and spent the junior year in France and all that.)
But dude can you imagine what this girl went through in that program that was supposed to help her learn Japanese? And here is the sobering thought: we can now change this barbaric kind of instruction. Boy if that is not a reason to set our freak flags firmly in the rich soil of the change we are in right now, I don’t know of one.